CASE STUDY
Pathstone (FKA Crestone Capital) Saves Hundreds Of Hours Of Work With Altvia
With AIM CRM, they have visibility and transparency to support their work.
“It was a lot of work to launch the pool and get the commitments.” Now everything is streamlined, capital call records are easy to access, and distribution notices are simpler to send.
Hayley Chase
Operations Coordinator
ABOUT PATHSTONE
Pathstone (FKA Crestone Capital) is a modern-day family office. Their team delivers a suite of fully- integrated investment management and wealth advisory services to families looking to protect and enhance their wealth and define their unique legacy. With over 30 years of experience and approximately $3 billion in assets under management, they help entrepreneurs, business owners, and their families pursue a better life lived.
FOUNDED
1991
INDUSTRY
Family Office
LOCATION
Boulder, Colorado
CHALLENGE
Pathstone invests like an endowment with an asset allocation model, providing a family office structure for nearly 90 families. Their team provides investment services including family wealth planning, payment facilitation, and money management.
With increasing assets under management, Pathstone sought out a system to support business growth, create operational efficiencies, and better serve their stakeholders. The team was using a set of disparate systems including Excel sheets, PDFs, and Microsoft Dynamics. It was cumbersome to gather all client data into a central location, and the group had difficulty leveraging Microsoft Dynamics across the organization to accomplish basic tasks. It didn’t fit and ultimately only ended up being used for contact management.
Pathstone needed a CRM that could play a key role in scaling the business and support the vision of a central database and eliminate spreadsheets. The chosen solution needed to work with their other systems and provide the ability to show where all of their client’s assets exist at any point in time.
SOLUTION
The Pathstone team chose Altvia and rolled out the AIM platform to the firm in January of 2018 to create operational efficiency. “Collaboration with Altvia has enabled our firm to create significant cross departmental efficiencies. Their insights and ability to execute improvements based on learnings has helped us continue to evolve. We appreciate their partnership and positive impact on our business,” shared Hayley Chase. With the AIM CRM, they have visibility and transparency to support their work.
The addition of Altvia’s Managed Services supports the unique family office customization use-cases that Pathstone wanted to support their clients. Also, with Investor Correspond, the team has a more efficient method for asset management and agreement distribution and signature collection.
More specifically, the Altvia team merged two different views of the households that Pathstone serves:
- Tracking of relationships (who is related to whom within a given family, what are the interactions Pathstone is having with each person), and
- Tracking of the flow of capital (which investment vehicles each household owns, what are the holdings of those portfolios, what is the total $ amount that Pathstone manages for that household).
The ability to summarize both relationships and flow of capital in one system, with everything totaled at the household level was a new capability for Pathstone. Imagine how much easier an advisor’s life is when they have one central view of a household they’re advising. Additionally, once they have a structure that can support the data, they plan to use Answers to achieve better insights and analytics for internal and external use.
With the implementation of AIM and Investor Correspond, Pathstone will save hundreds of hours of work. Before Altvia, advisors spent hours sorting through Excel sheets of capital calls to determine if there were available funds and then send emails to get the trade—ultimately, 80+ emails had to be typed and sent. “It was a lot of work to launch the pool and get the commitments.” Now everything is streamlined, capital call records are easy to access, and distribution notices are simpler to send.
Pathstone also manages 40 private equity pools and the agreement process for entering a pool is much simpler with Altvia. The efficiencies created in the signature process will save their team “hundreds of hours next year.”
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