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How we helped
Working with Artium by AlixPartners, a global custody bank transformed fund onboarding for its alternatives investment platform, turning a manual bottleneck into a scalable digital process in just seven months, without taking its experts out of the loop.
The Challenge
Alternative investments have become central to institutional portfolios, but the operational machinery behind them has not always kept pace. Onboarding a single alternative fund required skilled teams to spend several days manually digitizing complex legal and marketing documents. Each document contained broadly the same core information, but each was formatted very differently, which means conventional machine learning would have struggled.
For the bank, this created a ceiling on alternative investments. A traditional team could only process a few funds per week, which constrained how quickly the bank could expand access to alternatives. This was in part because the surrounding processes for fund formation, custody, and servicing sat across disconnected applications. Building enterprise-grade controls had proved difficult internally, and an external estimate for the work came in at two years and $25 million.
Our Approach
Document variability is a weakness for rules-based extraction and a strength for generative AI, so we designed around it rather than against it.
We built the platform to extract more than 70 critical data fields from fund documentation automatically. Rather than returning results as a finished answer, it surfaces each extraction alongside the source reference it came from, so the specialist reviewing it can see exactly where a value originated and accept, refine, or correct it directly.
That design decision is what made the system usable in a regulated environment. The same experts who previously did the work by hand now supervise it, with full visibility of the evidence behind every field. Accountability stays with the people who hold it, while the mechanical work moves to the machine.
Underneath the interface, we built a core API coordinating data and events across the bank’s asset servicing, custody, and platform systems, so onboarding draws on one connected foundation rather than several disconnected applications.
Key results
The platform shipped in just seven months
With the launch of the platform, fund onboarding time was cut from four days to four hours
Generated over $20 million in first-year annual revenue
With faster onboarding, throughput increased from a few funds per week to several per day, unlocking new revenue streams much faster than was previously possible
A platform built at 72% lower cost than the alternatives considered by the client
In addition to being less expensive, the platform we developed also had more than 70 data fields extracted automatically, with each one traceable to its source document
The bank can now expand its alternatives business without compromising its onboarding standards, on a connected platform its own experts control. In addition to the cost savings, the bank also gained a faster way to grow a key part of its business.
