Your platform is the heart of your online deal syndication service, impacting every area of your business. It’s the primary way that your investors interact with your firm and research new opportunities, it impacts the amount of administration your team needs to do, and it is also a key factor in how satisfied your investors are with your service.
Simply put: the platform you choose will have a long-term impact on your brand’s reputation and success.
Despite this, many businesses choose the wrong platform for supporting the ongoing growth of their business. Many firms approach us after outgrowing other solutions – this switching cost could have been minimized by either switching earlier or choosing the right platform from the beginning.
How Much Will The Wrong Deal Syndication Platform Cost You?
The key costs for using the wrong technology include time, restricted growth, and lost business. Of these, the easiest to calculate is the operational inefficiencies within your team’s workload. Tasks that could be automated but aren’t add hours to your teams’ task list, so they have less time to deliver the quality of service your investors expect. Hiring more staff to solve this problem is an inefficient and costly workaround that should be avoided.
Long term, and far more insidious, is the effect your platform has on your business’s potential for growth and the speed at which it can realize that potential. A platform that lacks integrations with marketing tools or that develops bottlenecks in key processes will restrict the growth of your business. Poor usability can also damage both the growth of your business and the reputation of your brand; poor user satisfaction impacts both investor acquisition and retention, leading to fewer long-term investors.
Your firm can avoid these problems by choosing a technology that not only provides the features your business needs today, but also anticipates and meets the demands that will be placed on it in the future.
The Sooner You Choose The Right Solution, The Better
Whether you are looking for your first deal syndication platform or considering an upgrade, now is the time to get it right. The future cost of making the wrong choice (and then having to repeat the whole process 12 months later) is far larger than the time necessary to make the right decision now.
Finding a platform that meets your immediate needs is easy, but finding one that will continue to meet your requirements for years to come is much harder.
So, how do you choose the right deal syndication platform?
We’re glad you asked!
Future-Proof Your Business By Choosing According To These Four Criteria
To help businesses avoid these costs, we’ve developed a list of four key criteria that businesses must look for in prospective platforms:
- Criteria 1: A platform which supports you with the right technology and features
- Criteria 2: A market-proven partner who goes beyond technology
- Criteria 3: A partner with the technical capability to support future growth
- Criteria 4: A price point that delivers value
A solution that meets all four of these criteria is highly likely to have the tools and competencies necessary to support the growth of your business both now and in the future. We’ve broken each of these criteria down in detail below:
Criteria 1: A Platform Which Supports You With The Right Technology
It goes without saying that there are certain features that are essential for your platform: the ability to easily manage investors and investments; automation features that reduce administration, so you can focus on value-added tasks; and painless one-click onboarding and KYC/AML processes that make compliance easy.
What is less obvious are the other technologies that will impact the long-term success of your business. It is easy to overlook these features, but they are essential to your success:
- Latest Security Standards – Protecting customer data and building trust is essential for building a successful brand.
- Multiple Roles – That platform should give you the flexibility to have multiple roles (including multiple levels of administrators).
- SEO Tools – Take advantage of search engine traffic with a platform that helps you optimize your website.
- Segmentation Capabilities – Seamless permission levels to control investor accessibility and limitations seamless.
- Easy Updating – It should be easy to update the content on your platform.
- Integrations With Other Software – Payment integrations, investor verification, digital signatures: the more integrations the solution provides, the lower the administrative burden on your team.
- Flexibility - customized forms, process workflows, and configuration options can allow you to best tailor a solution for your compliance and business requirements.
The features you’ll need in the future are as important as those you need now – how will your requirements change if your business doubles? What if it grows ten times over?
Criteria 2: A Partner Who Goes Beyond Technology
It is critical that you choose the right partner, not just the right platform. Your deal syndication software isn’t a one-off purchase – it’s an ongoing partnership where both parties benefit when your business grows. It makes sense then that your partner should bring more to the table than just the right technology. Their experience working with different businesses in different countries under different regulations will be invaluable as you grow.
One of the key aspects you should consider is the level of support you will receive. Your partner must address software bugs and other problems as soon as possible, and you should accept nothing less than a quick and helpful response to any query you have. You should also look for a support team with global knowledge, and a robust knowledge-base or easy-to-use training tools that you can use to train your team.
You should also look for:
- Legal and Compliance Expertise – Expert knowledge on how to use the platform to meet your legal and compliance requirements as well as (crucially) information on additional actions you may need to take outside of the platform. No software firm will provide legal advice but they can provide best practice to streamline your own legal review.
- International Experience – Experience working with businesses around the world and can advise how different localities affect legal, compliance, marketing, and more.
- Industry Experience – A partner must understand your business and your industry to be able to help you. Ideally, your partner will have helped launch multiple solutions within your industry.
- Great Track Record – Awards and excellent reviews are a key indicator that a partner can help a business achieve an effective solution. Be wary of any partner, no matter how good the software, that has been reviewed poorly because of their customer service or the advice or strategies they have provided.
Having the right platform is not a magic bullet for success – a platform cannot replace the energy, enthusiasm, dedication, and passion of your team. A successful implementation requires you to get stakeholders on board, train your team members, and work hard to reach realistic adoption goals.
The main criteria here is not that a partner will do all this for you (it can’t) but that, in addition to providing the right technology, they will also provide you with the expertise and advice necessary to take advantage of that technology to best effect.
Criteria 3: A Partner Who Will Support Your Future Growth
Changing technology is expensive and time-consuming, so the ideal partner will be one who can support your business as it grows and expands. This goes beyond the technological - it’s also about how the partner plans for the future, the potential longevity of their own business, and how they plan to continue to expand their offering.
You should look for:
- Large and stable – The last thing you need is for your partner’s business to fold unexpectedly. Look for a business that is large enough to support you, has a proven track record in the industry, and has stable and experienced leadership.
- Innovative Product Roadmap – How is the partner planning on improving their product over the next few years? A product roadmap will help you establish how future features will benefit you and is a good sign in and of itself that your partner is forward-thinking.
- Future Thinking – Your partner should not just understand your industry, but be actively considering the future, predicting changes that may affect your business, and advising on appropriate changes to your business strategy.
- Custom Configuration Capabilities – A partner with strong in-house development and UX/UI teams will have the capability to assist you in creating a platform perfectly suited to your industry. A partner without this capability will struggle to assist you if your needs go beyond the features provided by their standard solution.
- Experienced With Automation – Automating everything can be as expensive and cost-inefficient as automating nothing. Look for a partner with automation experience who will help you choose which areas to focus on so that you receive the biggest benefit possible from your investment.
Criteria 4: A Price Point That Delivers Value
Like anything, you can what you pay for with technology. If you want customized functionality or robust support services from a capable team you need to be realistic with your budgets. Allocating an appropriate spend to improving your operations is a strategic decision and you should not be cutting corners (it will always cost you more in the long run).
In some cases, paying twice as much per month to gain one extra feature may be more than worth it. If, for example, that additional feature saves you ten hours of employee time a week then that investment is going to pay for itself again and again.
When comparing different platforms at different price points, it may be useful to consider if or how each platform can add value in the following areas:
- Saving employee time and increasing productivity through automation
- Helping build your brand by providing a better user experience for your investors
- Providing valuable expertise that will help you grow quicker and market better
- Delivering software that supports your business no matter how big it grows
The cheapest solution rarely provides the most value. Custom development, for example, isn’t cheap, and the pricing from a firm that provides this option will reflect that – but this feature could also be the difference that ensures your business stands out in a crowded market.
The best way to assess these costs and the value they provide is to compare them with the costs of hiring internal resources to provide the same solution. Put in that context, providers that deliver custom development and other expert features provide value that would be impossible to match internally.
Katipult: Deal Syndication Software Made For You
We work with businesses as a technology partner, rather than a vendor, using our unique strengths in development to provide a solution that is tailored to your industry and audience.
Our strengths include:
- International Experience and Support – We’ve got team members on four continents, and customers on six; wherever you and your investors are based you can be certain you’ll receive expert advice.
- Background in Custom Software – We have our own expert in-house development and UX/UI teams who are experienced in crafting unique solutions for our customers.
- Stable Trustworthy Partner – We’re a publicly traded company, so we’re subject to audits and exchange due diligence and have an independent board of directors.
- Award Winning Technology – We’ve won plenty of awards for our work – take a look at the full list on our About Us page.
Do we meet all four criteria for your business? Contact a Katipult expert today to start a conversation and find out more.
