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.
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.
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!
To help businesses avoid these costs, we’ve developed a list of four key criteria that businesses must look for in prospective platforms:
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:
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:
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?
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
Do we meet all four criteria for your business? Contact a Katipult expert today to start a conversation and find out more.