News
We continue to add substantial depth and breadth to the Eton team. In this quarter, we have added 61 new employees bringing our total headcount to 240!
We have also added two new critical hires to our Senior Leadership Team:
Joining this quarter on our Senior Leadership Team on the product side, we are pleased to announce that Jeegar Patel has joined us as the Chief Engineer – Head of Platform Architecture. Jeegar is a highly innovative thought leader with a commercial product mindset and an exceptional track record of shaping and executing technology transformation and business process reengineering strategies. Jeegar spent 18 years at Blackrock working on the Aladdin investment management platform. Jeegar was most recently at Blackrock as Managing Director, Product Engineering, Accounting, where he led a multi-year accelerated technology vision and commercial product launch strategy for Aladdin’s accounting, performance, provider oversight, and reporting capabilities. At Eton, Jeegar will provide insights and input into product development, vision and specifications for the accounting, performance reporting, data transmission and reporting platforms. He will architect the product engineering and development strategy consistent with Eton’s client-centric strategy. Jeegar holds a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Automatic Control and Robotics from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
On the sales and marketing side, we are pleased to announce that Pat Barrett has joined us as the VP of Marketing. Pat was most recently the Marketing Director for Verisk Financial. In addition to his wealth of experience, Pat has a Master of Science degree in Strategic Marketing and Communications from Fordham University and holds a Professional Graphic Design Certification from the New York Institute of Art and Design. Pat will lead Eton’s brand development and lead generation activities. His experience with content marketing and campaign execution, coupled with his marketing strategy expertise, will help us to broaden our reach in the Family Office Market.
We recently participated in the Family Office Exchange (FOX) Technology Showcase last month. In case you missed it, you can access our session here. We are also participating in their July event, the 2021 Family Office Forum. If you are interested in the FOX organization or in participating, please let us know. You can find out some more about FOX here.
Client Success
One of the interesting trends we are seeing with our clients is that they are spending more time focusing on providing value-added tasks or services to their stakeholders. Simply put, they are looking for automated solutions to improve the speed and accuracy to complete routine data aggregation, transaction process and document management which can be very time-consuming tasks. These tasks are often performed by members of the family office staff hired to do more sophisticated work. Automation frees your staff so that they can focus on value-added tasks for your stakeholders.
At a broader level, this idea of leveraging the new and innovative technologies like AtlasFive® to automate the family office operations further is at the core of a thought leadership article we just released, entitled “The Path to the Family Office of the Future.” The report can be accessed here. We argue that if you are trying to create the family office of the future and benefit from tools that revolve around Natural Language Generation (NLG), automated BOT processes, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc. the quality and location of your data is paramount. One database that was designed for a family office is key. As investment options continue to get more complicated, the time it takes to record and track investments properly will continue to escalate, so finding ways to streamline those functions while maintaining a quality database that can support the reporting and information needs of the office will become even more critical.
AtlasFive Update
Eton Solutions senior management recently held a full two-day offsite meeting on the broad topic of product development. In addition to reconfirming our client-centric development priorities over the next several months, the team also discussed the concept of “Jobs to Be Done” (JTBD), which is a concept explained in the book by Clayton Christensen, “Competing Against Luck – The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.” The short version of this concept is that innovation does not have to be hit and miss if you focus on your clients and the jobs they “hire” the product to do; in thinking this way we are more aligned to our clients and their outcomes.
Not only does it sharpen our focus on how we need to approach our future development of AtlasFive and be more granular about the jobs our clients need to do with AtlasFive, resulting in better design of the platform to do those jobs, but it also sharpens our focus on how to explain what AtlasFive does now.
For example, we took the “job” of deciding to invest, fund and report on a private equity investment. In our review, we concluded it had at least 60 steps to do that job effectively. With Atlasfive, you could currently do about 40 of those steps today, giving us a very clear outline of how the platform needs to continue to evolve for a family office to do that job in AtlasFive completely. In selecting Family Office software, the essential question is not whether a platform can record a particular transaction but to what extent all the parts of the “jobs to be done” are comprehensively handled in one integrated platform.
Look out for more about Jobs to Be Done in future conversations from Eton Solutions. It is an excellent way of looking at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of jobs in a family office.
Learn more about AtlasFive.
In closing, we hope that your organization is getting back to normal. While we have reopened our office, we still have many professionals working from home as that model has worked well for us for over 15 months. We do expect to do more traveling in the second half of 2021. We hope to schedule a trip to your office (assuming your office is back!), and we can get back to building relationships based on personal contact, which has always been the hallmark of this industry.