Accelerating VCT fund manager onboarding for a Bristol-based investment platform
A leading investment platform was struggling to manage the operational complexity of Venture Capital Trust (VCT) fund onboarding. Despite their scale, internal processes remained tethered to legacy systems that required manual intervention for every new manager partnership.
Recognising the need for a more agile infrastructure, the organisation launched a strategic initiative to modernise their approach, ensuring that both their technical back-end and client-facing digital presence could scale to meet investor demand.
- Conducted a focused three-month project to procure, onboard, and integrate a high-performance third-party API service.
- Aligned the API integration with the platform-wide migration of VCT fund manager pages to a new content management system (CMS), ensuring seamless data delivery and improved content agility.
The core issue was technological inertia. The platform operated on infrastructure that had not evolved alongside the modern financial landscape. Every new VCT manager partnership required a heavy, multi-month lift, creating an environment where internal teams spent more time navigating paperwork and technical debt than serving clients.
As the window for VCT fundraising is often narrow and highly competitive, a four-month delay meant the platform was frequently missing the start of key investment cycles. The business needed a way to decouple its growth from its legacy constraints without a complete, multi-year core banking rip-and-replace.
The objective behind this project was to improve the onboarding of new fund managers in order to obtain the market share during new fund raising seasons.
- Process Mapping
- Stakeholder Workshops
- Gap Analysis
- Risk & Compliance Integration
- Performance Testing
- Security Testing
Implementing an Abstraction Layer
We worked closely with the partnerships team and company stakeholders to define a solution that was not only functional but inherently scalable. Ensuring alignment with the broader technology strategy was critical; we needed to avoid short-term fixes that would create future technical debt.
To achieve this, we procured a high-performance third-party API and built the integration within a modern technology stack. This architecture allowed us to bridge the gap between legacy systems and current market requirements, providing a robust foundation that supported the concurrent CMS migration and allowed for seamless, long-term scalability.
Digitising the Onboarding Workflow
The implementation shifted the platform from a manual, document-heavy process to a streamlined API-driven architecture. We prioritised the integration of the third-party service specifically to handle the high-friction points of manager onboarding.
By digitising these workflows and ensuring data parity with the new CMS, we removed the human bottleneck that had previously caused the three-to-four-month delays.
The solution was designed to scale, ensuring that the platform could handle increased volume without a linear increase in operational overhead.
Delivering Commercial Velocity
The impact on the business was immediate and measurable. By slashing onboarding times by over 75%, the platform became far more agile, ensuring they were ready to support VCT managers exactly when new funds hit the market.
This operational efficiency translated directly into financial performance, contributing to a 70% increase in VCT AUA throughout FY2025/2026.
Ultimately, we enabled the organisation to deliver a significantly more compelling service to their clients, proving that targeted tactical interventions can unlock massive commercial value.
