Finscale in English
00:18:43 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
You know, one of our first clients on the GP side was actually the SoftBank Vision Fund, which was, you know, it's obviously a huge huge program and and highly voluminous program. Again, sort of demonstrating our competency, if you will, at the enterprise end of the market. And then obviously in 2019, the Carlyle Group invested in Chronograph and became a client as well, which which is something that we're very, very excited by Carlyle in addition to Nasdaq. So happy to provide more background, but that was sort of how we came to market as you noted. [00:19:13] S1: Perfect. So you mentioned already several times that you were serving, you were initially serving LPs and then you expanded the model to GPs. Could you take typical use cases? So I have in mind Carlyle. Carlyle is one of your clients and Montana Capital, maybe you can select others and explain to us what problem you're solving concretely for them.
00:19:32 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:19:32] S2: Certainly. So at the highest level, it's really about realizing and enforcing your data rights as a general partner. If you look at the solutions that existed prior to Chronograph coming to market, they were largely template based, meaning that, you know, you would have, in effect, a middle office team that would distribute a template to an underlying portfolio company. They would fill that in and send it back, and then you could, in effect, consume that information and report out as needed. You know, I'd be candid in saying that at Chronograph, we're pretty skeptical of templates on both the LP and GP sides. I think templates are very limiting in the degree of fidelity that they provide. Right? I mean, because they're predefined, it actually reduces flexibility to provide more information that you might otherwise might receive in things like a quarterly report, etcetera. But they're also not the source material that often the investment teams themselves are looking to. Meaning that, you know, if you sit on a board as an investment professional, you're looking at board decks, you know, audited financials, you know, memos and emails and so forth, ensure unstructured information that actually provides the richest context. So what we've delivered at Chronograph is a tool set that can take advantage of all the type of information. So, you know, taking in, again, any form of unstructured information. You have templates, sure, great. You know, we'll take those in as well. But then we can extend that further into qualitative information, meaning things to your point, like ESG surveys, like regulatory and compliance surveys, etcetera. But in short, giving general partners in this case the ability to query their portfolio companies in any way they see fit and in any way they see appropriate for the nature of the relationship, meaning control or non control, take that information in, again, structure in a way that makes it now useful for things like evaluation or things like your LP reports or other internal monitoring with other constituencies, etcetera, and having a single... Truly a single source of truth that you can look to to understand at any given point in time how does this company perform both quantitatively and qualitatively.
00:21:30 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
And now having something that's validated, just so you can again make use of that in any way you need far into the future. [00:21:36] S1: Charlie, I would be keen on discovering with you the way you built your products. And yes, can you describe your team, your tech team? We heard and we felt from the beginning that you're a tech savvy company. So yeah, it would be great having more details about this. [00:21:53] S2: Absolutely. We do everything in house at Chronograph. We don't outsource anything. And this is something that we felt strongly about since really day one. It really helps that we have two technical founders and that we can get in there and read the code alongside folks. And we even chose to base the company here in Brooklyn so we can attract creative folks who wanna do something a little bit different. We have to teach them what private equity is often because you don't find many devs who have a natural understanding of private capital markets. But that's something that we've developed as a competency is really an ability to take extremely high performing, really A plus developers, each in the business of private equity and deliver differentiated solutions. So we felt pretty strongly about being based in Brooklyn just again as a sort of different approach to approaching this problem. But even more so, again, as developers ourselves, we felt very strongly about keeping things in house so that we can always be delivering incredibly high quality coded and solutions to our clients at the end of the day.
00:21:53 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
[00:21:53] S2: Absolutely. We do everything in house at Chronograph. We don't outsource anything. And this is something that we felt strongly about since really day one. It really helps that we have two technical founders and that we can get in there and read the code alongside folks. And we even chose to base the company here in Brooklyn so we can attract creative folks who wanna do something a little bit different. We have to teach them what private equity is often because you don't find many devs who have a natural understanding of private capital markets. But that's something that we've developed as a competency is really an ability to take extremely high performing, really A plus developers, each in the business of private equity and deliver differentiated solutions. So we felt pretty strongly about being based in Brooklyn just again as a sort of different approach to approaching this problem. But even more so, again, as developers ourselves, we felt very strongly about keeping things in house so that we can always be delivering incredibly high quality coded and solutions to our clients at the end of the day. [00:22:51] S1: Great. So you are serving and there you have a team in Europe, so you're serving different continents. How do you integrate and how far do you go in integrating local specificities and when it comes particularly to, I don't know, GDPR in Europe or regulatory conformity with regard to sustainable finance, how far do you go in those adaptations?
00:23:15 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:23:15] S2: Well, there's there a couple of questions in there. So one, our client base probably reflects the total distribution of private capital, which is to say about 65% of private capital's whole states in North America, 35% ex North America. And our client base is basically exactly that. We have clients across all regions globally, very big presence in Asia, which is great. Great presence in Europe and The UK. To your point, we have a team based in London as our second office. And, yeah, we've actually been global really from the earliest days. And so in short, we've always had to consider, you know, the global context in its totality, which is to say, to your point, different regulatory regimes with regard to technology, different types of users and user norms, etcetera. And so, you know, call me a globalist, but, we very much, appreciate the fact that we, again, do have a highly distributed client base. And, again, these are sort of, at the end of the day, actually routine considerations for us. One thing I would stress is that we deal exclusively with private information. So for us, issues of security, as you can imagine, confidentiality, and ultimately privacy have always been core to our brand. And I think there's simply no opportunity for deviation from that because, again, it is what we do, which is to say, administrate and help administrate private information.
00:24:31 · Solenne Niedercorn
[00:24:31] S1: Okay. And when you're thinking of the future and particularly technological innovations within your company, Which one or which ones would you say are the most impactful for your clients?