Globally active Accelex has set up in Luxembourg to sell its next-generation software as a service solution aimed exclusively at private markets because of the country’s leadership in private assets. The UK-headquartered company sees itself playing a key role in the maturation of the private assets market, including through the increased availability of such funds to retail investor clientele.
The firm was founded in 2018 in London by Fintech industry experts focusing on the early adoption and creation of AI and technology advancements specifically for the private markets ecosystem. Accelex now has offices worldwide, with 70 staff globally and with its London HQ joined by offices in Paris, Luxembourg, New York and Toronto.
Accelex regards Luxembourg as a great place to continue solving persistent problems in financial markets.
“Luxembourg is a major centre of finance especially for private assets, with many funds registered in Luxembourg and a large contingent of related activities such as fund servicing, auditing, and consultancy also clustered in the country,” said Stuart Tait, sales director at Accelex. “By operating in FinTech hubs like Luxembourg, close to our clients and surrounded by relevant professionals, we can engage with practitioners and hire top-quality talent.”
Fintech hub facilitation
“Our product team has developed a next-generation SaaS (software as a service) solution that leverages data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques destined to streamline and automate the process of document acquisition and data extraction from unstructured content trapped in private markets fund documents, without resorting to manual or template-based approaches,” explained Tait.
The dynamic nature of the firm’s algorithms allows them to “read” documents and achieve high levels of accuracy even if the software has only been exposed to those documents for the first time, Tait explained.
Data ownership retained
Addressing a concern among clients about such services, Tait insisted that “Accelex’s clients maintain ownership of their processes and data without the burden of the work involved.” Accelex’s software puts their clients in charge of the accuracy and timeliness of the data without the need for other third parties, Tait said.
Accelex has recently added portfolio analytics and reporting, which, he said “makes Accelex an end-to-end platform”.
Accelex is very well aware that its product might be seen as revolutionary in the private markets sector. “The disclosure of information and provision of data in private markets is more limited than in public markets,’ said Tait. “That is unlikely to change any time soon; private markets are, by their nature, opaque.”
Deliberate obfuscation
Private market fund managers deliberately share data in PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) to control the message to investors and report various metrics based on their particular focus, Tait explained. While that format makes it difficult to analyse data, Tait said Accelex has the necessary tools. “Our solution applies cutting-edge technology to overcome that problem”, he said, pointing out that his company’s solution can reliably extract data from PDF reports and put it into a format conducive to analysis.
Accelex is excited about the EU’s European Long-Term Investment Fund (Eltif) and its role in pushing the increased availability of long-term investments including non-listed companies or real estate or infrastructure to a wider investor base. “We have several clients and prospective clients who are building their businesses around the provision of Eltif investment vehicles to retail investors.”
The demand for the kind of services Accelex provides seems strong. It reports having tripled the size of its business year-on-year since its first client in 2020 and is continuing this high growth trajectory into 2023 with over 40 clients across North America, Europa and Asia representing private assets under management of nearly 3 trillion dollars. This includes some of the largest names in alternative assets, having raised 10 million dollars in the past few years from Illuminated Financial, Albion VC, MassMutual Ventures, SixThirty Ventures and Expon Capital.