Phundex - Our Story
I’m Heather-Anne Hubbell, serial entrepreneur, former lawyer, banker, and regulatory transformation consultant in all areas of financial services. And founder of Phundex.
Like many of you, we’ve spent years working in financial services. Across the investment lifecycle, we manage complex transactions and processes, and there are some wonderful tools available to make our jobs simpler, but they typically do a specific thing – calculate NAV or do reconciliations and portfolio management or offer incredibly rich client due diligence AML/KYC platforms and reporting capability.
What about the end-to-end process? All of those manual steps to make the pieces come together - Or getting all of the stakeholders-internal and external - on the same page in terms of steps and documents in a transaction? And making sure nothing falls between the cracks?
We understand the pain points because we’ve lived them- and we had some thoughts on how to fix them.
Welcome to Phundex
Our Journey to date
We had an idea for our platform and spoke with potential clients to see what they really needed – and what they needed wasn’t quite what we had planned – so we pivoted to deliver what you need. We know many of you have regulated businesses, and because regulation is in our DNA, we spent months just designing the user and data/document permissions to ensure the right people had access at the right time. And to make sure you could ensure compliance with things like BCBS 239 data provenance, GDPR, version control and audit trails.
Our beta platform was designed with co-creator clients. The innovation management functionality has been used by an incubator at a top university in Canada for the past year. Our investment administration and transaction management capability was designed with an SME venture capitalist and leveraged our collective experience in financial services, and they, and we, have worked closely to design and build Phundex 1.0
Consistent feedback from pipeline clients on seeing the Phundex platform during our build and test cycle was– “I can see how that will work for me, and how I will save time.”
“The workflow will help me manage transactions with internal and external team members on the same deal and reduce the risk of missing information and steps.” We know that many of our clients will be regulated businesses, so in addition to data and user permissioning, audit trails and version control apply automatically to all data and documents on Phundex. We’ve even introduced Phundex to the Innovation teams at the JFSC and the Ontario Securities Commission who liked what they saw and could see how it would benefit the industry generally.
Our solution
Phundex is a centralised collaboration, transaction, process and data management hub, accessible by all of your stakeholders across the investment lifecycle but permissioned just the way you want. Think of Phundex as a combination of Trello, document management and Data room and a document signing facility, all on one platform. Completely configurable to your processes, Phundex improves efficiency and real-time collaboration across all internal and external stakeholders thereby enabling you to close deals sooner and manage processes more efficiently.
Why us and why now
We’ve made Phundex easy to use, and highly configurable. But having spent years helping clients transform the way they work in financial services, that wasn’t enough for us. So we designed a series of Pathway Templates to give a ready-made menu of options for processes and transactions that you might want to do. We’ll look at industry best practice and continue to develop and add to our Phundex Pathway Template suite, and they will all be available to you, to help you transform the way you do business.
Full platform security features and a global technology team mean we are robust enough to meet the requirement of global financial services clients, but small enough to really listen to what our clients want.
We’ll also be adding links to other platforms – led by user demand. We’re already speaking with some of the other technology platforms to see how we can provide interoperability and a more streamlined process across the industry.
Why now?
We recognize that many of you have adopted lots of new technologies over the past 18 months. Now’s the time to really look strategically at how to manage business in this new world of remote working, multi-location teams and wider stakeholder network.
We look forward to working with you on our journey to build Phundex into a global investment network platform.