Italian heavyweight Fondaco taps Canoe Intelligence to transform analytics and reporting for Institutional Investors
LONDON, TURIN, January 7th, 2025 – Canoe Intelligence (“Canoe”), the platform for smarter alts management, today announced a new client engagement with Fondaco, a leading independent Italian asset management company exclusively dedicated to the institutional investor market, with offices in Turin and Luxembourg.
Fondaco has implemented Canoe Connect to automate its alternative investment document collection workflow into a centralised location and Canoe Intelligence to systematise its valuation and transaction data extraction processes. Fondaco will also leverage Canoe’s API to integrate with its downstream systems.
Fondaco has been actively involved in the private markets since 2003, committing nearly 2.6 billion euros to some of the world’s leading General Partners. The firm has experienced organic growth in several areas, including the number of funds launched, assets under management (AUM), and employees. Its activity is exclusively dedicated to institutional investors, including pension funds, insurance companies, banking foundations, and other large institutions. The firm currently employs over 50 professionals, with a significant portion of the team dedicated to alternative investment operations, reflecting its growing focus on this area.
One of Fondaco’s growth pillars has been its commitment to investing in technology, innovation, and systems to improve data management and analytics. Over the past few years, the team has made significant investments in internal systems and processes to enhance the usability of private market data. However, the process still involved some manual intervention, as the primary source of private market data consists of unstructured documents.
Fondaco began researching AI/ML solutions to extract data from unstructured documents to address this challenge. The team quickly came across Canoe, which stood out as a leading alternative investment player. Canoe offered a precise solution to the company’s needs, providing cutting-edge technology for data extraction and an efficient way to collect documents directly from GP portals.
“The most immediate impact of Canoe has been the significant time saved in performing repetitive tasks such as gathering and saving documents and performing manual adjustments into our internal systems. The time saved allows our team to focus on more strategic investment activities and critical analysis,” says Elena Di Blas, Risk Manager at Fondaco. “In the long term, we anticipate benefits related to strengthening governance and optimising internal processes, making them more efficient and scalable.”
Fondaco is the latest addition to Canoe’s client roster and the first Asset Management company in Italy. Today, the firm works with over 375 institutional investors, asset servicers, capital allocators, and wealth managers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Canoe’s extensive GP coverage has allowed Fondaco to benefit from pre-established relationships for portal connections and pre-trained document patterns for data extraction.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with the Fondaco team as we further extend Canoe’s reach across the EMEA region. With our help, Fondaco is automating a traditionally onerous process—document collection, data extraction, and readiness for delivery of data downstream,” said Hamish Warnock, Senior Relationship Manager at Canoe Intelligence. “One of the success criteria that we established at the start was to increase this straight-through processing, so it was very apparent Canoe would fit nicely and also improve the teams’ existing workflow. As active proponents of this end-to-end processing, Fondaco goes one step further by automating the pull of data via Canoe’s API for use further down the workflow. Together, we enjoyed a hugely collaborative implementation that will no doubt set us up for future success, and we look forward to continuing this open forum with Elena and Fondaco’s team.”
Initially, Fondaco adopted Canoe to collect private market documents and automate its valuation and transaction data extraction workflows. Recently, the firm has also decided to expand its use of Canoe to include Hedge Fund documentation. The team is also evaluating the potential to leverage Canoe Asset Data for look-through data extraction, enabling Fondaco to use Canoe as the primary source for all alternative investment data, creating a centralised and streamlined workflow.
“Canoe’s technology will be central not only at the operational level, optimising our processes and governance in Alternative Investments, but also at the strategic level,” said Davide Tinelli, Chief Executive Officer at Fondaco. “It will support our goal of strengthening Fondaco’s position in the Italian private markets landscape by providing analytical and reporting tools that are timelier and more flexible than traditional advisors to our investors. Data will play a key role in achieving this objective, as state-of-the-art reporting is only valuable when supported by state-of-the-art data.”
Hamish Warnock, Senior Relationship Manager at Canoe Intelligence concluded with, “Myself and the rest of Canoe look forward to further deepening the adoption of the Canoe platform and adding extra benefit over the coming months and years”
On July 9th, Canoe completed its Series C financing round of $36 million, led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. This marks a significant milestone for Canoe, representing a more than 3x increase in its company valuation. The additional capital will fuel Canoe’s strategic initiatives, global growth, and advancement of its AI-driven financial technology platform for alternative investors.
This year, Canoe has also won a number of awards including the WatersTechnology Buy-Side Technology Awards for “Best Cloud Based Solution”, Funds Europe Awards for “European FundsTech Provider of the Year: Investments”, A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight Europe Awards for “Best Data Ops Solution Provider”, and “Change Management Process/Best Implementation of a Technology Solution” at the WealthBriefing European Awards 2024.
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About Canoe Intelligence
Canoe Intelligence empowers over 375 institutional investors, asset servicers, and wealth managers with innovative technology to manage alternative assets efficiently and accurately. Backed by recent growth milestones and a successful Series C financing round led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Canoe continues to redefine the future of alternative investment management.
About Fondaco
Fondaco is the leading independent Italian asset management company exclusively dedicated to the institutional investor market. Based in Turin with an international presence in Luxembourg, it manages assets exceeding €19 billion for more than 55 investors, thanks to the work of over 50 qualified professionals. It ensures an international approach with a distinctly Italian attention to service quality.
Fondaco’s offering includes tailored investment solutions, ranging from creating vehicles to managing traditional and alternative portfolios. The group stands out for core values such as the efficiency and transparency of the services provided, cross-cutting and innovative thinking focused on results quality and attention.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Betsy Miller Daitch
Canoe Intelligence
+1 443-690-6200
bdaitch@canoeintelligence.com
Elisa Silvestro
Communication & Marketing, CSR
+39 0113991004
elisa.silvestro@fondacosgr.it
