Working as general counsel for a family office in 2008, Jill Creager found a frustrating lack of technology suited to family office needs. So, she built iPaladin, which launched as a product for family offices in 2010 and has been offered via a software-as-a-service model since 2017. Creager, iPaladin’s CEO, talks about the technology challenges family offices face:
What challenges did you face in your family office work that technology was not addressing?
We wanted a system to help run the office. Instead, the tech people wanted to talk to me about managing documents, about to-do lists and task tracking systems. All I knew was: I’m looking at this massive set of tools that don’t translate to my workday. I don’t manage documents. Documents are part of my workday, yes, but I don’t wake up thinking, ‘How am I going to manage documents?’ I had Crummey letters to get out and capital calls to address. I thought there had to be a different approach to technology that would allow us to think about this data from a governance perspective.
For example, if we shift wealth from the family principal who earned it to the next generation in a trust, what are we trying to achieve with that? Is there a document involved? Yes, it’s called a trust agreement. Are there tasks involved? Yes, that’s called trust administration. But I don’t think in terms of task management and rows on a spreadsheet and document management. That’s all very awkward and not natural to my workday.
When designing the system we said: What do all levels of people do in this ecosystem, from the family principal to the next gen to their staff, outsourced support and third-party advisors? How are they doing it, what do they know? And what records do they need after it’s done? Breaking it down, we saw that 70% to 80% of our workday was 100% predictable, and if we all worked together, documentation could be dynamic.
When we started in 2008, it was just a completely different way to think about technology for this market. It’s not uncommon for these niche industries where there’s a lot of risk and complexity — including industries like oil and gas, aviation, health care, as well as family offices — to develop these specialized operating systems. We committed to creating an operating system for the complex pattern of work naturally occurring through a family office ecosystem. In the early days, we weren’t focused on patents. Our sustaining commitment was a single system to comprehensively run the business with transparency and accountability across generations. Implicit was the need for the architecture to adapt to new directions — dynamically keeping the architecture and resulting documentation current. Today we hold three patents, with more pending — and a deep pipeline for continued innovation.
Why were you not able to adopt more traditional technology, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system?
CRMs just don’t work in this market because it’s a bespoke market— typically, a series of inter-related ownership patterns between generations, trusts and special purpose vehicles for investments. Everything is custom, and that’s not what CRMs do. They also don’t manage documents.
If you have a trust administration responsibility, for example, you have to go to your document system and probably dig through 10 layers of folders to hope to find the document. But you don’t know if you have the right version of the document, so you dig through your email to find the latest version. Once the work is done, you have to go back and store the documents in the document folders. But you don’t have time to deal with the fact that there are 10 duplicate copies in there, so you just dump the new version in the folder and make it worse for next time.
Then, if you’re using a CRM for task management, you have to remember to log back into the CRM and mark the work done. After all that frustration, the work may have gotten done, but there’s no documentation. Our family principal had an uncanny sense of this problem and continued to ask, ‘What happens to us if something happens to you?’ He knew the real ‘documentation’ of the family’s wealth was purely in our team’s heads — which meant it could walk out the door. We chose not to ignore that critical family risk.
How can an end-to-end operating system improve family communication and governance?
It’s important for people to see holistically how the wealth is being managed by the family office, by the outside attorneys, by the outside CPAs, by the outside investment advisors.
They know who got what, when, why. They see how their parents made decisions.
If everyone looks at the same data and walks away with the same understanding, that’s when you have tangible proof of truth. This is very different from second-hand information through a post-transaction report received through a family portal or from piecing together email threads of promises and outcomes.
Granular access and permission control over what information is exposed to each person is table stakes. With strict controls in place, collaborative interactions can naturally occur across the ecosystem within a single system — giving you a system of truth that people can trust. You don’t have miscommunication. You don’t have family disharmony about, ‘Why did so-and-so get the Picasso?’ You see that they got the Picasso because you got something else. This gives everyone context for how discussions are going and how the money is flowing.
