Technology, Data Management, and Domain Expertise Is a Holy Trinity” Says Kanav Kalia

Risk management and innovation, particularly in Finance and Banking have changed their face dramatically ever since digitalization has picked up the pace. More and more finance sector executives are depending on digital channels to promote business and attract new business ventures. However, siloed technologies have been keeping them from constantly upgrading to the changing demands of the digital world. Oxane Partners, a digital-first company says, the solutions it provides are versatile for a company to convert challenges into opportunities, and they make it all possible by combining technology, data management, and domain expertise in the right proportions. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Kanav Kalia, Chief Sales, and Marketing Officer, of Oxane Partners.

1.Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Oxane Partners is a technology-driven solution provider catering to the global private markets industry, a niche segment within the broader global financial markets. Private market investments broadly include private equity, venture capital, private debt, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources. Oxane Partners is the brainchild of (Mr. Sumit Gupta and Mr. Vishal Soni,) former credit traders from Deutsche Bank with close to 40 years of investment experience. They came up with an idea that stemmed from the first-hand challenges they faced during their investment careers. Their vision was conceptualized into a venture in 2013, naming it Oxane Partners.

Having substantial experience in the investment management space and closely listening to our clients, our operating model combines technology with domain expertise that differentiates us from our competition. We are helping our investment firms cross the digital divide and create a competitive edge with a digital-first approach. This approach constitutes our three core pillars:

Firstly, we provide a 'perfect-fit' technology platform to our clients, secondly, we act on behalf of our clients as their 'data custodians', and lastly, we provide a dedicated team of domain experts to our clients to handle their heavy operational tasks. This unlocks additional bandwidth for client teams to focus on their core business functions.

We provide a one-stop solution to investment managers covering a range of asset classes. Our offerings include portfolio management technology, managed data services, transaction execution support, loan servicing, and independent valuations. We are constantly evolving to be the industry stalwarts as we support new and complex investment strategies in newer and emerging asset classes.

2.With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

The private markets industry resurfaced after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. It emerged as an alternative post the major clampdown by banks that moved away from risky lending owing to the stringent regulatory environment post the 2008 crisis. One of the most important characteristics of the private markets industry is its complex and nuanced nature.

As there is no one-size-fits-all approach to providing any standard solution to private markets firms, as every client has a different requirement. We capitalized on this and covered the gap in the market, and founded Oxane Partners with the mission to simplify, digitalize and transform the private markets industry. Further, to bridge the technology gap between private markets and public markets (i.e., capital markets) we are relentlessly accelerating the technology adoption in the private markets space and constantly evolving to be the pioneers in moving the industry forward.

It is humbling to reflect on how far we have come in the last eight years. We bootstrapped the firm in 2013 and since then we have never looked back as we went on to become a full-suite solutions provider to the private markets. Today we have grown into a close-knit team of about 250 financial and technology enthusiasts. Over the years, we have developed a suite of tech platforms covering portfolio management across diverse asset classes. Currently, we are managing more than $300 billion in notional across 20 geographies globally.

3.Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

The private markets industry today is growing not only in size but also in complexity. Only in the last 10-15 years, the private space has grown considerably. With the explosion of data across the board, investment volumes are expanding as well, with fast-emerging new asset classes, tackling the rising cost pressures, and regulatory demands.

The most critical challenge we face is the diverse nature of investments across the private markets' spectrum. We are focused on simplifying the underlying complexities in private market space through digitalization and strengthening the private markets tech ecosystem. We see the private markets industry is evolving very fast. It is necessary for us to constantly keep evolving to support new and complex investment strategies, providing a one-stop solution for investment managers to address their overarching needs.

Apart from this, private markets firms have been using the traditional data room setups with excel-based make-shift solutions which often leads to onerous data management and reporting. To overcome this, we are providing a comprehensive offering that consists of an apt combination of data, domain expertise, and technology that ensures their seamless transition to an innovative solution capable of managing vast data efficiently.

Another challenge we come across is 'technological inertia', where incumbent firms with historical expertise in one generation of technology are not able to effectively develop and commercialize products based on a new generation of technology either because of reluctance, cost pressures, or lack of expertise. Having a deep understanding of finance and technology domains, we are well-positioned to enable the entire change management process in the private markets space.

4.What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Our biggest USP is how we marry our technological skill set with the depth of our domain expertise. We draw our confidence from the extensive exposure our senior leadership has had in the industry. They have years of experience working closely with various investment banks and firms that understand the underlying challenges and operational nuances of the private market space.

We bring together a trinity of Technology, Data Management, and Domain Expertise, which makes clients' transition to a more efficient operating model seamless. Our ongoing support ensures minimal overhead for clients for managing their investments on our technology platform.

It is worth mentioning that our one-stop solution for the overarching needs of fund managers goes one step further with its integration capabilities. It is centrally accessible to all investment professionals, be they, risk managers, portfolio managers, or heads of the desks. This integration functionality creates a 'data highway' between various systems in a firm's technology stack and rules out any information gap between different teams, eventually allowing them to derive insights from the coherent data much faster.

We are an independent solutions provider which gives us an edge over our competitors as we are free from any conflict of interest while we independently provide services to our clients.

5.Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

Before I discuss our solution and offerings, I'd like to share the typical customer profiles we work closely with. The portfolio managers and risk managers at principal financing desks of global banks, private credit firms, private equity firms, lending platforms, institutional asset managers, hedge funds, and alike.

Broadly, our offerings consist of portfolio management technology, managed data services, transaction execution support, loan servicing, and independent valuations. We have developed in-house technology platforms for the above offerings to our clients – these platforms help investment managers centralize their portfolio management workflows across asset types and bring all stakeholders on a single platform and institute strong data validation and standardization layers to ensure all underlying data is accurate and complete. These platforms work well for both structured and highly unstructured datasets.

We are not just a technology solution provider to our clients, rather, we act as their trusted partner helping them in transforming their traditional operating model, greatly enhancing their speed to market, and reducing the overall cost. Our clients have witnessed significant value addition and achieved a greater impact with productivity gains and unlocked additional bandwidth on their core business functions.

6.How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

In a span of a decade or so the private markets industry has come a long way. The pandemic has also brought in some change, as managers are now accelerating digital transformation projects across the board to enable constant access to investment data and improve operational efficiencies.

The future of the industry entails the emergence of sophisticated and robust technology infrastructure. Having worked closely with private investment firms for nearly a decade and seeing the space undergo a paradigm shift, we have found that investment firms are either already investing or setting up roadmaps to significantly boost their digital capabilities, to secure an advantage over their peers.

To help lower the barriers to digital transformation, we, as progressive solution providers, are continuously enhancing our solutions offerings to be the largest independent solutions provider for private markets globally.

At Oxane Partners, we are committed to strengthening the private markets tech ecosystem through innovation and digitalization. Further, we are relentlessly accelerating the tech adoption in the private markets space and enabling private markets to embrace change and be better prepared for the future. As we grow further, we want to constantly evolve to be the pioneers in moving the industry forward.

7.The industry is seeing the rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?

We're always on the lookout to incorporate advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Distributed Ledger Technology to further enhance our offerings and to be future-ready.

The technology enablers like convergence and cloud are proving very beneficial and are in sync with the demand in our business sector as a growing number of investment managers today are looking for a solution that is flexible enough to support a broad range of asset classes with multi-asset portfolios – all in a single ecosystem.

Investment managers also look for an innovative and scalable solution – one with an open-ended framework and strong integration capabilities, both internal and external. Keeping this in view, we have developed our proprietary technology platforms with advanced low-code technology for faster and more flexible integrations which can be continually modified and upgraded to provide our clients with a truly scalable solution that seamlessly integrates with their existing technology ecosystem to create a coherent 'golden source' view of the entire portfolio data coming from disparate sources.

8.What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

As the private markets as an industry is a rapidly evolving industry, it is essential for us to constantly keep growing to support new and complex investment strategies. We keep on expanding our asset class coverage to comprehensively cover all private markets assets.

Oxane Partners has been performing exceptionally well on all fronts. We have recently completed various milestones such as working with 100+ clients across the US, the UK, and Europe.

Talking about our expansion plans, we are currently focusing on tapping the large potential of the US private markets industry. We plan to bring more uniformity to our US-focused solutions, as the market is highly standardized compared to Europe.

To support our rapidly growing global clientele we have set up a new base in Hyderabad. We have plans to strengthen the team to 500+ in the next two years. For this, we have significantly stepped up our campus engagement with top colleges in the country by participating in campus case-study competitions to attract talented candidates.

Moreover, we have witnessed exponential growth in our portfolio management technology business over the last few years. In the last twelve months, we have added 15+ clients and have strong visibility to grow this number further in the next 12 months.

Additionally, with our focus on continually enriching solutions offerings, we are also working on enhancing data ingestion speed and accuracy by integrating the use of AI and ML in seamless data extraction from documents.