In the spotlight: Sustainable growth at FundApps
Andrew Patrick White is CEO of FundApps, a leader in cloud-based compliance monitoring and regulatory reporting software for global investment managers. The company, which joined SEP’s portfolio in 2021, developed the first ever ‘Compliance-as-a Service’ (CaaS) business model. Its ability to help clients comply with increasingly complex international regulatory requirements has made it one of the world’s most successful regulatory technology (RegTech) companies.
FundApps’ platform monitors more than $22 trillion of total assets under management every single day. Since SEP invested in the company it has doubled revenue and employees, upgraded and expanded its platform to scale even faster, and achieved major milestones on equality and environmental responsibility.
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Meet the Game-Changer: Andrew Patrick White
Blue-sky thinking on bold new software businesses can strike in unexpected places. Software executive Andrew Patrick White began developing a revolutionary approach to compliance monitoring and regulatory software in an idle moment on the golden sands of Copacabana beach.
When he sketched out his plan for FundApps in 2009, the Irish entrepreneur was on a year-long adventure traversing the Amazon as part of a career break.
He describes his inspirational moment pithily: “See the world: Part two…Climbed more mountains. Became a rescue diver. Got bored, started drawing architecture diagrams on Copacabana beach and returned to London to setup FundApps."
He already had an impressive pedigree in RegTech, having previously built a compliance engine from scratch for Aquin International that was aimed at investment managers. As Managing Director, he drove Aquin’s success in scaling internationally which culminated in being acquired by US financial services giant State Street. It provided an opportunity to mull his next move.
The FundApps business growth story
The FundApps story began in 2010, with Andrew working out of the spare room of a pub and bootstrapping the venture with his own money. He was driven by a vision to bring badly needed fresh thinking, efficiency and flexibility to the rigid and arcane world of regulatory software solutions.
From the outset he planned to build a company with strong ethical values: “We have a responsibility to leave the world a better place and to be good corporate citizens. We pursue a triple bottom line – people, planet and profits.”
This led FundApps to become one of the first UK tech companies to achieve B Corp status, independently certifying that it meets high standards in social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
He is a leader with a philosophical mindset and a strong commitment to giving back via the Founders’ Pledge, a non-profit focused on maximising the impact of entrepreneurs on global challenges such as alleviating poverty.
He is also a pragmatist. He built the initial rules-based software engine that became the framework for the first iteration of the FundApps platform and enabled the launch of the industry’s first‘ Compliance-as-a-Service’ offering.
It proved a timely innovation in an important software niche that Andrew recognised as “…crying out for innovation.”
FundApps has always focused on making the increasingly complex and onerous task of complying with global regulatory requirements simpler for investment managers.
The consequences of regulatory breaches linked to errors or omissions in data collection, monitoring or reporting, can be grave – even ruinous. Compliance failures can result in not just hefty fines from regulators but also reputational damage, loss of customer trust or even withdrawal of operating licences.
FundApps’ business model emerged from a shrewd assessment of how to address the industry’s multiple pain points. It also encompassed lateral thinking about building blocks needed to create robust solutions capable of dealing with huge data flows, complex reporting requirements and constant change.
The answer was to combine cloud technology and automated collection and reporting of real-time market data with deep regulatory expertise. Employees include software engineers, lawyers and former regulators with knowledge of compliance across more than 100 jurisdictions.
Sharing knowledge and developing a thriving community
At the heart of daily operations lies the unique FundApps community - a dynamic global client forum in which compliance experts share knowledge freely.
“When it comes to compliance, there’s only one thing that matters: do it correctly. There’s no value or secret sauce in any compliance officer retaining knowledge or hiding something for themselves. It’s a zero-sum game – everybody must do it properly or get fined. We created a group of people around the world that do this for a living, and they willingly share their knowledge.”
It is this community that allows FundApps to have a powerful industry voice which it has used to successfully lobby regulators on specific regulations. It raises concerns or queries on clients’ behalf in relation to new or impending regulations that may be unclear or difficult to implement.
From bootstrapped business to working with a growth equity partner
During a decade of self-funded growth, Andrew reinvested revenue in the business to develop products, build a team and grow its share of a lucrative global market.
FundApps now serves 150 global financial clients, including five of the world’s largest 20 hedge funds and five of the largest 20 pension funds. North America is a large market and FundApps is investing more in that geography.
“Every single day, $22 trillion flows through our system, which is about 15% of the global assets under management.”
There has been a step change in the company’s momentum since 2021 when FundApps brought in SEP as its first external investor, as Andrew says“…to fuel the RegTech revolution.”
Since then, both annually recurring revenue (ARR) and the team have more than doubled, attracting new talent, and hiring pivotal senior roles.
“We’re growing revenue at 25% to 30% per year and we’re growing profitably. There’s a core long-termism in how we run the business. We’re not just optimising results for a quarter or running at speed to try something new. It’s about consistent growth over the long-term.”
SEP invested in May 2021, bringing deep expertise in scaling software businesses in global markets, with Tony Robison (SEP Partner) being appointed to the Board. Having access to SEP’s global network also helped FundApps secure highly experienced Danish fintech entrepreneur Torben Munch as the company’s first independent non-executive director.
“We’d done really well and achieved exceptional growth using our own resources, but we’d only scratched the surface of what we knew we could achieve. Bringing in SEP gave us extra helping hands and advice on building a strong footing for the future.”
FundApps is already a clear leader in providing regulatory solutions focused on shareholding disclosure, position limits and sensitive industries. It has expanded its range from one core product to eight, responding to clients’ needs for more specialist solutions.
“Our strategy was to launch with one strong product, build trust, and then as we increased clients, start building and offering other products.”
The business has also delivered global growth through a successful partnership model, including partners such as SimCorp and Enfusion.
Re-engineering the FundApps platform
A critical achievement in the last three years has been the re-engineering of the FundApps platform, transforming it to a ‘cloud-native’ architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable it to scale efficiently and to make it easier to bring on board new clients.
Having a robust scalable platform is vital. For its largest clients, the FundApps rules-based engine runs 100+ million individual rule evaluations daily, with each evaluation encompassing millions of individual positions. That requires a lot of computing power.
The impact of the re-engineering has been to make the platform faster, cheaper and greener as crunching data now consumes less energy.
Being greener is a core aim for FundApps which achieved carbon neutrality early in 2023.
People first
Andrew is equally passionate about the company’s impact on people. Employees have access to wellbeing programmes, and many engage in volunteering and charitable initiatives, with a strong focus on education. Andrew himself is an enthusiastic ‘literacy pirate’, coaching young children in East London in literacy skills and helping build their confidence via the Literacy Pirates charity.
He is proud of the company’s track record in addressing gender equality and has succeeded in narrowing the gender pay gap at FundApps to very close to zero. It is no mean feat in the tech sector, especially in the UK where the vast majority of companies pay their male employees more than their female employees.
“We have excellent female representation across the senior team which is important to us and something we want to maintain - including newly appointed Chief Revenue Officer, Claudia Thurner, who is highly experienced in driving growth and transformation across FinTech and RegTech”. he adds.
Looking ahead, 2025 looks set to be another banner year for FundApps...
Looking ahead, 2025 looks set to be another banner year for FundApps, driven partly by new US regulations on disclosure of short positions. The rules, imposed by the SEC (US Securities & Exchange Commission) are effective from January 2 and they have forced many more investment managers to seek automated solutions to enable them to keep track of data and to comply with the new rules.
“It’s our Super Bowl year…hundreds of companies that were either too small or didn't think they needed us before, and did everything manually, suddenly realised they can't doit manually anymore. It requires day-to-day monitoring and reporting. It's very onerous. It’s the biggest single change in 30 years, it’s massive.”
FundApps’ advertisements for new recruits call for ‘game-changers, challengers and go-getters.’ It is a description that could easily apply to the CEO, who 14 years after founding the business remains hungry for new opportunities.
“We’d done really well and achieved exceptional growth using our own resources, but we’d only scratched the surface of what we knew we could achieve. Bringing in SEP gave us extra helping hands and advice on building a strong footing for the future.”
In the spotlight: Sustainable growth at FundApps
Andrew Patrick White is CEO of FundApps, a leader in cloud-based compliance monitoring and regulatory reporting software for global investment managers. The company, which joined SEP’s portfolio in 2021, developed the first ever ‘Compliance-as-a Service’ (CaaS) business model. Its ability to help clients comply with increasingly complex international regulatory requirements has made it one of the world’s most successful regulatory technology (RegTech) companies.
FundApps’ platform monitors more than $22 trillion of total assets under management every single day. Since SEP invested in the company it has doubled revenue and employees, upgraded and expanded its platform to scale even faster, and achieved major milestones on equality and environmental responsibility.
________________________________________________________________________________
Meet the Game-Changer: Andrew Patrick White
Blue-sky thinking on bold new software businesses can strike in unexpected places. Software executive Andrew Patrick White began developing a revolutionary approach to compliance monitoring and regulatory software in an idle moment on the golden sands of Copacabana beach.
When he sketched out his plan for FundApps in 2009, the Irish entrepreneur was on a year-long adventure traversing the Amazon as part of a career break.
He describes his inspirational moment pithily: “See the world: Part two…Climbed more mountains. Became a rescue diver. Got bored, started drawing architecture diagrams on Copacabana beach and returned to London to setup FundApps."
He already had an impressive pedigree in RegTech, having previously built a compliance engine from scratch for Aquin International that was aimed at investment managers. As Managing Director, he drove Aquin’s success in scaling internationally which culminated in being acquired by US financial services giant State Street. It provided an opportunity to mull his next move.
The FundApps business growth story
The FundApps story began in 2010, with Andrew working out of the spare room of a pub and bootstrapping the venture with his own money. He was driven by a vision to bring badly needed fresh thinking, efficiency and flexibility to the rigid and arcane world of regulatory software solutions.
From the outset he planned to build a company with strong ethical values: “We have a responsibility to leave the world a better place and to be good corporate citizens. We pursue a triple bottom line – people, planet and profits.”
This led FundApps to become one of the first UK tech companies to achieve B Corp status, independently certifying that it meets high standards in social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
He is a leader with a philosophical mindset and a strong commitment to giving back via the Founders’ Pledge, a non-profit focused on maximising the impact of entrepreneurs on global challenges such as alleviating poverty.
He is also a pragmatist. He built the initial rules-based software engine that became the framework for the first iteration of the FundApps platform and enabled the launch of the industry’s first‘ Compliance-as-a-Service’ offering.
It proved a timely innovation in an important software niche that Andrew recognised as “…crying out for innovation.”
FundApps has always focused on making the increasingly complex and onerous task of complying with global regulatory requirements simpler for investment managers.
The consequences of regulatory breaches linked to errors or omissions in data collection, monitoring or reporting, can be grave – even ruinous. Compliance failures can result in not just hefty fines from regulators but also reputational damage, loss of customer trust or even withdrawal of operating licences.
FundApps’ business model emerged from a shrewd assessment of how to address the industry’s multiple pain points. It also encompassed lateral thinking about building blocks needed to create robust solutions capable of dealing with huge data flows, complex reporting requirements and constant change.
The answer was to combine cloud technology and automated collection and reporting of real-time market data with deep regulatory expertise. Employees include software engineers, lawyers and former regulators with knowledge of compliance across more than 100 jurisdictions.
Sharing knowledge and developing a thriving community
At the heart of daily operations lies the unique FundApps community - a dynamic global client forum in which compliance experts share knowledge freely.
“When it comes to compliance, there’s only one thing that matters: do it correctly. There’s no value or secret sauce in any compliance officer retaining knowledge or hiding something for themselves. It’s a zero-sum game – everybody must do it properly or get fined. We created a group of people around the world that do this for a living, and they willingly share their knowledge.”
It is this community that allows FundApps to have a powerful industry voice which it has used to successfully lobby regulators on specific regulations. It raises concerns or queries on clients’ behalf in relation to new or impending regulations that may be unclear or difficult to implement.
From bootstrapped business to working with a growth equity partner
During a decade of self-funded growth, Andrew reinvested revenue in the business to develop products, build a team and grow its share of a lucrative global market.
FundApps now serves 150 global financial clients, including five of the world’s largest 20 hedge funds and five of the largest 20 pension funds. North America is a large market and FundApps is investing more in that geography.
“Every single day, $22 trillion flows through our system, which is about 15% of the global assets under management.”
There has been a step change in the company’s momentum since 2021 when FundApps brought in SEP as its first external investor, as Andrew says“…to fuel the RegTech revolution.”
Since then, both annually recurring revenue (ARR) and the team have more than doubled, attracting new talent, and hiring pivotal senior roles.
“We’re growing revenue at 25% to 30% per year and we’re growing profitably. There’s a core long-termism in how we run the business. We’re not just optimising results for a quarter or running at speed to try something new. It’s about consistent growth over the long-term.”
SEP invested in May 2021, bringing deep expertise in scaling software businesses in global markets, with Tony Robison (SEP Partner) being appointed to the Board. Having access to SEP’s global network also helped FundApps secure highly experienced Danish fintech entrepreneur Torben Munch as the company’s first independent non-executive director.
“We’d done really well and achieved exceptional growth using our own resources, but we’d only scratched the surface of what we knew we could achieve. Bringing in SEP gave us extra helping hands and advice on building a strong footing for the future.”
FundApps is already a clear leader in providing regulatory solutions focused on shareholding disclosure, position limits and sensitive industries. It has expanded its range from one core product to eight, responding to clients’ needs for more specialist solutions.
“Our strategy was to launch with one strong product, build trust, and then as we increased clients, start building and offering other products.”
The business has also delivered global growth through a successful partnership model, including partners such as SimCorp and Enfusion.
Re-engineering the FundApps platform
A critical achievement in the last three years has been the re-engineering of the FundApps platform, transforming it to a ‘cloud-native’ architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable it to scale efficiently and to make it easier to bring on board new clients.
Having a robust scalable platform is vital. For its largest clients, the FundApps rules-based engine runs 100+ million individual rule evaluations daily, with each evaluation encompassing millions of individual positions. That requires a lot of computing power.
The impact of the re-engineering has been to make the platform faster, cheaper and greener as crunching data now consumes less energy.
Being greener is a core aim for FundApps which achieved carbon neutrality early in 2023.
People first
Andrew is equally passionate about the company’s impact on people. Employees have access to wellbeing programmes, and many engage in volunteering and charitable initiatives, with a strong focus on education. Andrew himself is an enthusiastic ‘literacy pirate’, coaching young children in East London in literacy skills and helping build their confidence via the Literacy Pirates charity.
He is proud of the company’s track record in addressing gender equality and has succeeded in narrowing the gender pay gap at FundApps to very close to zero. It is no mean feat in the tech sector, especially in the UK where the vast majority of companies pay their male employees more than their female employees.
“We have excellent female representation across the senior team which is important to us and something we want to maintain - including newly appointed Chief Revenue Officer, Claudia Thurner, who is highly experienced in driving growth and transformation across FinTech and RegTech”. he adds.
Looking ahead, 2025 looks set to be another banner year for FundApps...
Looking ahead, 2025 looks set to be another banner year for FundApps, driven partly by new US regulations on disclosure of short positions. The rules, imposed by the SEC (US Securities & Exchange Commission) are effective from January 2 and they have forced many more investment managers to seek automated solutions to enable them to keep track of data and to comply with the new rules.
“It’s our Super Bowl year…hundreds of companies that were either too small or didn't think they needed us before, and did everything manually, suddenly realised they can't doit manually anymore. It requires day-to-day monitoring and reporting. It's very onerous. It’s the biggest single change in 30 years, it’s massive.”
FundApps’ advertisements for new recruits call for ‘game-changers, challengers and go-getters.’ It is a description that could easily apply to the CEO, who 14 years after founding the business remains hungry for new opportunities.
