AltsOps 2023 Q&A: Trilliam Jeong, WealthBlock
Trilliam Jeong of WealthBlock will be speaking on Day 1 of AltsOps 2023. AlphaWeek’s Greg Winterton caught up with Trilliam to learn more about WealthBlock and to get his thoughts on the year in the alternative investment industry so far.
GW: Trilliam, first of all, for those who might not be familiar with WealthBlock, tell us a little bit about your firm.
TJ: We are a group of engineers with a passion to make private investment accessible to the mass. Our story begins in my Chicago apartment in 2018. It was there where WealthBlock started building a capital raising platform to streamline the entire investor engagement cycle ---- investment presentation, investor onboarding & document e-sign and custom reporting.
GW: What are your main observations about the year in private markets so far? What’s surprised you, and what hasn’t?
TJ: The most obvious one is the overall market slowdown which is a continuation of 2022. As institutional investors become more reluctant to allocate capital, fund managers in turn slowed down their fund-raising effort. Not much surprise there. Also, it’s a bit interesting to see that capital allocated to emerging managers dried up while large funds raised more in many cases, showing a classic pattern of flight-to-safety, which leads to further capital concentration. What surprised me is that while institutional investors became more risk-averse, individual investors and, in turn, their investment advisors, stepped up in their allocations to private funds especially to debt funds and real estate funds which frequent dividend distribution. In fact, this is more in line with the decade-long trend of increasing demand of private investment or alternative assets.
GW: Your panel at AltsOps focuses on LP communications. What are a couple of the talking points that the audience can expect from your panel at the event?
TJ: LP communications are crucial for continuous AUM growth and are often neglected due to outsourcing effort. First, our data have shown that as a fund manager grows, the capital from existing LPs outweigh that from new LPs in each fund by at least 3 to 1. So the GP’s long-term success depends on increasing allocations from existing LPs. For existing LPs, investor reporting is the centre piece of LP communications and should not be completely outsourced for many reasons. Here are a few to start: 1. LPs need to be guided and educated with metrics and visualization relevant to the GP’s strategy to fully appreciate the fund performance; 2. LPs need easy and timely access to performance data in the right format in order to perform their own portfolio analysis; 3. LPs often need custom dataset outside of conventional reporting for different purposes.
GW: Lastly, Trilliam, back to WealthBlock. Any specific plans for the coming 12-18 months?
TJ: In the next few months, WealthBlock will roll out a proprietary smart e-sign product, WealthSign, to further streamline document e-sign digitization. With WealthSign, one can upload any templated subscription document and the tech can identify all fields that need investor input which are linked to a digital questionnaire ready to be deployed. Further, based on text surrounding the blank fields, the tech can understand the context and suggest appropriate questions on the questionnaire to solicit relevant answers from investors.
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Triilliam Jeong is CEO, Co-Founder at WealthBlock
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Asset/investment managers: request your complimentary ticket for AltsOps 2023 using the links below.
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