Technology firms in the advisor space follow a pattern common to all entrepreneurs. They see inefficiencies or other shortcomings among existing products, services or marketplaces and then build an application that more efficiently serves the needs of the consumer or the professional and, ideally, serves them both.
That’s the pattern followed by broker-dealer North Capital Private Securities (NCPS) founder and CEO, Jim Dowd, in building a a suite of technology tools that, he says, brings greater efficiency and scale to the exempt securities market.
That efficiency and scale, Dowd further suggests, will help to not only meet end-client desires to add alternative investments to their portfolios but also grow that market. That’s because North Capital’s suite of tools, comprising cloud-based software offerings called TransactAPI, Marketplace as a Service (MAAS) and the DirectInvest Button, more efficiently meet the investing needs of end clients, the funding needs of both one-off and serial private offering originators and the heavy compliance needs of intermediaries like broker-dealers including suitability, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML), along with verifying the accredited status of those end investors.
NCPS and its technology firm—North Capital Investment Technology—is part of Salt Lake City-based North Capital, a 10-year old firm that includes an RIA, a CTA, the broker-dealer and the tech firm.
Dowd, a 33-year veteran of the sell and buy sides in the derivatives, hedge fund and banking markets, calls NCPS a “technology enabled broker-dealer” that focuses only on the exempt securities market. Following the path of other entrepreneurs, he argues that the exempt securities market is one part of the industry that has “very little technology, very little standardization” but where good technology can make a “huge marginal difference in outcomes for investors and intermediaries.”
Dowd says that the biggest benefit of North Capital’s products to exempt offering originators is making the raising of capital more efficient by helping to “compress” the offering and subscription process for those offerings.