An Interview With FinTech Company Governance.io

Luxembourg's first FinTech awards drew nearly 80 applications from around the world, including lending and crowdfunding platforms, RegTechs, digital banking products, robo-advisors, and big data solutions. The winner of the grand prize (€50k, four months' hosting at the Technoport, and a one-year membership at the KPMG Hub for Entrepreneurship) was Governance.io, an oversight and control product for investment fund professionals. I sat down with CEO Bert Boerman to get a closer look.

Tell me about Governance.io. What's it all about?

Well, for fifteen years I was a banker in charge of depositary bank activities and investment fund oversight, so I was dealing with a lot of fund industry challenges. And, basically, that experience gave me the idea for the software that became Governance.io. I implemented an earlier version of the system at my bank in order to fix my own problems and make my job easier. In 2014 I decided to leave the bank and to focus exclusively on that project.

So, in a nutshell: Governance.io is a fund oversight platform that helps fund managers and depositaries deal with their regulatory oversight. When management companies or depositaries want to control investment funds, they first need to have a view over the entire fund structure and know everything that's happening inside that fund structure.

We gather all the fund data and display it in one place: you can see a graphical representation of your fund, either in an ORG chart or a real-world map; how the fund structure is built; the different entities; who the service providers are; what the fund's assets are, and what transactions took place; the NAVs that have been published; what documents you've received; what controls you have performed; and any other related data.

Is it customisable? Do you tweak and adjust it for every client?

From my background as a banker I had this ideal model of data in my head, something like if you have X, Z, and Y - then you're golden! But when we started testing early on with external clients they said that's nice... but we would like this different and that different, and can we have this, and not that... etc. Our first reaction was to tweak it each time, but if you want to think beyond your first five clients then this is not really feasible.

So, we built an infrastructure for a system that you can continuously upgrade over hundreds of clients, and which can accommodate everybody's different data model. Normally you have customisation but...