Insights from Galaxy’s Garima Grover on how to offer LPs a white-glove onboarding experience.
Aug 12, 2024 — 7 min read
Head of Product
Insights from Galaxy’s Garima Grover on how to offer LPs a white-glove onboarding experience.
Aug 12, 2024 — 7 min read
LPs deserve a white-glove onboarding experience, ensuring a strong first impression for a firm and creating the base for a positive experience from initial interest to first close.
I recently sat down with Garima Grover, VP of Client Services at Galaxy ($6.2B AUM as of 5/31/24), for a virtual conversation. Galaxy is a digital asset and blockchain leader providing access to the growing digital economy. Founded in 2018, Galaxy supports clients in three complementary businesses: Global Markets, Asset Management, and Digital Infrastructure Solutions.
Throughout our conversation, Garima shared her insights around modernizing the investor experience, best practices for offering LPs frictionless onboarding, and how to reduce manual tasks from initial interest to wired funds.
Responses have been edited for clarity and length, full conversation can be found here.
Garima: A well executed onboarding process is fundamental in establishing that trust and confidence with potential investors, especially ones that are new or unfamiliar with your firm. It’s like a first impression. You’re serving as the first detailed interaction that the investor will have with the company. So yes, the investor or prospective investor will have their chats with the sales team, but the sales team is mostly selling the products, right? That’s their forte.
Where we get to show off our skillset is when we’re selling the firm through the onboarding process. It can signal how organized, transparent, and competent your firm is. Additionally, it’s crucial to ensure that you are meeting all of the regulatory and legal requirements that are being asked of you. You need to be sure you’re reducing the risk of any missteps during onboarding.
It’s a journey from beginning to end.
Garima: This one’s simple. A great investor experience is one where the client has limited questions–not because I don’t want to answer questions, but because that means that the process worked.
When you have an onboarding where there’s very limited back and forth between yourself and the client and the fund administrator, the client is able to just get through the process and sign the docs. That means that the process worked and it worked well.
Garima: When a client or a prospective investor is interested in subscribing, I’ll send them an initial email welcoming them to our investor platform, AngelList, to work through the necessary documents but it doesn’t stop there.
The client is going to go through the digital subscription process, but you still need to provide that human element because, at the end of the day, it’s still paperwork. Who really wants to get through paperwork? It can be mundane. You need to keep the investor excited and the only way to do that is by providing that human element and letting them know that you’re there for them at any point via phone, zoom, email, etc.
Garima: It’s been a game changer. We went from a completely archaic method of collecting documentation to something that is incredibly streamlined for the three parties involved–the client, the fund administrator, and the fund manager–without having to solely rely on an email inbox.
We’re in fundraising mode right now and it would’ve been impossible for me and my team to get through all of our investors with ease without AngelList. I also love the fact that it has such filterable features. We can print out reports and download different data sets of information that just make the onboarding process so much more streamlined, not only for us, but also for the client.
Garima: The fact that you can see where a client is in their subscription process is so vital because, before this, you’d have to pick up the phone and ask, “Hey, client A. How far along did you get in the documents? Where can we assist you?”
It can get to a point where you’re constantly bothering the client to try to get the documentation, whereas now I can go onto my fund manager portal and look at exactly where a client is, where they might be struggling, where I’m foreseeing some sort of issue occurring. That’s, I think, the wow factor. The transparency that AngelList provides is what really makes this process so much easier for us.
For additional insights or to share the conversation with others, you can find the full conversation with Garima, including a live Q&A from the audience, below.
Curious to learn more about how Galaxy and other firms are leveraging AngelList’s Investor Management Suite to:
Simplify investor onboarding and communication
Automate routine tasks to save you time
Provide secure and compliant document distribution for investors
Provide a branded, seamless experience for both you and your investors
Connect with a member of the AngelList team to learn how you can modernize your investor experience at angellist.com/contact/private-markets.
