Laureate Global Ventures is proud to announce the funding of its first portfolio company, Alpha Innovations Ltd…
Alpha Innovations (AI) is a next-generation global asset management company that is partnering with its affiliate company, Laureate Digital Securities Ltd, to pioneer the connection of the innovation of blockchain to the asset management space.
The core of its mission is to leverage technology and our deep expertise in the finance world to solve the issues that keep investors on the sidelines. Blockchain enables an efficiency and ease of use
that was previously unheard of and will lead to a paradigm shift in asset management. AI is at the vanguard of that shift and bring our extensive experience to create offerings engineered to target highly compelling returns while maintaining full regulatory compliance, and that avoid many of the risks and expenses associated with traditional asset management.
With the tokenization of AI’s flagship fund, it will become one of the very first asset management firms on-chain. It is one of the many steps in the bridge we are building between the traditional asset management world and blockchain—a bridge that will help to usher in the next stage of the integration of blockchain into modern day life.
WHERE ARE THE CLIENTS’ YACHTS?
There is an old joke about a visitor to New York City standing on a pier with his broker, admiring his broker’s yacht. His broker then points to each of the other yachts in succession, telling his client which broker or banker owns each of them. After admiring those as well, the client asks “Where are the client’s yachts?” While it might have been funny to the broker, it certainly is not to the clients.
There is an incredible amount of capital worldwide that either does not get deployed, or is only deployed passively, because investors know that giving their money to an asset manager will make the asset manager money, but they are unconvinced that they, themselves, will
make money, too. And their concerns are not unfounded. Investor profits have long been leeched away in a myriad of fashions— excessive fees, inefficient structuring, fraud, paying for things the client does not really need, and sub-par investing in general. Clearly something is not working correctly when the value proposition of investing client capital is so much poorer for the client than it is for Wall Street.
One of the most fundamental premises upon which Alpha Innovations is built is that the interests of the investment manager should be aligned with those of the clients, so the clients can net compelling returns, too. This tenet has been incorporated into AI in several ways, beginning with designing a fee structure that avoids layering fees on top of fees, continuing to pioneering the use of blockchain
in asset management to increase efficiency, and even going so far as to offer an equity stake in our management companies and a revenue share in our funds—aligning our interests with those of our clients in the most fundamental way possible! Of course all of this is predicated upon an ability to generate investment returns, and more specifically, alpha.