Making Alternative Investments as Easy to Own as Mutual Funds with Mat Dellorso

Today we welcome Matt Dellorso, who's the co founder at Altigo. Altigo provides technology solutions developed by regulatory experts to streamline investments into alternative securities. Altigo was founded upon the idea that alternative capital markets are opaque, inefficient and rife with barriers and that needed to change. Welcome Mat.

Mat Dellorso  0:42

Thank you, Doug. Glad to be here.

Douglas Heikkinen  00:50

So tell me a little bit about Altigo.

Mat Dellorso  01:08

Altigo is a technology, subscription automation and straight through processing platform for alternative investments. So our mission is to make owning an alternative investment as easy to own as a mutual fund. What's been the problem with the alternative industry in the past? And how does your firm change that? Yeah. So, you know, I founded wealth Forge, which is the parent company of Altigo, in 2009. And at that time, you know, alternative investments were the Wild West, you know, there was no standardized marketplace, there wasn't standardized information. And the biggest problem that we've seen, you know, with the industry and doing the business is, operationally everything is still based off a paper subscription document, and a paper process. It's like, you know, completing alternative investment is like the last bastion of financial services that hasn't been digitized. And it's like, you have to fill out a 60 page document to subscribe your client to an alternative security, rather than, you know, you can go on any platform now and click a button and put your client into a mutual fund or stock or a bond or annuity. And so we wanted to make that subscription process that purchasing experience for the advisor, so much easier. So if it's easier to purchase, you know, more people can do it, and more people can see and get the benefits of diversification and increase returns that alternative securities provide. So the problem is, it's antiquated. There's no way to do it simply and ultimo provides a digital easy online alternative investment experience for all of your alternative securities that you want to put a client into, does it handle a wide range of alternative investments? Or is it limited? It does so ultimo is agnostic in terms of products, we currently have over 120 different funds on the ultimate platform from over 50 well known sponsors. And for advisors, we're adding new offerings and new sponsors about five to 10 new offerings a week. So we work with your existing product and your existing sponsors and your existing Asset Management providers. So we currently have offerings that are non traded reads their VCs, their private funds, their private credit, their traditional private placements, we have a broad range of asset class of security type, and we're agnostic to offering so we'd be happy to add offerings to the platform if you need them. And currently, we have a broad range of offerings available.

Douglas Heikkinen  2:50

Advisors have so much on their plates in terms of managing assets, client relationships, dealing with technology, how easy is it to integrate into their CRM, their custodian? Is it easy for them to use?

Mat Dellorso  03:08

Yeah, Doug, I mean, that's one of the things that we strive for, and have been told by our clients is, this is really the easy button for doing alternative investments. I mean, doing an alternative investment without Altigo is hard. It's a painstaking, problematic error prone process. I mean, honestly, some of the advisors that we talked to said, say they spent hours or two hours an hour or more per subscription. And if you're doing that for a bunch of clients at scale, it's not easy, it doesn't make sense, it's almost not even worth it. So what we've done is we've really created the easy button, we walk an advisor or their assistant, through what we call an intelligent interview is a simple online workflow, almost like TurboTax to get the information to populate the subscription documents in under five minutes. In many cases, we do integrate with your CRM. So we have an integration with red tail and working on others with well Fox and Salesforce to pull client information out of your systems. And right onto the sub docks, we do use DocuSign as our esign vendor. So every subscription that's completed through alto can be sent out for the client all perfectly prefilled so that all the client has to do is open the DocuSign email, click a button and sign click a button and sign up. We also include your custodians so we have 19 of the major and minor custodians integrated into ultimo. So you're Studio documentation is an alternative. So we've we've looked at all to go and completing a subscription from a kind of 360 perspective perspective, from the rep from the advisor from the sponsor, from the asset manager from the custodian from the transfer agent from the fund administrator, everybody who needs touch, and alternative investment in any of the processing is included in alter ego. And it's really just in the piping, you know, the easy button to get it done.

Douglas Heikkinen  05:24

Altigo was launched two years ago. Congratulations. And tell me about the growth.

Mat Dellorso  05:31

Yeah, so we're very pleased by the uptick. So Altigo is actually an acronym. It stands for alternative investments in good order. And that's what we're providing to the market. And we've had over 75 advisory firms with more than 400 advisors use the platform. Over the past two years, we currently have more than 50 sponsors, as I mentioned, who put their offerings up on the platform and over 120 different offerings currently available. We do work with broker dealer firms. So if you are a hybrid advisor, we do have 12, broker dealer firms that utilize all to go for all of their subscription business, all of those completed more than $350 million of subscription for for advisors and for their clients. We're doing more than 250 subscriptions per month on the platform. And we've seen really great usage and experience and feedback from from those advisor users.

Douglas Heikkinen  06:26

You say you came from a regulatory background? And you have this idea? how satisfied are you with coming up with an idea? Going through the grind, creating it, and now seeing some success?

Mat Dellorso  06:39

Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's really scaled our business. So in 2009, we actually started our own brokerage firm as well. And so we actually, you know, in a past iteration of the company have had representatives who were, you know, advising clients and putting clients into alternative investments. And just seeing them, you know, at the home office level, you know, go through the frustration and pain of completing those these sub docks was something that we wanted to better, we wanted to make it scale, you know, for our own benefit. We grow our own business to grow our clients business, but also for the industry. So you know, having these 75 advisory firms say they love the platform, you'll be raving fans, you tell us about the time we're saving them and their advisors, getting these transactions done for asset managers in days that would normally take weeks or months, it has been really, really rewarding. The feedback that we've gotten from our our users has been the most rewarding part of the journey. It's been it's been a roller coaster as any entrepreneurial venture has been. But it's allowed us to scale our business from doing you know, the first year, I think we did $20 million in all subscriptions. You know, to this past year, we did over $850 million of all subscriptions. And now we've done more than $3 billion of all the subscriptions through the Altigo and Wealth Forge companies and platforms. So it's really enabled us to scale and that user feedback has been so rewarding.

Douglas Heikkinen  07:54

Talk a little more about the feedback you're getting from advisors. What, what are you hearing?

Mat Dellorso  07:59

Yeah, I mean, advisors want one place to do all their business. I mean, you have that for mutual funds, you have that for annuities. You know, they want a marketplace where they can find different, you know, distinguishable differentiated, diversifying alternative investments for their clients, when they find a particular investment. They want to research it study at diligence that we're working to bring that into ultimo. And when they have a client who wants that as diversification or increased yield benefits, they want to be able to simply put them in that position not have to take months, make sure it's all correct, never have to go back to the client again to get additional information or because things weren't filled out, right. And so they can do that, you know, at the click of a button through Altigo. So they love the simplicity. They love the ease. They love the access, they love that it's integrated with all their vendors, they love that it coordinates with the home office, if they have a home office that needs supervision, their clients simply get a, you know, a DocuSign email and they just click and sign wants and it's all done for them. So it's super, super easy, super flexible. Folks love it for time saving for growing their business and focusing on stuff that's more value add not filling out paperwork.

Douglas Heikkinen  09:04

Do you feel like it's opening a whole new world for advisors and their clients to have access to alternatives?

Mat Dellorso  09:10

I yeah, I do, I really do know, we have several advisor users that they kind of are dipping their toe in the waters to alternatives. Maybe a client is bringing them into, you know, a 1031 exchange or an opportunity zone fund or something that they haven't done in the past. And they don't really know where to start, you know, they want to find information about those types of alternative securities or they can do that through the Altigo platform. You know, we have several advisors who want to run a model and want to you know, put their clients that maybe have a high net worth or you know, a small percentage of their assets into alternative investments. And there's no efficient way to do that, you know, across their book of business altogether provides them that efficient way to do it across their business. You know, if you're subscribing you know 30 clients for $5,000 into a non traded read, it may not make sense if it took you an hour per subscription, you know, 30 hours to do that work with altogether. Now take Five minutes, it makes it worth, you know that diversification effort. So we do have advisors, yes, who are dipping their toes into the water into vaults. And it's opening up a world for them, you know, through Altigo to be able to do this business.

Douglas Heikkinen  10:12

So you're probably thinking of what's next, you're probably working on what's next. So what is next?

Mat Dellorso  10:17

Yeah, so we've got a whole bunch of exciting things coming for what's next. So I mentioned, we want to make this more of a marketplace. So we want to provide more data, more diligence, more research information about different alternative investments into Altigo. So if an advisor has a thesis, hey, I want to find tax qualified real estate, hey, I want to invest in raw land, timber, or water or resources or royalties, you know, how do I do that? Hey, I want to subscribe, you know, 30 of my clients at one time across the my book by running a model into alternative investments. How do I do that? Well, you can do that through Altigo. We also want to, you know, we've done a really good job of focusing on the initial subscription to putting clients into a particular alternative investment, who as advisor correct, and where we're going is also being able to do secondary transactions. So our mission at Altigo is to make owning an alternative investment as easy to own as a mutual fund. And that's not just the initial purchase, but also the lifecycle of that investment. So if the client changes address, or they have liquidity needs and want to request for redemption, you can also do those secondary types of transactions through altogether. So we will are we are we're currently working on that functionality. We'll have that soon. So that's a little bit about what's next.

Douglas Heikkinen  11:28

How do people find you if they want to learn more?

Mat Dellorso  11:31

Yep, very easily, you can go to altigo.io. So www.altigo.io is the way to access our platform. You can create an account there, you can request the signup, you can log in and actually access the platform. So that's our direct signup page. You can also go to wealthforge.com to learn more about the benefits and about our company.

Douglas Heikkinen  11:51

Matt, we really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you very much.

Mat Dellorso  11:54

It's great to be here. Thank you for helping. Great to be here. Thank you for helping me tell our story at all to go appreciate it.

Douglas Heikkinen  12:01

For everyone at Advisorpedia our producer, Jakie Beard and the power advice podcast team. This is Doug Heikkinen.