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A few weeks ago, the funds industry gathered in London for the Guernsey Funds Forum, held under the banner of "The Next Trillion", a nod to the £1 trillion in assets the island now oversees, and the ambition to keep growing. The programme covered the themes of regulatory convergence, geopolitical pressure, shifting sources of private capital, and, inevitably, the role of AI and automation in the future of fund administration.
The more revealing exchanges, however, took place away from the main programme.
Asked about their biggest operational headaches, almost no one led with artificial intelligence. They led with something far less futuristic: opening a bank account before a deal closes. Getting a straight answer from a banking partner without waiting three days for a ticket response. Certainty that a capital call will settle on the date it is due.
Beneath all three sits the same underlying problem. The legacy banking providers fund administrators have historically relied on are not built to onboard complex fund entities and, in some cases, unable to onboard them at all. Opening accounts for GP vehicles, SPVs and fund structures has become a months-long exercise in bureaucracy: rounds of KYC, repeated document requests, escalations that go unanswered. Complex structures involving offshore ownership, multiple jurisdictions, or first-time managers are quietly declined, sometimes without explanation.
Basics are not the opposite of innovation
There is a quiet assumption that the table stakes operational infrastructure is a solved problem, and the real value now lies in the intelligent layer built on top. Automate the workflow. Add the AI. Call it progress.
But automation is only ever as fast as the slowest manual dependency it touches. An elegant payment workflow is worthless if the account it draws on took four months to open. A real-time reporting dashboard tells you very little if the underlying banking relationship still runs through email and a call centre. You cannot automate your way out of a foundation that was never built for the job. You can only automate its limitations faster.
For fund administrators, this is not an abstract point. The cost of operational friction compounds. A delayed payment is not a single inconvenience. It is a capital call that slips, a launch window missed, a distribution that reaches investors late and a fund manager left to explain an operational failure that was never theirs. Multiply that across a client book of dozens of SPVs, holdcos and fund vehicles, each with its own jurisdictions and signatories, and the operational table stakes that attract the least attention become a significant factor in how an administrator is perceived.
Forward-looking means fixing the foundations first
None of this is an argument against technology, and that distinction matters. Automation, API-driven payments, real-time oversight across a client book are genuinely transformative, and the firms that adopt them well will pull ahead.
But they pull ahead precisely because their foundations can carry the weight. The right model is not human or machine; it is automation handling volume, and exceptions handled by people who actually understand fund structures. Technology should exist to remove friction from the routine, so that human judgement is freed up for the nuanced, multi-jurisdictional problems where it is genuinely needed, not buried under chasing a payment that should long have arrived.
The experience of one fund administrator and fintech lender we work with illustrates the point. As it secured large-scale debt and equity funding to support its consumer lending platform, the structure depended on capital being deployed rapidly into its retail loan book. Securing the funding was only part of the challenge. If account opening and payment infrastructure were not ready when the capital arrived, there was a risk that funds could not be put to work at the intended pace, slowing lending volumes, delaying growth and reducing the speed at which loans could be originated.
There is a broader financial dimension too. Market conditions, particularly interest rates, can move between the point a structure is agreed and when it becomes operational, affecting margins and returns. At the same time, opening accounts for fund structures remains a complex process involving regulatory checks and detailed due diligence. The faster a fund becomes operational, the greater the certainty of execution. In that context, rapid account opening is not simply an operational efficiency; it becomes a strategic advantage.
So when fund administrators tell us their real pain points are accounts, communication and payments, we hear an industry that knows exactly where the value sits.
The industry's next phase of growth is unlikely to be defined by whoever has the most impressive technology demo. More often, competitive advantage will come from getting the fundamentals consistently right: fast onboarding, knowledgeable support, and payments that arrive when they are supposed to.
Technology remains an important part of that equation. But its value is ultimately measured by the outcomes it delivers. The firms that pull ahead will be those that combine modern technology with operational foundations that are genuinely reliable.
VFX Financial provides alternative banking and payments infrastructure built for fund administrators and corporate service providers: named multi-currency accounts opened in days, a single login across the client book, and a dedicated expert account manager who understand fund structures.