Citco aims to streamline fund administration with ‘AI-plus-human’ product

Citco has launched a new fund administration offering that pairs speedy AI data processing with human oversight.

The product is called Citco Document Intelligence, with a complementary “AI-plus-human” approach to assist GP and LP customers alike.

It attempts to alleviate the burden of manually sifting through documents and identifying important details, a process Citco says can cause overwhelmed GPs to miss out on investment opportunities.

“Not only are the functions around extraction important, but just document management in general is quite painful for these organizations,” said Nick Eisenlau, head of institutional services for Citco Fund Services in the US. “They’re dealing with huge volumes.”

He also noted that customers use a slew of technological steps for their manual processes, including e-mail-based sharing, portals and file drops.

“Even just taking that burden off of our clients is meaningful because that five or 10 times a day where you’re just clicking and moving files around and classifying them – that goes away,” Eisenlau noted.

The service provider said that CDI will be especially helpful for fund of fund managers, estimating that they get more than 2,000 documents on average each year.

Eisenlau noted that Citco spent about two years developing CDI, with multiple pilots along the way. This is because the company adapted due to technological changes in AI, such as the rise of generative AI.

CDI will be offered both as a standalone product and alongside Citco’s main fund administration offering, he said.

Automated data handling

Citco said that CDI will automate multiple steps: capturing documents, indexing them and extracting their underlying data. This will include a deeper dive to gather the data.

The byproduct for customers is “discoverable information and insights” that they can use.

The offering’s document work is performed on an end-to-end basis. Eisenlau explained this means that Citco is authorized by its customers to be a recipient of their documents, and that it can go ahead and process these materials for them.

“We’ll capture the information or retrieve the information on behalf of the client,” he said. “We’ll process that information and publish it via our API stack.”

But humans will check the AI’s work and weed out mistakes. Eisenlau said this is because AI isn’t at a point where it can be relied upon to operate entirely by itself for financial transactions due to error risks.

And there’s a high bar for accuracy when it comes to transactions.

“Even if these AI processing tools are running high-90-percent accuracy rates in terms of their ability to pull data, you would never want to make the decision of sending money or not purely based on that level of accuracy,” he said. “You still need a human expert to help you make that judgement.”