Bank of America recently announced it is extending its multiyear partnership with asset and wealth management investment platform iCapital.

The New York-based fintech iCapital provides a digital approach for investors and advisors who are investing their clients’ assets into private funds, offering an automated version of what was once a manual process, iCapital Chief Information Officer Tom Fortin told Bank Automation News. The fintech allows advisors to review and learn about funds, and send clients e-sign documents instead of going through the process of downloading, shipping and filling out paperwork by hand, Fortin said.

iCapital will use the bank’s investment toward its global expansion and to “improve the servicing for our clients, much of that through improving technology,” Fortin said. “A stale platform is a dying platform; we need to continue to invest in it to keep it up to date with what’s going on in the market.”

The amount of funding provided in the deal was not disclosed.

The historically paper-based process of investing in private funds consisted of hundreds of paper documents, the need for wet signatures and the back-and-forth shipping of boxes, which “became one of the hurdles to growing the distribution of private funds,” Fortin said.

Through iCapital, clients can now electronically sign documents opening up “private funds to the high net worth market in a way that had not been possible given the incredible amount of paper beforehand,” he added.

“That was the opportunity in the space,” Fortin said. “Removing the headaches associated with the investing and servicing of clients over the long term.”

The fintech, which allocates about one-third of its 800 employees to technology and products, plans to invest in strategic partnerships, including with UBS and Morgan Stanley, to determine how to leverage distributed ledger technology to create operational efficiencies throughout the industry ecosystem, Fortin said. “We feel that the underlying technology holds tremendous potential.”

The $3.24 trillion Bank of America first initiated talks of a strategic investment in 2019, when iCapital closed its acquisition of the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank’s alternative feeder fund business from Merrill Lynch Wealth which represented more than $25 billion in invested capital and nearly 70,000 accounts, Fortin said. “Since then, it’s been a very successful relationship of growth.”

The company also plans to continue growing its client base of banks internationally, Fortin noted. “We want to do globally what we’ve done in the U.S., which is partner with leading firms to establish a footprint and become an integral player.”

The fintech has already expanded its global outreach and has offices in Hong Kong, Lisbon, London, Singapore, Toronto and Zurich, an iCapital spokesperson told BAN.

iCapital launched in 2013 and holds more than $130 billion in platform assets.

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