'Direct notifications from Corporify reduce risk of phishing'

B2B companies

Smartfin is of Belgian origin and invests in B2B companies strongly linked to technology. It does so through five funds.

The two venture funds date from 2015 and 2020 and raised €15 million and €52 million, respectively.

The three growth funds invest in more mature tech companies that can already show some turnover. They already raised 75 and 240 million euros in 2014 and 2019, respectively, and last year, Smartfin launched a third growth fund targeting 250 million euros. Meanwhile, almost four-fifths of this target has already been reached.

It was top entrepreneur and tech investor Jürgen Ingels, along with Bart Luyten, who raised up Smartfin in 2015.

"We focus on the European market", says partner and CFO Sébastien Thiel. "Most of our investments today are in the Benelux, but we also have holdings in the Nordics and Turkey, among others. In total, we have participated in 27 portfolio companies, four of which have already been exited, spread over the five funds. A team of about 10 employees monitors these daily. In the past four years, that number has doubled."

From Excel to Corporify

Since the second half of 2021, the Corporify platform has been a fixture within Smartfin. "This solution takes over a large part of our processes for which we used Excel spreadsheets in the past", explains Sébastien. "Those processes can be reduced to three main areas. On the one hand, there is portfolio monitoring, where we closely monitor all KPIs, among other things. On the other hand, there is full fund reporting, and finally, there is the intensive contact management of all shareholders."

"For portfolio monitoring, Excel is still our go-to resource today. However, for the reporting of our funds, we can now fall back partly on the Corporify platform. More specifically: to store documents and give our investors access to this information."

However, the main focus of using Corporify within Smartfin is managing investor contacts and the online management of all KYC administration.

Sébastien Thiel: "It's very important for us to know exactly who our shareholders are. Full KYC is, therefore, crucial. All persons involved—including partners, UBOs, etc.—are stored in the system along with their IDs and due dates, subscription documents, commitments and all financial details. This makes Corporify the place of truth for us to look up and validate all this data."

'User-friendly and intuitive'

As a finance & administrative assistant, Laura De Cleen is also a daily user of the platform.

"You can indeed find all relevant information in one place", she confirms. "Moreover, the tool is user-friendly and intuitive. For me, an additional advantage is the ease with which you can perform downloads. You can also easily consolidate data on the basis of those downloads and the search work within Corporify itself. Also handy are the automatic notifications, for example, when IDs are about to expire."

The integration of the platform into Smartfin's business environment went smoothly, according to Sébastien and Laura. "Partly because we could fall back on our Excel database", they say. "Certain data from it had to be transferred manually, but for most data, the import could be automated."

"It is true, however, that as a niche player, we needed a solution that had to be tailor-made for one piece. This brought challenges that were well addressed by Corporify."

Shareholder security

According to Sébastien Thiel, the platform also offers significant added value in terms of security.

"In the past, we used to send our shareholders e-mails when they needed to add capital, for example", he clarifies.

"Today, we can send notifications directly from Corporify so that our investors can validate themselves in the tool. At a time when phishing practices are rife, such legitimisation is more than welcome to protect the safety of every shareholder."