WOMEN LEADERS ISSUE
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Kim Vogel
Although capital has steadily flowed into the industry ever since the financial crisis of 2008, it has continued to rely on manual processes and antiquated technology. To solve these problems and to meet client demands for transparency, managers and their administrators are forced to rely on expensive, outmoded technology products, or add to their overall headcount. But neither approach is effective, and both reduce margins. Making matters worse, they often rely on Excel to inform them of key portfolio information, including exposure and risk metrics. With the motto- “Investment Management – Re-envisioned”, Kim Vogel, President, and Co-Founder at BaseVenture is working to provide an unsurpassed solution to its clients. BaseVenture is headquartered in San Rafael, CA (San Francisco Bay Area). The organization has quickly gained market share and traction in the industry in a short period of three years because of its novel all-encompassing offerings.
Leading with Leaders
Kim started her first professional job as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) at KPMG. Shortly thereafter, she earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School, which then lead to securing a position as Vice President of Montgomery Securities. Her venture into entrepreneurship and innovation; began in the late 90s, as CFO of Semaphore Partners. At the time it was one of the first digital marketing agencies around. She was one of the original members of the executive team that established the company into a global powerhouse, attaining clients like General Motors, Orbitz, and more. Once Semaphore Partners was sold to a marketing conglomerate she took a position of teaching finance and business at St. Mary’s College of California in their graduate and undergraduate programs. When of one of her colleagues was looking to “bring the band back together” as they say, she became one of the initial executives at a pioneering mobile banking and payments technology company called mFoundry. It was the first company to submit a mobile banking app to the Apple App Store and one of the earliest to introduce the ability to deposit a check via a mobile device. She served as CFO of mFoundry for almost a decade, which grew to become the largest player in North America and was later sold to FIS (NYSE: FIS). Shortly thereafter in 2015, she co-founded BaseVenture with John Pizzi and they started to build their team. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for Saint Mary’s College of California. Kim enjoys supplementing her corporate responsibilities with involvement in academia. As she elucidates, “It keeps me close to those who are just starting their careers and gives me an opportunity to share my story and lessons garnered along the way”.
Passionate for building something innovative
BaseVenture has become an innovative force in the alternative investment and wealth management industries. It is a cloud-based software company that develops innovative solutions in the areas of financial reporting, data visualization, and process management. The enterprise’s award-winning platform, “FundManager.io,” helps organizations simplify and automate how private funds are administered and managed. By providing users with data intelligence, reporting, workflow management, and document storage, “FundManager.io” radically simplifies the process of fund management and provides a platform that is modern, easy-to-use, intelligent, scalable, affordable and secure. The following features offer just a glimpse of what “FundManager.io” has to offer. Clients see it is a drastic improvement for fund administrators:
• Digital dashboards that display dynamic key performance metrics for fund managers and their investors.
• An intelligent document management system that allows them to upload and filter documents based on industry-specific terms, thereby saving time when they try to locate specific documents.
• Investor CRM and collaboration tools to simplify how they communicate with investors and reduce their reliance on email.
• A Digital workflow engine that expedites the completion of key processes like capital statement preparation and cash management requests.
One of the key differentiators of “FundManager.io” is the system’s flexibility: It is the only new entrant to the industry that can handle all classes of private funds, as well as be used by all key industry stakeholders, including fund administrators, fund managers, investors, trustees, auditors, and regulators.
Bringing your “A” game
Building great companies is a team sport, and it is not something one can do very successfully alone. Kim too loves being surrounded by really smart people. “They spark new interests in me; introduce me to new ideas, concepts, and opportunities that I would have never come up with by myself”. The team at BaseVenture is no exception. The leadership of the company is comprised of technology, product, and alternative investment experts. In fact, each of their members has an experience of a decade, which helps ensure that they are better equipped to tailor their product to the specific pain points and needs of their clients. “We invest in top-notch teams. If the team is top-notch, they will figure out the rest.”
“If the team is top-notch, they will figure out the rest.”
Setbacks happen
Kim believes that for being an effective leader one needs to follow what Jeff Bezos has eloquently coined as “High-Velocity Decision Making”. As Kim puts it, it is the art of producing the highest quality decisions with limited information and doing so as quickly as possible. Kim suggests it isn’t just a personal skill; it is an environment that leaders cultivate. Most decisions should probably be made with 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for more, you are probably acting too slowly “As a leader, I know that setbacks are shockwaves to improvement. My journey has taught me to look at “setbacks” differently and quickly turn them into what can sometimes be groundbreaking opportunities”.
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