Shade Tree Advisors’ AI journey with Eton Solutions
Like many single and multi-family offices, Shade Tree Advisors faced the burdensome task of managing a high volume of custodian account statements across multiple custodians and hundreds of client relationships and legal entities. This process demanded significant manual effort each month. In seeking a scalable solution, they encountered a fragmented vendor landscape, where most providers offered narrow, siloed technologies. This case study illustrates how Eton Solutions partnered with Shade Tree to streamline their operations, leveraging advanced knowledge graphs and proprietary EtonAI™ technology to automate nearly all of the manual workload and unlock meaningful efficiency gains as a result.
Eton Solutions is a leading wealth tech platform provider, offering AtlasFive® and EtonAI™ applications to family offices, wealth owners, RIAs, business managers, and private equity firms globally. Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform integrates AtlasFive®, a SaaS application, EtonAI™, an AI application, and managed services into a cohesive offering, managing nearly $1 trillion in assets. EtonAI™ comprises three key products: EtonAI™ Intelligent Document Processing, which focuses on document understanding, interpretation, and data extraction; EtonAI™ Portal, serving as an AI assistant for analysts, investment advisors, and legal counsel; and EtonAI™ Agents, aimed at agent technology.
About the Company
Shade Tree Advisors LLC
- Location Saratoga Springs, New York
- Type Multi Family Office
- Founded 2017
- Services Family Office
About the Service Provider
The problem
Shade Tree processes thousands of custodian statements each month. The documents come from two dozen custodians, and processing requires several steps, including retrieval, renaming, and extraction of key metadata, including the client relationship, entity, month, and month-end market value. From end-to-end, this process could take upwards of 8 minutes per statement and frequently led to bottlenecks.
Understanding that the manual processes could be more streamlined, Shade Tree Advisors sought a solution.
The (Eton) Solution
To address the inefficiencies and enhance scalability, Shade Tree implemented the EtonAI™ Document Intelligence Platform. This innovative solution introduced context-aware automation, significantly minimizing the need for human intervention. Several compelling factors drove the decision to partner with Eton Solutions:
Established, trusted relationship: Shade Tree had already partnered with Eton Solutions on other aspects of their business, allowing them to “plug in” immediately rather than starting from scratch.
World-class AI expertise: By leveraging Eton’s dedicated AI team, Shade Tree gained access to seasoned prompt engineers and data scientists who could deliver meaningful, turn-key solutions.
Speed to market: Thanks to the groundwork Eton had laid, Shade Tree became one of the earliest multi-family offices to roll out AI, avoiding the typical delays and resource constraints of a greenfield implementation.
Balanced data approach: Eton Solutions had already architected a way to keep sensitive client data fully confidential and proprietary, while still permitting enrichment from open-internet sources to improve AI accuracy.
“Adopting EtonAI and creatively incorporating it into our process has proven highly successful. We began by utilizing EtonAI to read PDF documents, extract the data and leverage the information. By prioritizing high-touch, low-risk tasks, we have established a solid baseline of experience and trust in both the process of implementing AI workflows and the resulting data. This approach has positioned us well to further expand our use cases and continue leveraging AI to optimize our day to day tasks.”-Meghan Grayson, Director of Operations, Shade Tree Advisors.
The results
Below are some of the results and measurable benefits for Shade Tree:
- Custodian account statements: Processing time decreased significantly from over 8 minutes per statement to under 2 minutes, resulting in an ~80% reduction in overall effort. In addition, the automated solution consistently operates at an accuracy level exceeding 97%, with the remaining 3% identified and segregated for manual processing.
- Tax document renaming: Seeing the success of the custodian statement initiative, Shade Tree automated the renaming process for thousands of 1099s and K-1 forms, again with over 90% accuracy. This has saved hundreds of hours annually.
- Credit card coding (in progress): Again, seeing the success of other initiatives, Shade Tree has begun the process of leveraging EtonAI to aid in the processing and coding of client credit card statements.
Conclusion
Shade Tree Advisors’ experience emphasizes the significant advantages of integrating extensive industry knowledge with a secure, scalable, and adaptive AI framework. Eton Solutions implemented a carefully designed AI strategy addressing the unique challenges of multi-family office management. At the same time, Microsoft Azure furnished the strong cloud infrastructure necessary to operationalize that strategy effectively. This collaboration has been instrumental in achieving substantial enhancements in efficiency. Notably, the processing time for custodian account statements decreased significantly.
Moreover, the smooth merging of Eton’s proprietary document intelligence and knowledge graph technologies with Azure’s comprehensive suite of AI, security, and monitoring solutions has reduced inefficiencies and facilitated quick deployment. This successful implementation not only enhances operations for Shade Tree Advisors but also illustrates a viable avenue for other multi-family offices aiming to use AI for transformative improvements across the industry.
Further Reading
Modernising 150 years of governance and entity management with DiliTrust
Family governanceA prominent family group, one of the Middle East’s oldest conglomerates, faced a growing challenge familiar to many multi-entity legacy businesses. As a fifth-generation family enterprise with over 60 companies reporting into several clusters, the group had gradually outgrown the tools and processes that once upheld its governance infrastructure. Critical workflows such as board communication, […]
Saving the inheritance: Maritime Capital’s property portfolio rescue
Real EstateTwo brothers built a successful UK property portfolio, which their children eventually inherited. The transfer split the assets between two branches of the family, essentially cousins. This split created significant uncertainty, sparked disputes, and ultimately jeopardised the inheritance. One side of the family realised they lacked adequate experience and expertise, so they sought assistance from […]
Simplifying lifestyle management with Albertine’s discreet digital concierge platform
Concierge ServicesManaging the lifestyle needs of wealthy families is no simple task. One family office responsible for both the financial and lifestyle management struggled to manage their day-to-day requests. Their team juggled communication via email, text, and phone calls. Oversight became difficult to maintain. Never mind delivering at the level of discretion families expect. Seeking a […]
Securing the digital footprint of a prominent family office
Cyber SecurityA prominent family with members ranging in age from 8 to 86 had a digital footprint that was as diverse as it was vulnerable. Daily activities like online shopping, social media and even gaming, inadvertently exposed their personal routines, locations, and relationships. This case study details how Crisis24 Cyber Protect helped each member take responsibility […]