Aquiline Capital Partners, the $11.3 billion investment firm with private equity, venture, and credit strategies, agreed last week to acquire SEI’s family offices services business and its flagship Archway platform, and it has big plans.
“We want to go build the best family office technology and service platform,” Vincenzo La Ruffa, managing partner at Aquiline, told Modus.
“We're super confident it's the most powerful core engine in the market for this customer set. And with that engine, there's just so much more we think you can do with it to provide value to these family offices…we're assembling a really incredible team to go work with this [Archway] team that's built a lot and has accomplished so much,” he added.
Oftentimes, private equity firms cold-call around to potential acquisition targets, but that wasn’t the case this time. La Ruffa said he previously explored an Archway acquisition and knows SEI well. When the investment firm revisited a sale more recently, it was a friendly conversation at the right time.
Aquiline agreed to purchase Archway for $120 million. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year. SEI employees in Indianapolis, Denver, and Oaks, Pennsylvania, including members of the family office services core leadership team, will join the new Aquiline-owned company.
Archway, which was founded in 2002 and acquired by SEI in 2017, is one of the oldest accounting and portfolio reporting software used by family offices, private banks and other wealth and asset managers. At the end of last year, 10 of the wealthiest 25 families in the U.S. used the platform, along with more than 575 other ultra-high-net-worth families, according to SEI. The Archway platform tracks a total of $723 billion in assets.
Sandy Ewing, head of SEI's family office services business and Archway, said in a statement when the deal was announced that SEI made substantial investments in Archway over the past several years. But "a strategic opportunity presented itself that enables us to monetize our family office services business and reinvest the capital in areas of our core business that are central to our growth ambitions and the best-in-class products and services we provide our clients," SEI told Modus in a statement about the deal.
Other stakeholders think Archway’s future is brighter with Aquiline.
Erin Hulse, the founder of Deviate Consulting, which helps single-family offices choose and implement software and accounting services, wasn’t surprised that SEI sold Archway. She previously worked for SEI’s family office services business and said it lacked the nimbleness the market has quickly come to expect from service providers. Her firm now has 20 employees who advise offices on the expanding list of software built for or tailored to them.
“Everybody's communicating with each other now with APIs, playing nice and opening up, and Archway’s never been that way. In the past four or five years, the tech space is sort of shifting back to the best-of-breed and not an all-in-one solution,” Hulse told Modus.
As soon as the news broke about the deal, Ryan Eisenman, co-founder and CEO of Arch, a software company used by customers to manage their alternative investments, received an enthusiastic message from one of his team members. Arch and Archway share about a dozen multibillion-dollar family office clients and according to Eisenman, the deal could result in closer collaboration between them.
“This has the potential to make it much easier for folks to access a best-in-breed market of the solutions that they need,” he said.
Aquiline has invested in fund administration, payment processing and wealth and asset management-related businesses, which informed its thesis that Archway has major potential to evolve and serve the growing number of family offices. Last fall, Deloitte estimated there were 8,030 single-family offices worldwide and projected there would be 9,030 offices by 2025 and 10,720 family offices by 2030, a potential 75% rise in just over ten years.
“As a fintech investor, I've never seen an opportunity where there is so much white space, where there is so much new demand for new services and new offerings in an expanding environment, with so few technology-enabled vendors or technology vendors,” La Ruffa said.
The variety of approaches to building and managing a family office is fascinating to La Ruffa. Much of the disparity stems from the purposes they are created for and their size. Some rely heavily on accounting and consulting firms. Others look more like wealth or asset managers. “It's a saturated market in the sense that everybody's using stuff to get work done. But in terms of a properly vender-ed software market, it's actually not saturated at all,” La Ruffa said.
In addition to some of the largest family offices that Archway counts as clients, Aquiline sees an opportunity to work with more small ones and the growing group of families that historically wouldn’t have a single-family office but nonetheless desire similar tools and services. Those families have akin goals and objectives and act similarly to the principals and beneficiaries with single-family family offices.
“You cannot achieve those outcomes without purpose-built software, or you can't optimize those outcomes without purpose-built software,” La Ruffa said. “I think that's the direction of travel. The general ledger is exactly the right place to start.”
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- Poor CTA warriors. Late last Sunday, the Treasury Department defanged the Corporate Transparency Act. “Not only will it not enforce any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either,” the department said in a statement.
- Dyson’s chief legal officer, Martin Bowen, was appointed CEO of Weybourne, the Dyson family’s office, Bloomberg reported this week. The office seldom shares details, but it is among the world’s largest family investment firms, with more than 60 employees in the U.K. and Singapore. James Dyson’s assets include his company, which makes vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and headphones, as well as an English country estate and one of Britain’s largest farming businesses.
- U.K. Finance Billionaire Hires JPMorgan Veteran as Wealth Adviser.
- Almost none of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture were filmed anywhere near Hollywood. Like the wealthy, films tend to go where they pay less in taxes.
- ‘Garage Mahals’ Are Driving Neighbors Nuts.
- On her new podcast, “Smart Girl Dumb Questions,” journalist Nayeema Raza and Mark Cuban discussed what the U.S. government could learn from the NBA when it comes to keeping billionaires in check.
Jobs
- A $1 billion single-family office in San Francisco is looking for a vice president of wealth management to help with investing, portfolio management, operations, startup incubation, estate planning and a charitable foundation. “We have a bias towards self-starters who happily take direction on projects from the principal and ‘own’ the outcomes,” but you should also have an “undergraduate degree from a “top school” and preferably a CPA, CFA, or MBA, the job posting says. Salary is up to $250,000.
- A family office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is seeking a general counsel for the usual estate and wealth transfer strategies and investment-related matters. Some healthcare sector investing experience would be especially good to have.
Other Stuff
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Where I'll be...
- New York City this week and next week.
- Miami at Future Proof Citywide March 16-19. I’m moderating a panel about family office governance with two stellar guests: Andrew D. Pitcairn, a fourth-generation family member and leader of an office that continues to evolve after more than a century, and Brian Broadway, a vice president at Fidelity’s FORGE Community.
- Palm Springs — any family-office people there I should meet?
A correction made on March 7, 2025: A version of this newsletter sent today and a previous version published online incorrectly reported that SEI started Archway in 2002. Archway Technology Partners was founded in 2002, and SEI acquired the company in 2017.
