On a balmy autumn evening in Belfast, I had pizza with Seb Wallace, one of the founders of the administration platform Further, and a founding partner in Triple Point's venture business.  We discussed how the fund administration landscape is undergoing radical changes.

I know the Further platform well, since Sapphire has moved the majority of our investment funds onto it. Still, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of his inspiration for launching Further (along with his co-founder, Rob Tominey) and what they believe is the future of fund administration. 

I started by asking about the vision for Further, which had an enlightening answer.

“The EIS industry was built around custodians and managed services. Further believes the next decade belongs to the software that enhances those services, rather than replaces them.

For 30 years now, the EIS fund market has accepted a split model. Custodians oversee client money, and managers manage their funds around that. If a fund manager only has a handful of investors, a bespoke service can work. But with scale, this has become unachievable.

At their largest, EIS funds have thousands of investors, different allocations in each deal and complex reporting, which has led to Frankenstein-like manual work and processes. Rudimentary EIS software appeared, often facilitated by custodians.

But services businesses rarely perform well as product companies. Culture matters. Rather than building the best product possible, service firm cultures often lead to incremental tooling that preserves manual work. Do people want to design themselves out of a job?"

He is correct. In my experience, people are reluctant to automate themselves out of a role, so companies often resist genuine transformation, even as they invest in new technology. Instead of streamlining processes, digital tools are layered on top of existing workflows, preserving inefficiency.

This is the challenge that Further was built to solve. It is precisely why we now use Further for the majority of our managed funds.

So I asked what sets Further apart from all the legacy solutions out there.

“Looking at the market, Further started with a different premise. Do one thing exceptionally well. Be a product-led technology company in a niche market, dominate that niche, and expand. It begun focusing exclusively on software and working alongside service providers for the rest.

In practice, as a new entrant, despite pleas from clients, that meant no quick dash for custody permissions and resisting the temptation to absorb every regulated activity. Instead, Further built a product that can work with any custodian."

So what does the Further platform actually do?

“It focuses on the real work of running funds at scale.

Onboarding investors. Allocating capital across deals. Generating EIS forms.

Producing investor and quantitative reports where every investor may hold a different slice of every company. None glamorous, but all where the time is lost for fund managers and the errors creep in."

I asked about the hardest challenge they faced. After chuckling, it became clear their upcoming entry into the limited partnership fund market had the answer. In that market, fund accounting is a critical aspect of fund administration. For Further, their biggest challenge to date was building a powerful accounting engine for that.

“In the new product, Further built a general ledger from the ground up for fund administration. Double entry is not new, but automating mappings across multi-currency, automatic prepayments and accruals, equalisations and the many technical book entries that large vehicles generate, was the real challenge. Once accounting is native, everything else lined up. Carry waterfalls, investor reporting, portals, manager dashboards, and onboarding – all feed into and pull from one source
of truth."

“We are guided by our customers’ operational leverage. End of. We aim to remove the cycle of exporting, reformatting and rekeying between point solutions that exists in the market. Today, you can buy a good onboarding tool, a separate fund accounting system, a standalone waterfall calculator and a basic portal. You can also accept a lifetime of reconciliation. Further’s view is that the integration dividend outweighs a single best-of-breed feature. Think HubSpot. You might not use every module on day one. The value is that the data already joins up when you do."

I asked Seb if Further would ever launch an app. He emphasised that there is a healthy respect for usage reality across Further. Fund managers do not need a daily mobile app for fund admin. Most touch points are periodic. So the system aims to be powerful in those features and not disturb you when teams are busy doing something else. A low-maintenance solution. I agree with that approach.

That got me thinking about the company’s growth – so I asked. Since 2023, when it launched its product, how has the business grown?

“From 2021 to today, the business has grown to become the leader in the EIS market, which the whole team is very proud of. Last tax year, £200m of around £300m new EIS fund AUM raised was administered by funds working with Further. And we are expanding into limited partnership funds off the back of demand from our existing client base and others."

“EIS pricing is simple. We aim to be 5% or less of a fund’s margin, knowing that often 10-15% of fund margins are consumed by operational processes and team overhead. In LP, we are highly collaborative with each customer. Each pays a simple vehicle-based fee, so we can learn edge cases and prove measurable efficiency before optimising price. Our North Star at the end of the day is the customer’s margin improvement. We are not in the game of the software line-item maximisation."

“The perfect client today is an EIS manager with meaningful investor volume, and if they also run one or more LP funds then amazing. For a manager at scale, the system’s automation is usually obvious and pain relief immediate. But actually new managers, who are surprised at the level of manual work in fund administration, are the most vocal users of Further."

“Simple fund vehicles or angel syndicates that pass investors straight through to cap tables. They are unlikely to gain the efficiency to justify the full platform. And Further is honest in those cases. It’s part of the discipline. If the customer doesn’t win, nobody wins. We’ll tell people that when we speak to them."

I started to think about what the future holds for the business. Where is next for Further? Seb’s answers show his dual vantage point – as an experienced VC and a founder at the same time.

“In EIS, Further wants to be the category standard. Set up an EIS fund without it and people ask why you are choosing manual work and a weak investor experience. In the LP world, our ambition is different. The market is larger and more segmented. The plan is to work with innovative administrators and managers, remain admin-agnostic, and deliver a product both administrators and managers are proud to show to clients. We want to help existing players win more. And hopefully Further will do well helping them."

My takeaway.

Talking to Seb, it was clear how a founder running a VC fund brings empathy and an understanding of operational reality that is difficult to find in the VC world. It also keeps Further focused, having seen startup pitfalls from the inside. Lessons like not to chase regulation for its own sake. Not to bolt on every adjacent category. To build the product engine properly. To integrate features tightly. To price fairly. To tell customers when they are not a great fit.

Further’s journey so far is not a story about replacing incumbents. It’s a story about helping them (and their clients) work better, with a solution that is purpose-built for how modern funds actually run. And to do so with a laser focus on efficiency. As someone who has tried to buy and build these tools before at Sapphire, I find that focus refreshing. Specialise. Partner. Ship. And let the results speak for themselves.

And I am so glad we have moved our funds to the Further platform!

Thank you for your time, Seb (and the pizza at Orto, Belfast).

If you would like to contact me to inquire more about the Further platform or how to set up an investment fund, pricing, and options, fill out this form, and I will be in touch right away.

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