The fully automated capital call administration functionality was deployed for the Emerald Cleantech Fund III, a venture capital fund focused on technology companies.
The capital call involved parties in the investment advisor’s office in Zurich, the board of directors, and PwC Channel Islands, the fund’s auditor, who performed the audit of the capital call.
All parties connected through a distributed ledger based in Guernsey, operated by Northern Trust as the fund administrator.
“Working in partnership with key clients and regulators, we continue to deploy additional distributed ledger capabilities that drive efficiency and security across the spectrum of private equity lifecycle events,” said Peter Cherecwich, president of corporate institutional services, Northern Trust.
Northern Trust launched the first commercial blockchain solution for private equity administration in 2017, and earlier this year it won US patents for digital identify management and digital meeting managements, two critical elements of the move from manual to digital operations for private equity firms.
It has also since collaborated with major audit firms to develop direct access to fund data on the platform, enabling real-time auditing of private equity lifecycle events.
“Northern Trust’s technology and operations teams have built an industrial strength, scalable and secure cloud application that is fully micro-service based and uses advanced event-based communications and application programming interface,” added Hans Dellenback, partner and CFO, Emerald Technology Ventures.
“Emerald is proud to be a first mover in using blockchain technology for fund administration and happy to see it deployed successfully on behalf of our innovative fund and investors.