Last year was incredibly exciting and eventful for the whole Goji team. Despite the challenging economic backdrop, demand for private assets remained resilient and, significantly, managers continued to prioritise diversifying their investor base. Preqin anticipates that growing individual interest in private investments will be one of the key drivers behind the growth of private markets from $9.3tn to $18.3tn in AUM by 2027. To capitalise on this growth, asset managers and their administrators are reviewing their existing operating models and leveraging new, innovative technologies to find scalable solutions.

At Goji, we’ve seen this increased demand for technology first-hand:

• £3 billion in assets serviced on the platform
• +200% growth in assets serviced, up from just over £1 billion in 2021
• 30,000 investors
• 86 investor jurisdictions

We welcomed a number of new clients including Apex Group, one of the world’s largest fund service providers and Partners Group, a leading global private markets firm with USD 135 billion in assets under management.

Demand has been particularly strong among global fund service providers looking for new and innovative technology to:

• Solve long-standing operational challenges
• Provide value-add service to their clients
• Support clients as they look for new opportunities in the market
• Scale their distribution and leverage technology to manage the increase in workload

To support this growing momentum, we continued to build out our team across our engineering, operations, commercial and finance functions. In 2022, we welcomed 27 new members to the team!

The year culminated with the acquisition of Goji by Euroclear, a global provider of financial market infrastructure. This marks an inflection point for us as we aim to enhance the breadth and quality of access to private markets for investors of all types, everywhere.

Euroclear is a global leader in providing straight-through processing for mutual funds and other securities. The rationale behind the acquisition is to combine Euroclear’s global reach with their network of over 2,000 distributors with our technology and expertise in private funds. Together, we aim to achieve the shared goal of building market-neutral infrastructure that provides straight-through processing for private funds.

We believe this will transform the industry, facilitating access to private funds as easily as investors can currently access mutual funds. It will bring operational efficiencies and transparency across the value chain, and bring private funds into the digital era.

Alongside building out an end-to-end private markets solution for Euroclear’s client base, we’ll be accelerating product development and the rollout of our core products, including our investment platform technology and regulated nominee services, for new and existing clients across the asset management and funds servicing universe.

In particular, we are focusing on making further integrations to third parties, including fund accounting, reporting and compliance tools, and developing the multi-lingual capabilities of the platform.

Alongside these enhancements, we will also be further developing our regulated custody capabilities. We will be expanding our existing UK-based nominee framework to support the distribution of funds to private wealth investors.We have used this capability to work with a leading global asset manager to enable smaller, individual investors to access their funds. The individual positions are aggregated as a single subscription via a nominee. Goji’s technology enables wealth managers to provide investor level reporting and notifications whilst the asset manager benefits from the simplified operational processes of receiving a single subscription. With the revision of the ELTIF expected soon, Goji’s nominee capabilities will facilitate easier access to private funds for a broader investor base.

To support our product development and anticipated client growth, we’ll be expanding our team substantially in 2023, hiring across all business functions. To help us meet these ambitious hiring goals, we have partnered with Talentful, and have welcomed two talent partners – Richard Bodles and Jon Evans – to sit in-house to support the strategy.

To accommodate our growing team, we will also be moving to a new Goji HQ. In February, we’ll be moving from our Whitechapel office to a much bigger, new office space.

As private markets continue to evolve rapidly, spurred by regulation, changing investor needs and profiles, and digital transformation, we look forward to working with our clients to help them capitalise on these opportunities.

On behalf of everyone here at Goji, I’d like to thank you for your continued support and wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023.

David Genn