Product updates

Product updates: August 2024

This month’s updates are all about giving you more clarity, control and efficiency in managing your investor workflows and risk monitoring.

We’ve introduced new features that help you track investor activity, refine your KYC/AML processes with added risk ratings, and streamline your settings management with a revamped closing page. Additionally, we’ve made improvements to alerts for risk monitoring, making it easier for you and your team to stay on top of crucial updates. Read on for more details on these exciting changes!

Notes on Investors

Sometimes, your investors go on vacation in the middle of your fundraise. Or they may decide they’re going to come in through a different entity. Or there’s some other activity or comments that you want to track on the investor overall. We introduced a feature that lets you save notes on an investor so that your team can see everything in one place.

Revamped Closing Settings Page

We’ve revamped our closing settings page! Depending on your access level, you’ll now see a new "Edit settings" or "View settings" button. This update significantly expands the range of closing settings you can modify independently while also allowing funds to view more settings directly on their account. Plus, you can now generate self sign up links easily on your own, or re-use an existing sign up link with just a click.

New Risk Ratings

We've added two new risk ratings—Critical and Moderate—to our KYC/AML tool. KYC reviewers now have greater flexibility in their workflows, with the ability to select, filter, and sort by these two new ratings. With this greater granularity, our self-service and managed service customers can manage their risk with more clarity.

Better Alerts for Risk Monitoring

We’ve always kept you informed about new activity or warnings related to your screened investors or their beneficial owners. Last month, we introduced a feature for our self service customers that lets you mark these items as reviewed, helping you easily track what you’ve already addressed versus what’s still pending. For our managed service customers, we’re using this feature to streamline the process on your behalf.

Product updates: July 2024

July was an exciting month for Passthrough. We introduced a new settings page to enhance control over your fundraise, added KYC document collection support tailored to Luxembourg's requirements, and launched our integration with Snowflake. Dive into the details!

Improved Fund Settings Page

We know it matters to you when and why your LP’s receive emails. We’ve added a settings page in your fund that gives you control over what events will trigger notifications to your LP’s and what documents are included when those emails are triggered.

BCCs for Email Notifications

We’ve made it a lot easier to support compliance requirements for investor communications. Now you can set a single email address that will be BCC’d on investor communications.

Snowflake Integration

Whether you’re a fund manager, an administrator, or legal counsel, data from Passthrough’s sub docs is important to your business, and you need access to that data across your tech stack. We’ve integrated with Snowflake so all of Passthrough’s data is available in real-time in your data warehouse of choice. With the integration enabled, you’ll get access to the FUND, FUND_CLOSING, INVESTOR_CLOSING, DOCUMENT, and COLLABORATOR tables when you enable the integration.

Luxembourg KYC Jurisdiction

We launched our KYC product with support for the United States KYC/AML document requirements, and added the Cayman Islands jurisdiction shortly after that. In July, we added Luxembourg. If you’re a KYC customer with an upcoming Luxembourg fundraise that you need KYC documentation for, let your CSM know. If you’d like to learn more about the KYC product, reach out to sales@passthrough.com.

Product updates: June 2024

This June, we rolled out our new integration with Entrilia. Now, sharing data between the two platforms is smoother and more convenient than ever before. We've also introduced a new support PIN system to make getting help from Passthrough even easier.

Introducing our new Entrilia integration

With our latest integration live, you can now directly send investor data from Passthrough to your company in Entrilia by navigating to your organization settings and using our built-in integration. Please reach out to your CSM to get this enabled.

Support PIN System

We’ve made it even easier for customers to get support from Passthrough. Users with access to a fund are now able to see a “Support PIN” in the Account menu. Including this PIN in emails or in Kustomer help will allow Passthrough support staff to temporarily access your fund to support you.

Product updates: May 2024

In May, we made it easier for LPs to understand how their investor profile in Passthrough works, we gave funds the ability to add collaborators to an investor without notifying the newly added collaborator, and we added a new status for any approved investors who signed their sub docs offline.

Introducing our new Salesforce CRM integration

We've built a custom integration that allows you to update your Salesforce CRM from your Passthrough sub docs as often as you want, with whatever custom fields you need, so you can say goodbye to manual sub doc data entry. Find out more and see if it will work for your tech stack.

Information on profile selection for LPs

We’ve added more information for LPs when they are choosing a profile to pre-fill their sub docs so they better understand why they have profiles, what profiles do, and why they’re secure.

Adding collaborators without notifying them

Adding collaborators to an investor in Passthrough is always possible at any point during a fundraise. However, collaborators were always notified while being added during certain investor stages.
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Now, when adding a new collaborator to an investor, admins can choose whether or not that collaborator should be notified with an email.

Pending preparation status for LP’s who have signed offline

If you approve an investor who signed their subscription document offline the investor’s status now displays “Approved - pending preparation.” This status is now filterable. Prior to this, admins on Passthrough would have to filter by “Approved” investors to see all investors who required document preparation prior to countersigning.

Product updates: April 2024

April was busy for Passthrough. We added bulk countersigning support for offline-signed sub docs, made some enhancements to the limited partner experience, and gave view-only fund users the ability to opt into email notifications. Read on.

Bulk countersigning for offline signed documents

We released bulk countersigning for any sub docs signed online via Passthrough in January.

Now, we’ve expanded the feature to cover cases where investors upload documents that were signed offline. You review the pdf and indicate where the signature box is, then that countersignature page will be included in the bulk envelope that you bulk countersign.

Context links in answer choices for LPs

Investors have always been able to follow a link in an answer to the page in the subscription document to reference a definition or question. We can now highlight the specific text on the page so investors can find the definition without having to scan the entire page.

Email notifications for view-only users

Users with view-only permissions to a fund can now opt-in to email notifications.

Differentiating between sub doc and KYC tasks for LPs

If you send an investor a subscription document task and a KYC task for the same fund, the two items are now clearly differentiated on the LP’s task list.

Product updates: March 2024

In March, we introduced new features that give you even better control of users and their data, and added the new IRS W-9.

Custom exports across all fund closings

Some funds have requested a custom export to ensure that when they download their data, it is presented in a format and with the relevant information for their specific needs.
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Initially, this was limited to a per-closing level. Now it's available across multiple closings for a simpler, more comprehensive solution.

Changing countersigners when sending to countersigner

You’ve always been able to specify who should be countersigning sub docs when investors are added to your fund closing. However, if you wanted to change countersigners, you had to reach out to us for help.

Now when you send sub docs for countersignature, you have more control over who you want to add as a countersigner.

Creating or deleting owners in KYC as administrator

In Q4 2023, we rolled-out administrator features for KYC that allow you to make changes to the investor’s KYC submission on their behalf. For example, if your LP emailed you a copy of their driver’s license, you could upload it on their behalf as an administrator.

In March, we expanded this to adding or deleting owners in an investor’s beneficial ownership structure.

New version of W9 published by the IRS

In March, the IRS issued a new revision of the Form W-9. We’ve adopted the new form and have updated our tax questionnaire for LP’s for all funds going live as of March 2024.

Product updates: February 2024

In February, we introduced new features across our subscription documents and KYC experiences to make your investor onboarding even more streamlined and flexible, including a better in-app PDF review.

Better in-app PDF review

LPs have always been able to reference their PDFs with filled answers as they complete their subscription documents in Passthrough. Similarly, GPs and legal counsel have always had access to our review tool that takes them through the pages where LPs answered questions and previews those questions.

Now, midway through a sub doc, LPs can open the review tool, click on an output, and they will be taken to that question in the PDF. This is especially helpful for institutional investors that are used to reviewing answers in the PDF itself.

While we have always been able to link to pages in a sub doc that have definitions or footnotes, we can now highlight the exact text that was referenced in a question, making it much easier for LPs to answer questionnaires accurately and confidently.

Email deep linking for SSO users

If you're enrolled in single sign-on (SSO), you can now take advantage of deep-linking in the emails that are generated when an investor signs, or when an investor leaves a comment on a question in their subscription document.
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The links in these emails will take you directly to the investor’s questionnaire in Passthrough.

Document types on review page

To better help you find and review LP materials during your close, the documents page for investors now displays the document type for an investor’s document.

KYC/AML usability enhancements

When investors fill out the KYC questionnaire, they now identify a beneficial owner’s type as they add it to an entity. This should help to mitigate a common error we see with investor KYC submissions.

Product updates: January 2024

To kick off 2024, we released a feature that will streamline your raise even more: bulk countersigning. Besides that, we’re making your data more readily accessible with data exports across closings. Dig in.

Bulk countersigning

In the good old days, fund managers countersigned documents either by having one gigantic DocuSign with each countersignature page; or signing one page that their legal team would insert into each subscription packet. Electronic sub docs were actually a step backward: each investor had a unique DocuSign envelope that required managers to sign one-by-one.

Understandably, no one wanted to do that. So, Passthrough would assist the legal team with countersigning to essentially replicate the offline process. It was time consuming for everyone and we recognized that teams couldn’t move at the speed that they wanted to when it was time to close.

Not anymore.

Bulk Countersigning starts with a preparation step where the admin user enters any countersigning information, such as how much capital the fund is accepting from an LP, or the name and title of the person that will countersign.

Passthrough takes that information and uses it to generate a single DocuSign envelope where any investors you included during data preparation can be signed at once.

You can do all of this without needing to schedule time with your CSM. But, as always: reach out to your CSM if you have any questions on how this works.

Fund-wide custom exports

Passthrough has always supported exporting data to Excel, but you were limited to exporting the data one close at a time. That meant if you wanted a view of the progress across the entire fund, you had to export one file per close and combine them. Now, you can export data across all closings within a given fund in just one click.

Product updates: December 2023

To close out 2023, we made investor KYC/AML information reusable across Passthrough for compliance customers, introduced a way to export files into one folder instead of sub folders, and updated how we do emails for KYC/AML-only customers.

Diligence interoperability

After an investor completes KYC in our diligence module the investor will be able to reuse that information the next time they complete KYC on Passthrough.

Single folder file export

We introduced a feature where instead of exporting files with a folder for each investor you can export all files for a closing into one folder. Each file will have the fund name, investor name and document name.

Diligence-only emails

We updated the email we send when you are doing a diligence only closing to be more generalized in cases where the request is not directly tied to a current fundraise.

Product updates: November 2023

This month, we added new verbiage for tasks to make it easier for LPs to navigate their sub docs, you can now filter investors by risk rating, and changed the way address questions appear for LPs.

Verbiage for tasks

We’ve seen a number of requests to change the language of the green “invest” button for investor tasks. “Invest” made sense when we only supported subscription documents, but now we support indication of interest, KYC/AML, transfers, redemptions, and more.

In response, we’re changing the language to be more generic and responsive to the status that an investor is currently in:

• When an investor first logs in the button now says “Start”
• If an investor leaves the platform with an in progress questionnaire and come back in, it now says “Continue”
• If you’ve requested changes from an investor, the button now says “Review”
• If you’ve approved a sub doc for signature, or if a second signer has been invited in by an investor, it now says “Sign”

Sort and filter by risk rating

As part of the KYC/AML offering, either Passthrough or the client makes a determination of each investor's risk rating. This data was always extractable, but we wanted to make it simpler for clients to see who falls into what category.
KYC/AML customers can now sort and filter the fund closing summary by risk rating.

Updates to address questions for LPs

When investors fill out address questions in the platform, we use type-ahead to suggest addresses to save them time. Depending on the country where the investor is located, type-ahead isn’t always perfect.

We've updated forms throughout the application so investors now choose a country, receive type-ahead suggestions, but still enrich those suggestions with their unique address data.

Product updates: October 2023

Happy Halloween! This month, we have no tricks for you but we do have some treats. Read on to learn about our internal notes, investor tagging, and archiving sub docs features.

Internal notes

Sometimes it takes a team to review investor submissions. Those reviewers sometimes need to communicate with each other, and previously that process happened outside of Passthrough. We removed that unnecessary step.

When you’re reviewing an LP’s answers to a sub doc, you can flag an LP’s response to your teammate, save a note to come back to later, or leave a comment in response to another teammate’s question.

Investor tagging

Sometimes, you want to track data that lives outside of a subscription agreement, like which RIA an investor is associated with, or whether the investor is institutional or an individual. You can create and manage tags, and use them to tag individual investors in a closing. Those tags can be used as filters, and are included in the data export.

Archiving subscription documents

You can now archive previous versions of subscription documents for your fund. When you’re setting up a new closing, only non-archived sub docs will be available options. You won’t be able to add investors to a closing that is associated with an archived sub doc, and any external sign-up links for those closings will not work.

Product updates: September 2023

We added two new features that will make it even easier to review changes investors made to their sub docs and are continuing to push updates to our KYC tool to improve the LP experience.

Review changes and comments in sub docs

Teams that review subscription documents are used to reviewing the document itself, not in a list of questions. We launched a feature to do that quite some time ago. But then we launched audit trails, LP commenting, and more.

We added color coding to our review-in-document tool to differentiate between where you can find investor answers, investors questions and comments, and your own saved, change requests. Pages with comment threads appear in orange until you respond or request a change. Once you request a change, it’s marked in red.

Unanswered questions flag

We highlight when investors change their responses on a subscription document and make those changes obvious to reviewers. But by investors changing their answers, other answers may be no longer applicable and are therefore not displayed in the administrative view.

We added a toggle that lets you see the questions that are no longer applicable to the investor and the associated audit trail.

KYC exemptions

Our full-service KYC/AML customers may have investors where they’d like us to not perform KYC/AML. We used to move that investor to a separate closing where only the subscription document was required, but now you can leave them in the same closing and mark the investor as exempt. The KYC/AML requirements will be removed and the investor can proceed normally.

On the LP side, we’ve introduced grouping to our investor type drop-down to make it clearer which options should be evaluated with respect to one another.

Product updates: August 2023

Normally our product updates focus on the work that we do, but this month we’d like to highlight the work from our partner Altvia: OnboardingBridge. This is the first integration that links a CRM with Passthrough to exchange data, documents, and actions.

We launched a few things of our own too. You can now designate authorized signers, launch funds in international currencies, and use our improved KYC experience.

OnboardingBridge

With OnboardingBridge, Altvia customers can automatically add an investor to a corresponding fund in Passthrough. Once an LP completes their subscription documents, data is automatically updated in Altvia using the answers LP’s gave in their sub docs.
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Passthrough and Altvia users will be able to efficiently utilize, import, and export accurate, pre-populated investor sub doc data for immediate use in Altvia’s AIM CRM. Additionally, its real-time visibility empowers firm-wide collaboration by providing a live onboarding status to IR teams within Altvia’s AIM CRM.
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Please reach out to colleen@passthrough.com if you’re interested in learning about Altvia, or ben@passthrough.com if you’re an existing Altvia customer interested in enabling the integration.

Designated authorized signatories

We now support designated authorized signatories for cases where the documents are being completed by someone other than the authorized signer.
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Directly in the questionnaire, we can ask who should be signing the documents. If the person filling out the subscription document matches, they’re able to sign at the end. Otherwise, an email is sent to the authorized signer.

Currency support

We now support international currencies, so you can see your fundraise in your reporting currency.

KYC updates

We noticed certain types of investors were having trouble with some requirements in KYC. We updated our US jurisdiction KYC document requirements per investor type to clarify what’s actually being requested.

To make it clearer to investors if they are missing a required document, we’ve added instructions to our submission workflow and enhanced the form validation.

Reach out to justis@passthrough.com if you’d like to learn more about the changes.

Product updates: July 2023

The R&D team’s been busy this summer. Read on to find out how you can selectively disable emails, how you now have more control over signature requirements, and how your LPs get an even smoother experience.

Disable email notifications

While people can have access to Passthrough to monitor the progress of any given raise, it doesn’t mean they need to receive email notifications on every comment, submission, and more. You can now disable email notifications for any user via the access tab for a fund.

Require drawing signatures

We now support another signature case: requiring investors to draw their e-signatures instead of using the DocuSign-generated versions.

New profile selection flow

When investors invest a second time using Passthrough, they can select a past profile to prefill the subscription document for their next investment. We adjusted the workflow to make it easier for the investor to understand how to apply their information on subsequent funds.

More clarification around joint signers

We heard from joint signers that it wasn’t clear when the other signers on a document would be able to login and sign. We’ve updated the “All done!” page to clearly reflect what happens next.

Product updates: June 2023

This month, we’re excited to show you a redesign of Passthrough administration pages with an upgraded look and feel that’s going live on July 10th.

Better fund summaries

We have a new fund list that gives you metrics across all closings in a fund so you have better visibility into your raises. You can sort by expected close date or filter out completed fundraises so you’re only looking at active funds.

Revamped fund closing table

One of the biggest changes is a completely revamped fund closing table. It’s now full width, and the quick actions menu we added for each LP lets you send out documents or change requests one-by-one.

Cleaner investor review page

We streamlined the investor review page that displays the questions and answers, documents, audit trail, and more. The activity tab has been moved so you can see it while reviewing an investor’s answers to the questionnaire, and quick actions—such as exporting data or moving an investor to a new closing—have been added so you don’t need to navigate back to the closing table.

Product updates: May 2023

We launched a major upgrade to make it easier for fund managers, counsel, and investors to communicate.

LP Commenting

We’re excited to launch one of our customers’ most requested features.

Admin users have always had a simple way to request changes that investors can easily understand. But what if an investor had a question about the subscription agreement or KYC/AML? Then they were still stuck emailing or calling someone while their questions were untracked and potentially lost.

Communication in Passthrough is now two-way. Your investors can ask you questions as they fill out their sub docs or KYC/AML requirements, and you can respond to those questions without requiring them to complete their submission.

When investors submit a comment to a question, you’ll be notified via email and can follow a link to see the comment and you can easily respond. All responses, questions, comments, and revision requests by investor and admin users are tracked in our audit trail.

Then, the investor can see your responses along with any revision requests in a simple, accessible thread.

This feature is available by request. Reach out to support@passthrough.com if you would like LP Commenting enabled for your fund.

Product updates: April 2023

This month, we delivered a substantial update with custom approval groups.

We also announced a partnership with Altvia, a leading fund lifecycle management platform. With this partnership, fund managers can use all of their historical investor information located in Altvia to pre-populate subscription documents in Passthrough. Once the fund has closed, completed documents and data can be shared with external counsel, their compliance and tax teams, and updates can be shared back to investors.

Custom approval groups

Letting various parties involved in investor onboarding know that it’s their turn to review a sub doc is challenging, so we built custom approval groups, where we can configure an approval flow in Passthrough that mirrors your firm’s process.

Groups are set up in parallel or sequential stages, and when an investor enters the stage for a group, everyone in the group is notified. Once everyone has reviewed the investor, either send out change requests your groups have added, or approve the investor for the next step in the process.

KYC document collection-only mode

You may like our document collection process but you didn’t need our document review, matching, or case management tools because your administrator handles it. We separated the document collection from the rest of our KYC/AML offering instead of forcing you to the all-in-one solution.

Reach out to ben@passthrough.com if you would like to add KYC document collection to your sub docs.

Clearing signatures for documents that are partially signed

Whether it’s because you're investing jointly or in a jurisdiction that requires a witness, many subscription documents involve multiple signatures. In some instances, the initial investor signs but may provide the wrong contact information for their second signer. Fund managers were forced to contact Passthrough to intervene. You can now clear a sub doc’s signatures and send it back to the investor so they can correct the second signer information.

Fund closing creation experience

For KYC/AML customers, we revamped the way you create fund closings to allow you to set it for just the subscription document or KYC/AML (or both).

Product updates: March 2023

This month, we announced a preferred vendor collaboration with Goodwin Procter, a leading fund formation law firm. Read more about the collaboration in the press release.

Passthrough aims to make life simple for fund managers, their investors, and providers. We go out of our way to make sure that law firms, fund admins, and other providers know it's easiest for their clients to be on Passthrough. With today's announcement, Goodwin and Passthrough are working together to make it even simpler for fund managers to close their fund quickly while Goodwin's attorneys can focus on providing valuable counsel.

Embeddable Passthrough via API

Fund managers choose or build software that they want their investors to interact with. If your investors are already using your investor portal, you’d probably prefer for them to stay in it to fill out sub doc and KYC/AML requests.

With embeddability, API partners and customers can insert Passthrough and your docs directly into their platform with a few lines of javascript.Control the investor experience completely. Investors can click a button that says “invest”, see your sub docs and our workflows branded exactly how you’d like, sign, and never have to leave your platform. The next time they invest into your fund, they can reuse their information just like they do today on Passthrough.Embeddable Passthrough is available in alpha.

If you’re interested in embedding us, check out the SDK docs or reach out to ben@passthrough.com.

Organization dashboard

In March, we delivered an organization dashboard that gives insight into key metrics across your funds, allows you to manage access for your organization, and provides helpful searching and filtering tools. The dashboard aggregates every fund your organization is working on, not just the funds that you have been specifically granted permissions to. You can also now set a target close date on your closes and a target commitment for your funds.

If you’re a fund manager with multiple funds on Passthrough and would like us to enable the dashboard for your organization, reach out to ben@passthrough.com

If you're a service provider with multiple clients who use Passthrough and would like us to enable the dashboard for your organization, reach out to colleen@passthrough.com from our partnerships team.

Social authentication

Whether you're an administrative user or investor, users of Passthrough with a Gmail email address can now sign-in with Gmail. Later in April, this update will apply to Google Workspace users as well.

Product updates: February 2023

We launched AML/KYC last month and already have some big updates. Besides that, we launched important features for enterprise customers, firms that have European funds, and much more. Short month, but lots of good stuff.

But before you read on!

We’re conducting research on how to improve our user experience. If you’d like to participate, please fill out this form and our team will be in touch.

Cayman Jurisdiction for AML/KYC

We launched our workflow for funds in Cayman. Document types, beneficial ownership thresholds, and unique requirements come ready out of the box. Current AML/KYC customers have access to it today.

But what if you're not in Delaware or Cayman? Our workflows are configurable to whatever your requirements are and we’re looking to support more jurisdictions.

Get in touch so we can get started.

SAML SSO for Passthrough Customers

Customers can now use SAML to enable single sign-on into Passthrough.

If you’d like to get SSO set up, contact support@passthrough.com to get moving.

Qualified Electronic Signatures

In certain European countries, there are more stringent requirements for e-signing documents. The most stringent is qualified electronic signatures, or QES. It works similarly to a notary but it’s online. We enabled Docusign’s QES functionality so that an agent in the EU can verify your credentials live as you electronically sign a subscription agreement.

Default Invitation Email Text

Every time you invited an investor to Passthrough, you had to type or copy and paste the same message. It was inconvenient and unnecessary. Instead, you can set default text that pre-populates the message automatically. You can still tweak before sending the invitation.

Disabling & Forcing Offline Signing

While we’ve always allowed offline investor signatures, some customers wanted to disable the feature completely so all investors complete their subscription on Passthrough. Similarly, clients want to disable electronic signing for specific investors because of other requirements. Both options are available today.

Product updates: January 2023

We interrupt your regularly scheduled product update to share some news: Passthrough raised a $10M Series A led by Positive Sum.

This round helps us make investing into funds a one-click checkout experience. Check out this TechCrunch article and a blog post from us for more information. The private capital markets run on Passthrough.

We also announced Passthrough’s second product: KYC/AML. Available as standalone or fully embedded into your subscription document workflows, investors easily map beneficial owners, we screen them against sanctions lists, and fund managers have the tools to assess and manage risk. That profile is persistent and follows them across any investment on our platform.

Last, I’m thrilled to welcome Julius Leiman-Cabria as Passthrough’s Chief Legal & Compliance Officer to guide our compliance product. Julius joins us from Wealthfront and has decades of experience leading legal and compliance at companies like Carta, JPMorgan Chase, MUFG, and the SEC. We’re excited to work with Julius again and for him to work with current and future customers.Let’s dig into KYC/AML and still other updates below. Reach out if you’d like to learn more.

KYC/AML: Investor Document Collection

You need to understand who’s investing into your fund down to the underlying beneficial owner. Typically, teams map out beneficial ownership on a white board and have to ask for new information each time an investor outlines new owners.

For KYC/AML customers, your investors can do this in a new section called Diligence. They answer questions about the investing entity, provide documents and owner information, and then share additional documents and information for each underlying owner in a simple UX instead of over repeated emails. Investors no longer need to reference a checklist to determine which documents to send and you get documents and data structured in the system.

KYC/AML: Review Tools & Automated Screening

Once an investor submits information, you need to review it before running screens manually in another system. Instead of going to another vendor to manually search names and compare data, we built the process into Passthrough.

When an LP submits their KYC information, the individuals and entities behind their vehicle are automatically screened against sanctions, politically exposed persons, and adverse media lists. You review the data, documentation, and screening results in one place.

Besides performing an initial screening, Passthrough runs nightly screenings. We alert you to any updates or new matches to help you manage risk on an ongoing basis.

Legal Name Column in Fund Closings

When fund managers think about their investors, it’s often the name of the relationship and not the legal entity. So, the more colloquial Tim Flannery or The Flannery Family instead of Tim Flannery, LLC. Fund formation attorneys only care about the legal entity name, but that information is typically hidden in an investor’s responses instead of being displayed front and center.

We added a sortable column to the dashboard that shows the relationship name, legal entity name, and every other status update. Now everyone can easily find investors regardless of which name they care about.

Refreshed Passthrough Website

We launched a brand new website. It’s a more professional look with information about our existing subscription document product and now KYC/AML. We also highlighted specific use cases for emerging and established fund managers. We’ve got more coming this year, and our website is flexible to accommodate it.

Product updates: December 2022

200+ Data Point Universal Investor Profiles

In October, we announced an easy checkout process for returning investors. Anytime you were asked the same question twice, we’d just suggest your original answer. We made a massive improvement this month.

While every subscription document asks different questions, they all look for the same answers. Because we’re not in the business of telling you how to ask questions, we can just normalize the answers for you instead. “What’s the Subscriber’s name” and “What’s the Investor’s name” are both asking for a legal entity name. We normalized that plus 217 other data points including addresses, identity, contact information, and banking instructions so investors can reuse it across funds and fund managers while partners can map to it in their databases.

For API customers, you can find the list of data points here in the “answers” object and can start pulling them immediately.

Improved Zip Exports for Documents

We received a lot of feedback that exporting investor documents was too slow. You were right. You should notice a significant decrease in time to export. We’d love to hear about whether we hit the mark. So please, reach out.

Masked Tax Identification Numbers

While access is already limited to investor data, we wanted extra protection on one of the most sensitive data points: tax IDs. Passthrough automatically masks social security numbers, etc. until you explicitly click on them in the system.

Product updates: November 2022

You talk, we listen! This month we shipped features requested by customers and partners. In some cases, we added new functionality. In others, we exposed tools so that you can do things yourself instead of pinging your CSM.

Please, keep the feedback coming.

Custom Closing Emails

We used to automatically generate the same email every time an investor’s documents were fully executed. But you might want to customize the message for an individual or group. You might also want to delay sending it.Once you countersign the sub docs: select investors, add a personalized message, and generate the closing email at will.

Investor Commitment Prefilling

Passthrough allows you to prefill subscription documents with data that you already have in your CRM or investor portal by using an excel upload template. One of the most common things that clients ask us to upload is investor commitments. You had to email your CSM a list of investors and commitments each time you wanted to do it. We added a feature that lets you add the investor and specify their commitment amount without having to go through our team.

Navigate to the close, click “add investor”, and toggle “add commitment”. A third column appears where you can provide commitments that will prefill the subscription document.

Optional Documents in Zip Export

We updated the export document feature so that you can select what types of documents to download instead of downloading them all by default.

External Signup Links

Most fund managers add investors directly to a closing in Passthrough. But we also have the ability to provide a link where an investor can click it and send themself a sub doc.

We added the ability for fund managers to create the link instead of requesting it from your CSM. You can generate a link at will and refer back to it whenever you need to so that there's no managing links offline.

Product updates: October 2022

Earlier this year, we released investor profiles. We capture 9 data points on investors that they could use across any fund. We made a significant improvement to that in October (with more coming soon).

Easy checkout for returning investors

When an investor is asked the same question across multiple funds and fund managers, they should only have to tell us the answer once. Now that’s live. Anytime an investor sees the same question, Passthrough will populate their previous answer. This is especially powerful for fund managers with multiple vehicles and repeat investors.

Returning investors simply confirm the answers they provided the first time, provide updated commitments, and execute using Docusign. We’re inching towards making investing into private funds a buy-now experience.

Improved navigation for collaborating

Investors have back offices, CPAs, private wealth managers, and more that help complete subscription documents for them. Admins have always been able to add multiple contacts to those investors and those investors can add additional contacts themselves. We made an improvement to the investor experience so it’s more apparent how investors can share an in-progress subscription document with their team.

Product updates: September 2022

We released changes that help legal teams and fund administrators review an investor’s submission with better accuracy and efficiency but wanted to test it before announcing more broadly. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Here’s how we improved the review process.

Reviewing investor submissions within the PDF

When you click into an investor on Passthrough, we show you every question the investor answered in a list. But you’re not used to reviewing investor responses by scrolling through a list. You were trained to flip through subscription documents one page at a time because you know it inside and out. We rebuilt that experience for you.

When you press the “Review in document” button within an investor, you’ll find every page that has answers provided by the investor, a preview of their completed sub doc, and the ability to add change requests. Navigate to any page that has an answer, click the answer in the document, add any comments, and see how the investor will view your request in the preview section below.

Viewing answers changed by an investor

When investors respond to change requests, they’re directed to the question that you had feedback on but can make other changes too. Instead of reviewing the entire document from scratch, you can focus on just the differences from your last review. We highlight how many questions have changed, what the previous answer was, and what the new answer is.

Optional Documents in Zip Export

We updated the export document feature so that you can select what types of documents to download instead of downloading them all by default.

Recording an audit trail of comments and responses

Besides highlighting the changes from one submission to the next, we also added an audit trail to see the entire history of answers, comments, updates, and more that includes who did what. You can see those details by expanding an answer and clicking “See activity”. This is especially helpful for teams that need to track changes as a part of their compliance program.

Product updates: August 2022

We knocked out a couple of heavily-requested features that make it easier to communicate with and close institutional LPs.

Request Legal Review Prior to Signing

No surprise, but institutional and non-institutional investors execute sub docs differently. In one common use case, an institutional investor’s operations team completes the subscription document, gets sign off from the fund’s counsel that everything’s in good order, and only then will they ask the authorized signer to execute on the investor’s behalf. Passthrough required a signature before submission, so that process happened offline. Not anymore.

When the investor gets to the signature step of the questionnaire, they can click “Request a Review”. On your end, the workflow stays the same - review the documents, and either send change requests or approve the investor. If you approve the investor, Passthrough sends a notification that their subscription document is ready for signature.

Cancel Change Requests

Admins use the change request feature to request revisions on subscription documents and periodically to confirm investor answers. Sometimes, admins deem those requests to be unnecessary. In the past, you had to contact both the investor to say “no change required” and our support team to cancel the request.

You can now cancel change requests yourself. Press the “Undo Change Request” button, decide whether or not you want to notify the investor of the canceled request, and add a note if you like. If the investor was previously approved, they’ll go back to that status so you can send their subscription document to the countersigner as is.

Product updates: July 2022

This month, we introduced a new way to do document management and side letter execution, change requests, and watermarking. Read on to learn more.

Executing Side Letters

You’ve always been able to add a side letter or other supporting document to an investor or group of investors, but now you can use Passthrough for their execution too.

Add the document, assign whatever fields need to be completed, and append it to the existing package. The investor will be prompted to execute it in Docusign within the existing workflow. Once everything’s been countersigned for the close, the side letter will be included in the closing email that goes to your investors.

Alerting Investors about Re-submitted Information

Sometimes investors get change requests, but they don’t change their answer before resubmitting. We implemented a reminder that will confirm the investor intended not to change the answer.

Watermarking Documents

We’ve added the ability to watermark files that investors download. If you select this option, any downloaded documents will display the user’s name and email along with the date and time.

Product updates: June 2022

Big update today. Passthrough now remembers investor responses from previous investments to help them fill out future subscription documents. More below. Let’s jump in.

Investor profiles are live

To create the best fund closing experience, we believe it’s important to map Passthrough’s workflows to your subscription document instead of using a standard form and to allow investors to re-use their information wherever they invest. Building custom workflows used to mean trading off re-usability. Passthrough can now do both.

Let me explain.

Subscription documents contain 100-200 questions where not every question applies to all investors. Each law firm, and sometimes every partner, has a unique version. While each question may be worded differently, the prompts ultimately search for the same answers. Passthrough understands the meaning behind questions to allow answers to be repurposed.

The first time an investor uses Passthrough, we ask them to fill out a sub doc but not to create a profile. Instead, we build one automatically based on their responses. The second time that investor uses Passthrough, they can select the profile that’s been passively built or complete it as a different legal entity. By selecting their profile, Passthrough fills out the new document with their existing information and the investor answers the remaining questions.

Investor profiles cover 9 data points but we’ll add more over time. Investors will be able to complete subscription documents quicker and with greater accuracy.

This update is foundational to how we help improve the fund closing process. It’s also the beginning to how investors can own and control their information across the private markets.

Improved customer branding

Our previous UI leaned a little too heavily into Passthrough’s branding. We redesigned the investor experience and our emails to de-emphasize Passthrough and highlight your firm instead.

Product updates: May 2022

You use Passthrough to execute your close. Now, you can use it to get investor commitments. Introducing Soft Circle, Passthrough’s workflow for Indication of Interest.

Soft Circle by Passthrough

There’s a lot of work to be done before sending subscription documents. Use Passthrough to send marketing materials to potential investors, collect information about them and their investment vehicles, and their intended commitment. We’ll use that information to prepopulate their subscription documents when it’s time to send.

It’s easier than ever to track investors and circle capital ahead of the close. If you're interested in learning more, just hit reply.

Showing LPs What Happens Next

When you finished filling out a subscription document, we shared a screen and email confirming that your information was submitted and there was no further action required. We added a new screen that shows investors what’s coming next so there’s no ambigiuity.

Re-sending Closing Emails

Another incremental change for how we’re improving fund closing. Fund managers periodically asked us to resend closing emails to investors. Now, you can do that in the dashboard.

Product updates: April 2022

Today, we’ve got one major product announcement and some continual improvements to the investor experience.

Launching the Passthrough API

We were introduced to fund closing when we helped build a tech-enabled fund administrator. We worked to solve the problem even though it wasn’t core to our offering or value proposition. That problem wasn't unique to us. As the private markets grow larger and more sophisticated, more companies are building here and fund closing still isn’t central to what they do. We count a number of them as customers today. Now, some of them are building on Passthrough’s Public API instead of creating their own solution.

Startups can leverage Passthrough’s API to:
Generate a prefilled subscription document with the click of a button by their investors
Coordinate the fund closing process behind the scenes, including our legal review workflows for their lawyers
Pull structured data, statuses, and documents back into their systems.

This API isn’t just for startups. It’s also the beginning of how our clients and partners can directly integrate Passthrough into their CRM, investor portal, and more. We’re working on native integrations now, but it’s also open for you to build on.

If this is something you’d like to learn more about, just hit reply. We’d love to chat.

Making Exports Self-Service

Whenever we onboard a subscription agreement, we provide an excel export detailing each question that we ask and its associated logic and an answer location export mapping answer locations to the agreement. It's everything that you need to review the onboarding and make sure it matches your specifications exactly. These documents are now available for you to pull on-demand so that you don’t need to wait.

Adding CRS for Entity Support

Even though subscription documents vary law firm to law firm (and sometimes partner to partner), there are universal elements like W-8s, W-9s, and more. We’re continuing to chip away at these common documents by adding standard versions of them to Passthrough. We onboarded CRS forms for individuals in the past and just added support for CRS forms for entities. These forms are required for many funds domiciled outside of the US.

Product updates: March 2022

Investors filling out subscription agreements is only part of the fund closing process. Fund managers need to coordinate the raise, compliance teams need KYC/AML documentation, fund administrators need investor details, and lawyers/IR teams/fund administrators need to review and sign off on investor responses.

Today, we’re going to show you how we’ve improved that review process.

Reviews Made Simple

Everyone who’s ever reviewed a subscription document was trained to do it by… looking at the subscription document. With Passthrough, you could download the documents and review them the old fashioned way but then you still had to get comments back into the system.

We brought the PDF review process in app. Now, legal counsel can review investor responses the way they’re used to, make requests for revision alongside the review, and see exactly what the investor will see when the revision request comes through. 80% of the time investors are filling out sub docs correctly from scratch. But when they’re not… this should make it likely that you’ll only need one turn.

Understand What Changed

You requested a revision. The investor revised that answer. But did they revise anything else? Does that mean you need to re-review the entire document again? That’s a colossal waste of time. Every change, whether requested or not, is clearly highlighted in Passthrough.

Track Changes, Comments, and Resolutions

Besides seeing what changed, you can see who changed answers, who requested revisions, what comments are open or closed, and who ultimately marked the issue as resolved. You have a full audit trail of all activity available to view.

Review Before Signing

Maybe you have an institutional investor that doesn’t want to go through an authorized signer process before having their documents reviewed. Passthrough now supports reviewing investor documentation prior to execution.

Product updates: January 2022

We hinted that we had some big updates coming. So, let me introduce you to a refreshed Passthrough and DocuSign.(psst... more big updates next month too)

Meet the new Passthrough

Alex and Ben started building Passthrough in 2020 with no outside capital. They designed it from scratch. Since neither are designers by trade, we ended up with a great user experience but room for improvement on visuals. Our muted colors and checkmark logo were meant to emphasize reliability, but probably made us look a little more ‘90’s B2B software than we wanted. The new Passthrough is simple and approachable, just like we made subscription documents.

Check out the UX

We reworked the entire product to use our new colors, fonts, and logos. It’s the same Passthrough with a new coat of paint.

Greetings, DocuSign

Passthrough now supports DocuSign as our e-signature provider for executing subscription agreements. A number of fund managers and service providers (especially in the EU) expressed a preference for DocuSign. While HelloSign gets the job done and we’ll continue to support it, we migrated to DocuSign to provide additional flexibility in our signature processes. Expect to hear more about that flexibility in the future.

Product updates: December 2021

Last year, Passthrough launched things like custom reports, preloading investor information, and much more. In December, we split time between quality of life improvements and investments into larger updates that we’ll share over the next couple of months.

Get Better Investor Insights

Because there are so many moving parts in a fundraise, it’s important to know where your investors are (without cluttering your dashboards). Not only can Passthrough show you statuses like Investor Signed and Requested Changes, you can also sort to see when the last action happened. The information is available in the dashboard and exportable to excel, so that you know when to nudge your investors.

Do Not Pass Go

While some fund managers can countersign documents and admit investors anytime, countersigning without your lawyer’s involvement or review can create headaches for legal and fund admin teams. Before you countersign, we’ll ask “Are you sure?” We know it seems small. But getting this wrong can have annoying effects.

Keep Investors Consistent

Passthrough makes sure that investors only see questions relevant to them and fill out sub docs completely. But historically, we haven't been able to ensure that their answers are consistent across questions. We can now force investors to submit logically consistent responses so that your attorney doesn't need to request a preventable revision. Sorry, no fun gif/photo for this one.

Product updates: November 2021

We built Passthrough to make fund closing easy. Besides creating an intuitive workflow for investors, we need to make it simple to get data into and out of the system. We took two major leaps forward on that this month and shipped a couple of other updates too.

Preload Investor Information

Fund managers often make their investors’ lives easier by pre-filling sub docs with information they already know from their CRM or prior funds. Switching to Passthrough used to mean that those investors had to complete the sub doc from scratch. Not anymore.

Once we onboard your subscription document, Passthrough can provide with an excel file to pre-populate contact details, wire instructions, attestations, and more. You can review the info in the system, view and modify recipients, and share it with your investors. Your investors are prompted to review their information and quickly execute. We had one LP complete their docs in two-minutes. Magical.

I need to mention two constraints:
Preloading isn’t available to funds that are already raising on Passthrough today.
We have limited capacity for this feature. You may be waitlisted.

Download Custom Excel Reports

Law firms, fund admins, and fund managers pull data from subscription agreements into their system of choice every day. The data’s unstructured and trapped in PDF, so the process is manual, error prone, and time consuming.

Passthrough collects every investor response as structured data. Clients could always export it and do some data munging. Now, the system can export custom reports into whatever format you need. Click a button. Download an excel file. That excel file is immediately uploadable into your investor portal, CRM, or wherever the data needs to go. This is our first step towards deeper, API integrations. More magical.

Clear Signatures

Anytime an investor needs to revise an answer, Passthrough requires them to execute a clean agreement with the updated answer. But sometimes the document needs to be re-signed for other reasons. We added the ability for clients to clear signatures in the event the underlying document was updated, there was a problem with the signature itself, or any other strange edge case occurs.

Support You Better

We rolled out Intercom last month. You can still email us at support@passthrough.com, but we also have a support site and in-app chat. We’re here to help.

Product updates: October 2021

We made it even easier to complete, review, and execute subscription agreements. Besides everything that we launched that you can’t see, here’s what we shipped to investors and fund managers in October.

Skip Around Questions

Passthrough’s workflow is like TurboTax. Passthrough asks investors questions and serves new questions based on their response. We used to force you to answer questions sequentially to do that. Based on investor feedback, it’s now possible to jump between sections, skipping sections where you have to gather more information, and return to them later. We still require that all questions are answered before an investor can submit their subscription document.

Confirm Responses at a Glance

Passthrough makes it simple to fill out subscription documents. We just made it easier to review them. Every time an investor completes a section, they’re prompted to review their prior responses before proceeding.

Fix Multiple Signers Workflow

If your subscription document required a joint signer, witness, or additional authorized signers and you shared a computer with one of those signers, it used to be difficult to tell which user was signed in and that made it appear like you had no outstanding tasks. You likely filed a support request with us. Now, you’re prompted to sign in as the appropriate user regardless of whether you, your spouse, your witness, or any other co-signer share the same device. Clarity achieved.

Product updates: August 2021

You provided feedback and we listened. This past month, we made qualify of life improvements for everyone involved in the raise on Passthrough in response to your requests.

Simplifying standard forms

When we see people filling out the same standard forms regardless of their fund counsel, we create in-product workflows to make it easier to complete subscription documents.

We launched Passthrough’s version of the W-9 a couple of months back. This month, we made it better. It’s shorter and has better instructions for individuals investing through entities.

We found another candidate for simplification in CRS Compliance forms for Caymans domiciled entities. We launched an easy workflow for individuals to complete their forms. Don’t worry, entities. We’re coming for you soon.

Have it your way

It’s easier than ever to get data out of Passthrough.

Our zip exports include all files uploaded by investors as part of their Passthrough workflow. This is especially important if you’re collecting documents for KYC/AML.

Also, you’ve always had the ability to build custom reports based on investor responses. Those responses are now easier to upload into your system of choice. Multi-part questions split into multiple cells so that it’s simpler to get into your upload templates.

Get more transparency into the raise

We updated our dashboard with a simple refresh button and filters. You can see how your raise is going and who you need to nudge across the finish line with just a quick glance.