CAPABILITY DIAGNOSTIC
Three weeks
€9,000 fixed
About twelve hours of your firm’s time
Led by the founder and CTO
You built the firm to exercise judgement. To serve clients well, and to take on work worth taking.
Then the weeks filled with assembly.
Board packs rebuilt from several systems. Capital calls tracked from an inbox. Evidence gathered again because the process did not keep it the first time. Reviews living in a tracker somebody maintains by hand. Information copied, checked, and copied again.
That is not a failure of the team. It is what happens when the obligations of a large institution land on a firm built for the work rather than the paperwork.
In many fund businesses it does the opposite.
A new mandate brings revenue. It also brings reporting, evidence, reviews, reconciliations, approvals and exceptions. The firm hires, because the process cannot carry more work.
The visible cost is the next employee. The hidden cost is already inside the firm, and it never appears as a single line in the accounts. Four days rebuilding a board pack. A week of senior time lost inside one onboarding. The same investor question answered from scratch for the third time.
Taken together it can consume the cost of a senior hire every year, and nobody ever approves it.
THE CAPABILITY DIAGNOSTIC
Three weeks. €9,000 fixed, in writing. About twelve hours of your firm’s time in total.
Your people are not slow. They are compensating for processes that never grew with the business.
Someone built a spreadsheet. Someone else added a review. A new requirement created another evidence trail. Each decision was sensible at the time. Over the years the operation became a network of manual handoffs carried by the firm’s most reliable people.
That is how growth quietly became a hiring question instead of a capability question.
The operating burden on firms your size has been rising for years, and nothing about the next few will reverse it.
What changed is the response available to you.
Large institutions absorbed complexity with large technology budgets, dedicated engineering teams and more headcount. Independent firms could not, so they absorbed it with people instead. That trade-off used to be fixed.
It is not fixed any more. Firm-specific infrastructure can now be built around one defined operating problem, in weeks rather than years, without replacing the technology estate underneath it.
The objective is not to imitate a bank. It is to give a firm of forty the operating consistency of a firm of four hundred, while keeping the judgement, speed and closeness that made the smaller firm worth choosing.
The firms that see this will spend the same money as everyone else and end up with a different business.
Capability tends to leak in the same seven places.
01
Evidence
The proof exists. Producing it means several people stop what they are doing and start searching.
02
Reporting
The numbers are right because a senior person became the integration layer between systems that do not speak to each other.
03
Oversight
Reviews happen. The current picture still has to be rebuilt from trackers, calendars and memory.
04
Onboarding
The commercial decision is made, then the mandate waits behind requests, handoffs and approvals.
05
Capacity
The team reaches its limit before demand does, so the next mandate requires the next hire.
06
AI
There are licences and experiments. The expensive process is unchanged.
07
The one person who knows
The operation works because somebody remembers the exceptions, and that knowledge belongs to them more than it belongs to the firm.
Most firms will recognise more than one of these. Each carries a cost that never shows up as a line in the accounts. And each can be closed without adding headcount.
Your CCO reviews the report instead of building it.
Evidence is produced by the process rather than reconstructed when somebody asks for it.
Onboarding moves in days rather than weeks, which makes you easier to work with than firms ten times your size.
Oversight produces a current operating picture rather than another spreadsheet.
What the firm knows stays with the firm.
The team absorbs more mandates before another hire becomes necessary, so revenue grows faster than the cost base carrying it.
And your best people go back to the work that needs their judgement.
That is the firm you set out to build.
Most technology money is lost before a line of code exists.
The firm wants an AI use case. The supplier wants to sell the system it already knows how to build. A department wants rid of the task it likes least. Nobody has established whether that task is where the money actually goes.
Putting AI over a process nobody has mapped usually just makes the confusion move faster.
A doctor who prescribes before examining is not a doctor.
Asset Velocity does not begin by selling a build. We charge for the examination, because the examination is real work.
Three weeks. €9,000 fixed, in writing. About twelve hours of your firm’s time in total.
Week one: find the right place to start
An executive alignment session
Four to six cross-functional interviews
A systems and process inventory
Review of operating metrics and redacted process artefacts
The priority is selected on four criteria: cost in money and capacity, control and risk significance, strategic urgency, and feasibility of meaningful improvement.
We only select a priority that can be taken to a defined implementation scope and a fixed price inside the engagement. Where something needs deeper design before anyone can price it honestly, we name it rather than guess at it.
On day seven you receive the first memo: early findings and the priority selected for deeper examination.
Weeks two and three: take it far enough to build
Four to six domain interviews and working sessions
Process, system and responsibility mapping
Economic and capacity modelling
Target-state design
Implementation scope and sequencing
Validation with the people who perform and oversee the work
A final presentation built for the management or board table
The firm-wide scan stops the wrong problem being selected. The focused examination stops the right problem being studied too superficially.
What you keep
01
Capability Register
The firm-wide picture across the 7 Gaps. What we observed, the evidence behind it, and why one priority was selected over the others. Findings outside that priority are clearly labelled preliminary and unpriced.
02
Cost Map
What the selected priority costs in money, capacity, delay and control exposure.
03
Priority Implementation Case
The recommended target state, implementation scope, dependencies, delivery sequence, expected impact and fixed Asset Velocity price. Assumptions, exclusions and client responsibilities are stated plainly.
04
Board Decision Pack
One recommendation for the management or board table. What was examined. What was found. Why this priority comes first. What should be built. What it will cost. What should not be funded yet.
Every Capability Diagnostic is led by Asset Velocity’s founder and CTO. There is no junior delivery layer. The people in your first meeting conduct the interviews, map the work, test the economics and present the recommendation.
Asset Velocity combines experience building data products with senior infrastructure and DevOps capability, including experience at Microsoft. The purpose of that combination is practical: the people examining the operating problem are also capable of building what the evidence supports.
And what we do not do. We do not resell software, we take no vendor commissions, and we have no product to steer you toward. The recommendation is whatever the evidence supports, including a process change that costs almost nothing, or nothing at all.
We begin two Capability Diagnostics a month. Two people, two engagements. That is arithmetic, not scarcity.
We examine processes, systems and workloads. Client, investor and portfolio data is not required, and process artefacts are reviewed in redacted or anonymised form.
This is written into the engagement letter.
One experienced operations hire costs six figures a year and leaves the underlying process exactly as it was. What they learn stays with them rather than in the firm.
The Capability Diagnostic costs €9,000 and takes three weeks. What it produces stays in documents your firm owns.
Everything delivered is yours regardless of what you decide next. If the honest finding is to build nothing yet, the report will say so.
If Asset Velocity begins the implementation within 90 days, half the diagnostic fee is credited against it. The reason is simple: the diagnostic work does not need to be done twice.
Why is it paid?
Because a free assessment is a sales conversation designed to produce a proposal. This is three weeks of senior work. We examine the operation, select the priority, model the economics and produce an implementation case your firm owns whether Asset Velocity builds anything or not. Diagnosis is the product.
Do you need our client data?
No. We examine how work moves, who owns it, which systems support it and where time is spent. Underlying client, investor and portfolio data is not required.
Who conducts the work?
The founder and the CTO. No junior team is introduced after the sale.
What if we spend money on the wrong thing first?
That is the risk this removes. You are not asked to choose between competing projects. We put one recommendation, its evidence, its expected impact and its fixed price in front of management, so the decision does not rest on one internal sponsor’s judgement alone.
Why examine the whole firm but go deep on only one area?
Because the first risk is choosing the wrong problem and the second is studying the right problem too superficially. The firm-wide scan prevents the first. The focused examination prevents the second. You leave with a firm-wide view, and the selected priority is the part presented as validated, modelled and ready for a management decision.
What does implementation typically cost?
Implementation is priced fixed in the Implementation Case. Because we only select a priority that can be scoped and priced inside three weeks, implementations are in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds. The exact cost depends on the systems, dependencies and control requirements the examination uncovers, and you see the complete scope and price before deciding whether to proceed.
What happens after?
Whatever the evidence supports. Sometimes the priority moves straight into implementation. Sometimes the right answer is a process change needing little or no technology. Where a complex priority such as multi-entity architecture or core-platform replacement requires design work first, the diagnostic may recommend an Operating Model Blueprint. Sometimes the right answer is to build nothing yet, and the report will say so plainly.
What firms your size are expected to report, evidence and oversee has been increasing for years, and the next two will add to it. That expenditure is not optional.
What is optional is whether it buys another layer of administration, or infrastructure that improves the firm beyond the requirement itself.
One firm will spend it adding people around work that does not scale, and will be the same business at the end of it with a thinner margin.
The other will spend it on infrastructure it owns, and will come out able to take on work it has to decline today.