operations DIAGNOSTIC
The Operations Diagnostic. A fixed €9,000 engagement for Luxembourg ManCos, AIFMs, fund managers and family offices.
Asset Velocity designs and builds institutional infrastructure for regulated financial firms, around their obligations, operating model and expertise. The Operations Diagnostic establishes where to invest first; implementation creates the infrastructure the firm will own and govern.
Three weeks
€9,000 fixed
Focused input from your team; schedule agreed at kickoff
Led by the founder and CTO
Twenty minutes. We use the call to decide whether the Operations Diagnostic fits your firm. If it does not, we will say so.
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.
Your most capable people became the operating infrastructure.
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.
Growth should improve the economics of a firm
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.
Payroll grows with revenue. Margin stays where it was.
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.
This is an infrastructure problem, not an effort problem
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.
What changed
The operating burden on firms your size has been rising for years. Connected data, clear responsibilities and traceable evidence give your firm a stronger foundation for what comes next.
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.
The 7 Gaps
Capability tends to leak in the same seven places.
Evidence
The proof exists. Producing it means several people stop what they are doing and start searching.
Reporting
The numbers are right because a senior person became the integration layer between systems that do not speak to each other.
Oversight
Reviews happen. The current picture still has to be rebuilt from trackers, calendars and memory.
Onboarding
The commercial decision is made, then the mandate waits behind requests, handoffs and approvals.
Capacity
The team reaches its limit before demand does, so the next mandate requires the next hire.
AI
There are licences and experiments. The expensive process is unchanged.
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.
What changes when the right one is closed
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.
Do not start with the technology
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.
The Operations Diagnostic
Three weeks. €9,000 fixed, in writing. Your team contributes through focused interviews, working sessions and review. We agree the participants and time commitment at kickoff.
THREE WEEKS, END TO END
21 DAYS · FIXED SCOPE
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.
For €9,000, you leave knowing where to act first, what the problem costs your firm and what it will take to solve it. The findings and recommendation are yours to keep, whether you choose to build with us or not.
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
A clear case for moving ahead: the recommended target state, what needs to change, the delivery sequence and the expected impact. Dependencies and your team’s role are made clear, so management can make an informed decision.
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.
Not a catalogue of possible projects.
Twenty minutes. We use the call to decide whether the Operations Diagnostic fits your firm. If it does not, we will say so.
Senior work, handled directly
Every Operations 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.
The diagnostic brings together experience in data products, infrastructure and DevOps. The people examining the operating problem are also responsible for designing the implementation.
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.
Diagnostic start dates are agreed according to delivery capacity.
We do not need your client data
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.
€9,000
Next to what the firm already pays
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 Operations 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 implementation with Asset Velocity begins within 90 days, 50% of the diagnostic fee (€4,500) is credited against the implementation fee.
Questions we would ask before approving €9,000
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 what the diagnostic helps you avoid. We put one recommendation, its evidence and its expected impact in front of management, so the decision rests on a clear case rather than 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?
The diagnostic gives you the basis for that decision. We scope and price the recommended work separately, so you know what you are committing to before moving ahead.
What happens after?
You have a clear recommendation and the evidence to decide what happens next. We can help you put it into practice, or you can take the findings forward with your own team. Sometimes the best next step is a simple process change. If the right answer is to build nothing yet, we will say so.
Two firms, the same money
From October 2026 to October 2028, invest in infrastructure your firm can own and govern: connected data, clear responsibilities and traceable evidence. Build the institutional capacity to support additional mandates, entities and reporting obligations.
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.
They will not become larger institutions. They will become more capable independent firms.
Three weeks tells you where to begin, what it costs, and what should happen next.
Twenty minutes. We use the call to decide whether the Operations Diagnostic fits your firm. If it does not, we will say so.