GBST & Luna Partners to develop digital private equity technology platform

By Gloria Mathias

GBST, a global provider of wealth management and advice solutions technology, has collaborated with Luna Partners to create, develop, and implement a unique technology platform that seamlessly connects investors and managers to the wholesale private equity market.

The platform developed by GBST opens new Australian and New Zealand investment opportunities for individual investors that were previously only accessible to institutional investors.

The scalable and comprehensive cloud-based SaaS offering includes a website, an online investor portal, and an administration portal to easily accommodate Luna Partner’s growth and expansion ambitions.

Group CEO for GBST, Robert DeDominics, said, “Within eight months from the time of the initial brief, GBST Digital collaborated with our DevOps and Architecture teams to deliver a complete technology solution to Luna Partners. We enabled rapid market entry, which was one of Luna Partner’s main goals. It’s the combination of our teams’ financial services and digital expertise that enables this kind of incredible innovation.”

Co-founder of Luna Partners, Edward Caser, said, “GBST’s technology expertise and commitment to excellence made it the perfect partner to help realise our vision of bringing a ground-breaking Australian private equity (PE) solution to market. As a PE firm, we knew only too well that the opportunities in Australia for investors to gain access to private markets were limited. We’ve seen Australian private equity firms turning to offshore institutions and domestic private wealth platforms as superannuation funds retreat from the middle market. But we’ve now changed all that. We have an incredibly user-friendly website, an intuitive investor portal, and an efficient administration portal which has exceeded our expectations.”

The platform’s ability to simplify investor onboarding by incorporating Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks, facilitate multiple investments, manage online applications, and streamline portfolio management for Luna Partners’ operations and PE fundraising in the region.