Fengate Boosts Compliance Tracking & Data Ownership with Athennian

Fengate is an investment management company specializing in private equity, infrastructure, and real estate strategies. With over US$8 billion in capital commitments and US$35 billion in total asset value, the company operates on a massive scale. 

Fengate tapped into the power of Athennian’s automated entity management to maintain this momentum and expand into new markets. 

Until 2019, Fengate's legal team managed entities using an outdated database and disconnected tools like spreadsheets, but as the entities grew, this patchwork of systems became unsustainable. 

"We were noticing clear gaps in the old database. It was constantly crashing and lacked modern features like a virtual minute book and instant access to accurate data." — Michelle Khedar, Senior Law Clerk , Fengate.

“In our old database, if you messed up one transaction, you would have to go back, delete it, and then manually fix everything related to that transaction. It was frustrating and time consuming,” she adds. 

Constant manual interventions led to discrepancies between online records and physical minute books. Data was either missing, incomplete, or inaccurate and this disrupted information sharing between internal departments and outside counsel for processes around entity creation and transactions—ultimately delaying critical timelines.

"As a law clerk, sending out our minute books to outside counsel is tedious, as we have to arrange for the minute book to be sent out and tracked to ensure it was returned to us after a transaction. Things often get delayed or lost in the back and forth. Sharing our minute books now electronically through Athennian saves us a lot of time and resources. It’s one of the reasons why we decided to implement Athennian," says Michelle. 

‍Centralizing control & boosting data security by reducing reliance on outside counsel

One of the biggest benefits since adopting Athennian is the significant decrease in reliance on outside counsel. Entity-related details, like entity type, registration number, tax ID number, and more, are stored in Athennian’s centralized, secure, digital repository. 

This eliminated the need for external lawyers to manage and update corporate records because in-house teams can now access and modify documents in Athennian. 

In the odd cases when Fengate does use outside counsel, they set access restrictions within Athennian to maintain the security of sensitive information. 

“We love Athennian's feature to set time limits on data access. It is really helpful! We recently had a transaction closing at the end of January, and Athennian allowed us to grant outside counsel access to relevant data within that time frame. This keeps our legal processes secure and efficient," notes Michelle. 

Built-in features like compliance tracking and virtual minute books give greater control and ownership over entity and compliance data, fostering a proactive approach to regulatory commitments. Unlike earlier, when Michelle’s team used personal calendars in Outlook to track compliance deadlines, they now let Athennian do this grunt work.  

The automated entity solution generates alerts and reminders for important deadlines and filings. This helps Fengate stay on top of their obligations and avoid any penalties or legal complications associated with non-compliance.

"All our compliance tracking is done inside Athennian now. It's user-friendly and clean, and everything is in one place," describes Michelle. 

Removing friction in entity creation with registered agents

One of the core issues for the legal team was the decentralized approach to managing registered agents for creating entities. 

Previously, Fengate used multiple registered agents in the US to create entities, which was confusing.

The implications were obvious to Fengate. Firstly, varying levels of accuracy between agents could undermine the legality and standing of the entities. 

Secondly, the decentralized approach created managerial and organizational difficulties. Tracking which agent handled which entity became a nightmare for the legal team. 

"We recently switched over to Athennian's registered agent services and now have our registered agent consistent for all of our US entities." says Michelle. 

With Athennian, Fengate can easily retrieve and reference information, track entity history, and ensure that records are kept up to date. This facilitates efficient entity management and reduces potential confusion or mismanagement for the legal department. 

Driving productivity and data access for the legal team

Before Athennian, team members relied on the law clerks to access documents and information, like current directors of existing entities. This led to constant bottlenecks because requests for information had to be funneled through a single point. 

With Athennian, the legal team gained direct access to up-to-date data, eliminating the dependency on the law clerks for routine requests.

"It's much less work than before when everyone came to me for information. Now, they look it up themselves inside Athennian. It is much faster, and that's a huge benefit for the team in terms of time-savings," says Michelle.

It also builds a layer of full visibility for the leadership team like the General Counsel who recently mentioned it was nice to go into Athennian and see an entity marked as “confirmed” knowing she can pull the information herself, instead of emailing someone like Michelle and waiting for a response. 

“Our General Counsel and lawyers use Athennian to pull information on various entities and have found this to be a time saving tool.”

Fengate’s next big chapter: scaling Athennian across the finance department  

Fengate plans to scale Athennian across different teams and workflows as it adopts more features and fully integrates entity data into the automated platform. 

The next big move is fully migrating all entity data into Athennian and training the finance team to use Athennian.

"Our finance teams are excited about Athennian's org chart feature. They look forward to an easier tool to replace their manual org. chart creation." 

“This will simplify the process, especially for handling Know Your Customer (KYC) requests that currently take up a lot of back and forth with emails,” says Michelle.  

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