Rob Sanders and Roland Meerdter just launched a platform designed to revolutionize due diligence in Europe, and they've got plans to bring it stateside before year-end.

Rob Sanders Door Co-founder

Door streamlines due diligence by providing a single portal where asset managers submit fund information in a standard format for fund distributors to use when doing research. This, Sanders says, provides an efficient alternative to the back-and-forth of word documents and excel spreadsheets that currently plagues the process.

"At the moment, the process is pretty archaic," Sanders, co-founder of Door, tells MFWire.

Due diligence folks use Door for free, while asset managers pay a fee based on number of funds, though it's not a per-fund charge.

To create the platform, Door collaborated with a group of ten fund distributors and twelve global asset managers, including Aberdeen, Franklin Templeton, and Columbia Threadneedle. For the initial launch, the company is working with 18 asset managers and 28 fund distributors, representing 100 individual fund investor users. They're onboarding individual users in phases of 100 and already quickly filling slots for the next round of users.

When consulting distributors, Sanders and his team found a 90-percent overlap in due diligence questionnaires. Door incorporates those questions into a standard model but also gives distributors the option to include supplemental questions.

For distributors, the platform is designed to save time in gathering information and even alerts research teams when an asset manager updates fund information. For asset managers, the idea is to reduce the repetitiveness of responding to due diligence requests.

Door is overseen and endorsed by the Association of Professional Fund Investors, a group of fund investors concentrated largely in Europe.  

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