How Voyager Capital is using AI to rethink family office investing

Key Points

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the economics of running a family office, compressing investment research that once took weeks into days and reducing the manpower needed to process information.

For a venture arm of a Hong Kong-based single family office (SFO) Voyager Capital, the bigger shift ahead is separating the work AI can automate from decisions that still require human experience and differing perspectives. While the firm invests in AI and enterprise technology through the family portfolio, it is also applying AI internally to identify, analyse and monitor investment opportunities, and sees a future where technology allows increasingly complex portfolios to be managed by far leaner teams.

“We used to write investment memos that were like 70 pages long. We had everybody working on it. It took weeks,” Johnson Cheng, founder of Voyager Capital, told AsianInvestor. “Now, they take like a day.”

Johnson Cheng
Voyager Capital

COMPLEMENTING HUMAN INSTINCT WITH AI INPUT

With AI significantly reducing the need for manual labour, Voyager is using AI at the early stages of the investment process to test a thesis before committing significant human resources to due diligence.

According to Cheng, the technology is being used to help examine whether an industry is growing, identify its pain points and map the companies attempting to solve them. Investors can also use it to study earlier business models.

"You can look at all the previous failed ideas and see why they failed,” Cheng said. “I don’t need as many people to do information gathering, processing and writing.”

This reliance on AI does not mean Voyager is handing capital-allocation decisions to an algorithm, as Cheng still relies on an investment committee and sees value in people approaching and assessing an opportunity from different professional and personal perspectives.

“When we come to decisions, I need to bounce ideas off people with different backgrounds, and so we have a diversity of opinions,” he said.

FROM DUE DILIGENCE TO PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Family offices can hold investments and accounts across several private banks, brokerages and other financial institutions, leaving teams to consolidate information packaged in different formats. Cheng describes that administrative layer as the “business of investment management”, work that does not determine what to buy but is necessary for understanding what the family already owns.

According to Cheng, AI agents can increasingly consolidate information, reconcile portfolios and provide principals with a unified view of their assets using a fraction of the resources required to perform those tasks manually.

That is where he sees a role for private AI infrastructure that can analyse sensitive information without exposing it to public models. Cheng's views are also informed by his experience building an AI business focused on automating enterprise workflows involving sensitive data.

BUILDING A FAMILY OFFICE BRAND 

The ability to operate with a reduced headcount extends beyond back-office management, as AI is also democratising external-facing functions that single family offices have historically avoided.

Single family offices traditionally had little reason to build public-facing brands, focused on managing and growing private wealth, viewing brand visibility as antithetical to the discretion typically associated with family capital.

Cheng believes that calculation is changing. “Having a bit of branding helps you in your negotiation and helps you with deal sourcing,” he said.

For an investment office, visibility can make it easier for founders and other investors to understand who is behind the capital. It can also support negotiations with financial institutions and help a family office compete for top talent. 

As this realisation grows, even small investment organisations with limited resources are harnessing AI to step up their marketing efforts. The technology is now helping these firms build and maintain websites and social media accounts without building out the sizable teams associated with an institutional asset manager.