Caruso

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Caruso is fund administration and registry for New Zealand managers, on one platform: investor portal for LPs, admin CRM for the people who run the fund. Jamie was Product Director. Eight months. Go-to-market and implementation for an integrated platform in private markets.

• Problem: Managers juggle separate systems for registry, CRM, portal and compliance. Legacy admin is slow, paper-heavy, and locks data away.
• Role: Product Director. Roadmap, PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, UAT. Product demos to high-value prospects.
• Decision: One investor record. Digital wallet, reconciliation and an admin portal on the same platform as the investor login.
• From Jamie's write-up: Client AUM in the $250-500M range. 15+ high-value client demos. Six core features shipped.

The problem

Caruso's own pitch is blunt: fund admin is broken. Decade-old systems, fragmented data, poor service. Managers run five tools for one investor. Paper subscriptions damage trust. Data sits with the administrator, not with the manager.

The job was enterprise-grade software with compliance in the room, for real estate, private credit and private equity firms. Stakeholders are fund managers and the investors they report to.

Investor portal

The LP side is a white-labelled portal. PIE tax statements, distribution history and documents under one login. It is meant to look like the manager, not like Caruso, on phone or desktop.

Investors get portfolio and fund views, charts, a document library and a full transaction history they can export. They can onboard and complete digital subscriptions in the same place. Advisers get a single view of every client's investments, with bulk applications and downloads.

Activity (logins, data room, downloads) feeds the CRM so IR can see who is engaged. Caruso publishes $100B+ assets under administration, 900+ funds and syndicates, and 80k+ active investors as platform scale. Those are Caruso's figures, not a Pivot Labs delta.

Admin: CRM and the manager side

The manager side is Investor CRM. One record per investor and adviser: contact, holdings, compliance status, notes, documents, tasks. Search, tags, export. Tasks have owners and due dates, linked to the investor so a handoff does not fall off a spreadsheet.

Jamie's roadmap named Digital Wallet, Reconciliation and Admin Portal as the core. PRDs and stories went through UAT on Chromatic. That is the admin product: the people who run capital calls, distributions and onboarding, not the LP login.

Pipeline sits here too: contacted, meeting, docs sent, committed, onboarded. Emails can log automatically. Default background agents include contact enrichment: a name and email into a researched profile before the first call.

One record

Portal and CRM are the same investor. Registry, onboarding and AML/KYC are supposed to live on that record so a manager does not reconcile three systems. Caruso can run as software in-house, as a fully managed NZ admin team, or a mix. Implementation and historical migration are on them.

ISO 27001 and APIs are on the public site. We are not adding security claims beyond that.