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Amazing things can be built in 23 weeks.
VolkerFitzpatrick had built a new delivery office for Royal Mail in South Shields in northern England – including a 1,200 square metre new building, office space, yard and PV system. Program: 23 weeks.
The University of Oxford had structural adjustments made to the Richard Doll Building with a clearly defined 23-week program .
And in Melbourne, the new 6,250-square-metre headquarters of the law firm Maddocks – including a barista bar, conservatory and high-quality working environments – was realised in a 23-week programme .
23 weeks – or, by the way, the period over which this column is now running. And when you see what can be built in real life during this time, many a fund birth, which is nothing more than a sequence of a few legal acts on paper, seems surprisingly slow.
Anyone who structures funds in practice and accompanies fund launches knows that less than nine months rarely pass between the first ideas and the first capital call, often more like twelve and even more.
Not because no one is working, quite the opposite. But because every structuring layer – KVG selection, vehicle, investment conditions, ESG concept, tax and insurance regulatory assessment, approvals, coordination of contracts with fund service providers and asset managers – must be carefully documented and coordinated.
So while projects are "out in real life" in 23 weeks, the fund world is faltering. The real economy is scaling its pace, the fund industry is sticking to processes. The fund industry is moving a long way away from the actual value creation: offering a simple shell for the allocation of capital for projects in real life.
Capital is needed in the real economy today faster than our fund structures typically provide:
At the same time, we see in other industries:
credit processes, payment transactions, trade and supply chain control, risk and fraud detection – all highly complex, highly regulated and yet increasingly digital, standardized, AI-supported, with decision-making cycles in days instead of quarters.
Against this background, a one-year standard lead time to the fund launch no longer seems like an expression of deliberate prudence, but like a system remnant from a slower time.
The fund industry invests in assets that are themselves exposed to and master permanent pressure to innovate and adapt. Market participants in the fund industry must therefore question themselves much more strongly as to how they could better organise the supply of capital and thus also make their contribution. Otherwise, it is not a page of glory for the entire industry, which claims to be the backbone of long-term financing.
