Hi Philip! Can you tell us a bit about your role at Centi and why you decided to join the team?

Hi! My role splits into onboarding new companies, administering incentive programs, and helping with product development.

The onboarding side is about taking a new portfolio company from signed to fully live, working with deal teams, lawyers and CFOs to gather the ownership data. Day to day, I look after my PortCos, handling the offer flows and whatever comes up related to the incentive programs. Since I'm close to how clients use the platform, and use it myself every day, I feed a lot of that back into how the product gets improved, flagging what's slow or what’s missing.

As for why I joined, I wanted to work in an environment where decisions get made quickly and where I’d be challenged to learn with plenty of exposure. At Centi you’re trusted with responsibility from day one, and your input actually counts when it comes to where things are going. On top of that, the team is full of good, ambitious people, which makes it a great environment to be in.

A fun fact is that you for two seasons where a goat herder in Trentino, any skills from wrangling the herd that have carried over into servicing clients at Centi?

Haha. At the risk of taking myself too seriously, or comparing our clients to goats, there is some overlap between managing a herd and managing an incentive program from a client services perspective.

Goats have a strong will, and a herd is a lot of moving parts you have to anticipate and stay on top of. The job is to essentially keep them together and headed the right way.

It's a bit different with our clients here at Centi, since we’re accommodating their decisions on events like leavers and joiners. That's the everyday client services work: keeping track of what's happening across the PortCos, coordinating with IPs, law firms, fund administrators, and investors, and staying ready to adjust when something needs sorting on short notice. Where the anticipating comes in is the product. A lot of the value is in understanding our clients' needs, seeing what's coming, and building for it, so we're ready before they have to ask.

You've lived and worked in Italy, Germany, the UK, and Sweden. How do you apply your international background to Centi?

We’re working with clients and investors across a lot of markets, and are expanding into new ones quickly, so an international background naturally helps. Covering all our DACH cases is one example: I get to use my German day to day, whether on a call with IPs and lawyers or answering investor questions.

Then there’s also the cultural side. Every market also has its own way of doing things, and clients come in with different expectations of how involved they want to be. Some want every detail, others just want things handled and off their plate. Having worked in a few different countries makes it easer to read that early and adjust working styles.

Being our onboarding expert, what does genuinely good onboarding look like, and what's the most common thing that surprises people when they first get onto the platform?

Good onboarding is when the client hands things over without much effort and logs in to our platform to find out everything is laid out correctly. Getting there mostly comes down to being clear on what we need, so pulling it together doesn't become a hassle for our clients who already have plenty on their hands. If lawyers are sitting on some of the information, we’re happy to deal with them directly. One less thing on the client's list.

Once we have what we need, we take it from there. Onboarding is essentially a full audit: we work through the whole transaction history, rebuild it on the platform, check it carefully, and invite the client in to review. Because it's that thorough, errors that build up over the years through manual record-keeping get caught and corrected along the way, and with everything in one place it stays accurate going forward.

What tends to surprise people is the speed. They come in expecting weeks of back-and-forth, because that's what they're used to elsewhere. In practice the average case now takes around 2 week, and that's come down as we've refined the process. Once the information is in, configuring it is quick, and launch follows soon after.