Women in Innovation sat down with one of WIN's co-founders to learn about her new innovative venture and distill best practices in building a first-of-its-kind offer. 

Alfia Ilicheva is the CEO and Founder of Formulary Financial, a modern fund administration company for asset managers. A serial entrepreneur with a long track record in financial services, Alfia is the former CEO of Apollo-backed Edna Technologies and was previously a product leader at Bridgewater Associates. Her career spans positions across client service, artificial intelligence and product development, focusing on asset management and financial services. 

WIN:

What is Formulary Financial and what problem is it solving?

Alfia:

Formulary Financial's mission is to become the most reliable fund administration partner to asset managers. Essentially, providing all the back office operations for investment management firms in a trusted, expert, and highly efficient way. 

Historically, fund admin has just been a necessary evil in asset management. Across the lifecycle of accounting, there is a lack of reliable data and expert service. Most accounting companies operate with very little technology, meaning people are burdened by manual workflows and the resulting reports are error-prone and hard to trust. The people - accountants -  spend all their time buried in admin work instead of servicing clients holistically as experts. 

That's what Formulary Financial is innovating. 

We're embedding incredible technology into critical accounting workflows, producing something called bionic accounting. Bionic accounting allows accountants to provide better service and solve hard problems while the technology gets the numbers right. 

This is the higher order problem we're solving for. We're solving for the lack of trust in fund administration.

WIN

What was the ‘aha moment’ that initiated you building Formulary Financial?

Alfia

Financial services as a category has always followed rigid, faulty processes. There might be human error, but if you trust the people, then you trust the process. At the same time, it has been clear for some time that financial services wants to use technology to its advantage and fix what’s broken. 

When the first wave of technology came, many companies tried to convert all the quality checks and error-prone excel sheets into a SaaS business. Essentially productizing human-led workflows as a tech-led service. But the end result of a self-serve dashboard created more problems with the solutions… because a single platform couldn't support everything humans do. We’re left with fragmented solutions, and humans left to connect the dots between them.

 The revelation for us was believing financial services will be and should continue to be truly human led. It's not about building a dashboard that removes humans. It’s about using systems thinking to explore what accountants do, step by step, and then reimagine what the workflow could look like if they apply the right technology. In this world, moving humans up the value chain by making them bionic. That's the “aha moment.” High touch, high tech together: a bionic solution. 

There are a lot of conversations around the required harmony between AI and the human. We believe it should be humans overseeing AI. Whenever AI runs over humans, that trust gets compromised. Human trust can not be replaced by AI trust. Formulary Financial built our product in service of humans collaborating, empowered by sophisticated technology. 

WIN

What does it take to get from this type of “aha” moment or great idea to a business that works? Where do most people get stuck?

Alfia

The idea is often the easy part, and everything else is the hard part. In the everything else part, there are really two things to get a concept up and running successfully. 

The first part is product design, i.e., prioritizing user research to understand the urgent pain points of your end user. Here comes the real work: you have to be honest with yourself about what those pain points are. Then, you synthesize them into concepts that inform human centered design and product development. That’s actually why I started working in innovation: I wanted to learn how to apply design thinking and navigate the mental maps to better understand the problem [and the solution.] 

The second part is the business model design, i.e., thinking about how to capture value from solving the problem. Founders have to spend a lot of time thinking through questions like: what is the value to whom? That synthesis takes a lot of iteration, and many founders skip that part. But it’s integral to creating a successful product and plan. This is where collaboration with additional team members helps you move forward. You can balance each other’s main competencies so you don’t jump in blind on either side of the building or planning process. 

You end up with an iterative plan for the first few steps of building. When people have just one or the other, the product design or the business model, they have a hard time moving forward. What you're building will either have no customers OR customers that you can't actually monetize. Together allows you to define what your vision is. 

WIN

Formulary Financial seems deeply rooted in a specific philosophy around trust and humanity. Where does this foundation come from?

Alfia

There's a word in Japanese called ikigai. The purpose of why you spring out of bed. Our ikigai is to be the most reliable partners to asset managers. And we're partners–not bots– we're people. We talk about that a lot within our team–what our ikigai is–because it’s what unites us. Especially for a team that would not typically cross paths, we want to share the same goal. As partners, we’re the technologists who enable the accountant. It truly gets us out of bed each morning. 

WIN

Considering everything you have learned about innovation and building successful businesses, what is the one thing you would share with an entrepreneur who is just getting started?

Alfia

I would encourage them to define their mission. What audacious goal are you pursuing? Why does that goal matter to you? 

Starting a business is probably one of the hardest things I've done in my life and I've done many hard things. It's hard to raise money, to build a team, to build a product. You can't predict the volume, size or frequency of problems you’ll encounter. The only thing you have while you navigate these challenges is your purpose and vision. Starting a business can’t be rooted in ego, it’s not sufficient to carry you through. You need to know your why and it’ll inform the real mission at hand.

WIN

Finally, I’m wondering how you imagine these two worlds - Women in Innovation and Formulary Financial- intersecting? 

Alfia

At Formulary, we are continually and actively debating the question of human versus technology. It's more of an intellectual, spiritual debate that feeds our process. WIN is such a beautiful, global, diverse network of people who are grappling with the same questions across so many verticals [beyond finance alone.] I am curious how the WIN community could participate in our debate about human versus technology, human versus AI. I would love to hear the perspectives of the community. 

Second, we are hiring brilliant engineers, accountants, product designers, brand product designers and social media experts to help us as advisors, consultants and contractors. The talent in the WIN community is representative of the talent we would love to have on board.

Part of our process is innovating the act of building, creating agents and understanding how technology transforms traditional industry. We’re learning a lot about what can work, what cannot work, and how that relates to building a team. I suspect WIN has members grappling with the same question in other industries with insight to share, or talent to recommend. 

Finally, I would be happy to share some of those lessons I’ve learned about how to build and how to raise funding. If that’s interesting for other community members, I’m happy to speak to members who also want to pursue the Founder pathway.

WIN

Congratulations on another successful entrepreneurial launch Alfia. On behalf of the WIN community, sending you an enormous thank you for starting Women in Innovation ten years ago. It is exciting to see how far we have come because of your vision. Here’s to the next decade!