Featured: Perrin Quarshie (MBA ’16)
By Jeffrey McKinney | Black Enterprise | March 10, 2022
In a major deal, Black-owned technology provider RealBlocks has been chosen by LaSalle Investment Management to distribute and trade the real estate investment giant’s funds to potential investors.
Based on details shared with BLACK ENTERPRISE and a news release, the pact calls for RealBlocks to digitize the fund management process for Chicago-based LaSalle. It will cover LaSalle’s $77 billion in assets under management. That means RealBlocks will help bring in new investors, perform technology for secondary trading, and execute web-based subscriptions for institutional and retail funds for LaSalle.
RealBlocks emphasized that it is not managing LaSalle’s assets or making investment decisions. It simply is the service provider or administrator for all of LaSalle’s global business.
“RealBlocks is a game-changer in the real estate and alternatives space due to its ability to deliver an all-encompassing strategy that addresses the entire lifecycle of the investment process,” Jodi Akers, managing director at LaSalle, said in a statement. “Partnering with RealBlocks to bring their technology solution to our private equity business to optimize our global investor onboarding aligns with our digital transformation goals of continuing to improve our client experience and enhancing our operational efficiency.”
For RealBlocks, the transaction is by far its largest since the New York City-based firm started in 2017. RealBlocks CEO Perrin Quarshie discussed how his firm works.
“While alternatives have traditionally been limited by high barriers to entry such as geographic limitations, high minimums, and illiquidity, we set out to address these issues by building a better alternative for our clients,” he says. “We do that by providing the industry’s first white-label platform that allows for turnkey online global distribution and straight-through processing with all of the needed functionality for sales, feeder funds, and fund administration.”
