MutualFundWire.com: A Host of BlackRock Alums Back a Compliance Startup

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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

A Host of BlackRock Alums Back a Compliance Startup

A host of BlackRock alumni are supporting a new startup focused on making compliance simple, especially for asset managers, B-Ds, RIAs, and other financial services firms.

Joseph "Jody" Kochansky
Paragon Data Labs
Board Member, Angel Investor, Strategic Advisory Council Member

On Monday, Jeff Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Paragon Data Labs, publicly welcomed the New York City-based firm's first round of angel investors. (PDL launched last year.) Those investors now form a strategic advisory council for PDL, and two of them joined PDL's board.

PDL's leadership and investors now include a number of BlackRock alumni, such as: Mitchell; Josh Litwack, co-founder and chief operating officer; Hilary Agin, an angel investor who joined PDL's board and its strategic advisory council; Scott Condron, an angel investor who joined the advisory council; Sarah Hallac, an angel investor who joined the advisory council; Jody Kochansky, an angel investor who also joined the board and the advisory council; James Kong, an angel investor who joined the advisory council; and Andy Stewart, an angel investor who joined the advisory council. And Jeff Keil, another PDL angel investor who joined the advisory council, has served as a director for the BlackRock Institutional Trust Company. (Litwack, Mitchell, and their fellow co-founder, chief technology officer S.K. Gupta, all serve on PDL's board alongside Kochansky and Agin.)

Jefferson "Jeff" Mitchell
Paragon Data Labs
Co-Founder, CEO, Board Member

Kochansky, who now advises PE firms, previously led BlackRock's Aladdin Product Group. He lauds PDL's flagship offering, Compliance Administration & Tracking (CAT), as "a very modern experience" compared with the "quite clunky" technology he sees out there for compliance. The idea is to automate employee compliance via a cloud-based platform, covering issues like personal trading (where pre-trade authorization is needed), side gigs, political contributions, and more, "all areas where employees can run into trouble if they're not properly disclosing that activity, Kochanksy tells MFWire.

Joshua "Josh" Litwack
Paragon Data Labs
Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer, Board Member

"The product is really feature-complete," Kochansky says. "This is really going to change the way people think about employee compliance as a holistic activity."

"The whole premise of the firm is to make compliance simple," Litwack tells MFWire.

Mitchell confirms that PDL's first client has been using the service for nearly five months and that they have "several exciting new clients in the pipeline."

"We are planning to grow the business aggressively," Mitchell tells MFWire.

Printed from: MFWire.com/story.asp?s=62495

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