Like many single and multi-family offices, Shade Tree Advisors faced the burdensome task of managing a high volume of custodian account statements across multiple custodians and hundreds of client relationships and legal entities. This process demanded significant manual effort each month. In seeking a scalable solution, they encountered a fragmented vendor landscape, where most providers offered narrow, siloed technologies. This case study illustrates how Eton Solutions partnered with Shade Tree to streamline their operations, leveraging advanced knowledge graphs and proprietary EtonAI™ technology to automate nearly all of the manual workload and unlock meaningful efficiency gains as a result.
PUBLISHED ON SIMPLE MAY 12, 2025
Eton Solutions is a leading wealth tech platform provider, offering AtlasFive® and EtonAI™ applications to family offices, wealth owners, RIAs, business managers, and private equity firms globally. Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform integrates AtlasFive®, a SaaS application, EtonAI™, an AI application, and managed services into a cohesive offering, managing nearly $1 trillion in assets. EtonAI™ comprises three key products: EtonAI™ Intelligent Document Processing, which focuses on document understanding, interpretation, and data extraction; EtonAI™ Portal, serving as an AI assistant for analysts, investment advisors, and legal counsel; and EtonAI™ Agents, aimed at agent technology.
About the Company
Shade Tree Advisors LLC
- Location: Saratoga Springs, New York
- Type: Multi Family Office
- Founded: 2017
- Services: Family Office
About the Service Provider
Eton Solutions
- HQ: United States of America
- Category: Fully Integrated Platform
The Problem
Shade Tree processes over 1,500 custodian statements each month. The documents come from two dozen custodians and processing requires several steps including retrieval, renaming, and extraction of key metadata including the client relationship, entity, month, and month-end market value .. From end-to-end, this process could take upwards of 8 minutes per statement and frequently led to bottlenecks.
Understanding that the manual processes could be more streamlined, Shade Tree Advisors sought a solution.
“We initially focused on areas of our business where we knew our people were overwhelmed and would most likely welcome opportunities to alleviate some excess burden. For example, the first AI solution we implemented was for custodian account statement filing…starting there allowed us to overcome skepticism around how AI would impact job security.”
Tim Macherone, COO, Shade Tree Advisors.
The Eton Solution
To address the inefficiencies and enhance scalability, Shade Tree implemented the EtonAI™ Document Intelligence Platform. This innovative solution introduced context-aware automation, significantly minimizing the need for human intervention. Several compelling factors drove the decision to partner with Eton Solutions:
Established, trusted relationship: Shade Tree had already partnered with Eton Solutions on other aspects of their business, allowing them to “plug in” immediately rather than starting from scratch.
World-class AI expertise: By leveraging Eton’s dedicated AI team, Shade Tree gained access to seasoned prompt engineers and data scientists who could deliver meaningful, turn-key solutions.
Speed to market: Thanks to the groundwork Eton had laid, Shade Tree became one of the earliest multi-family offices to roll out AI, avoiding the typical delays and resource constraints of a greenfield implementation.
Balanced data approach: Eton Solutions had already architected a way to keep sensitive client data fully confidential and proprietary, while still permitting enrichment from open-internet sources to improve AI accuracy.
“Without Eton’s prescient groundwork, we’d have been behind – either stuck in pilot mode or late to market altogether. Eton’s deep AI expertise allowed us to bypass the usual start-up hurdles and be one of the very first multi-family offices to deliver meaningful, measurable results.”
Tim Macherone, COO, Shade Tree Advisors.
The Results
Below are some of the results and measurable benefits for Shade Tree:
- Custodian account statements: Processing time decreased significantly from over 8 minutes per statement to under 2 minutes, resulting in an ~80% reduction in overall effort. In addition, the automated solution consistently operates at an accuracy level exceeding 97%, with the remaining 3% identified and segregated for manual processing.
- Tax document renaming: seeing the success of the custodian statement initiative, Shade Tree automated the renaming process for thousands of 1099s and K-1 forms, again with over 90% accuracy. This has saved hundreds of hours annually.
- Credit card coding (in progress): again, seeing the success of other initiatives, Shade Tree has begun the process of leveraging EtonAI to aid in the processing and coding of client credit card statements.
Conclusion
Shade Tree Advisors’ experience emphasizes the significant advantages of integrating extensive industry knowledge with a secure, scalable, and adaptive AI framework. Eton Solutions implemented a carefully designed AI strategy addressing the unique challenges of multi-family office management. At the same time, Microsoft Azure furnished the strong cloud infrastructure necessary to operationalize that strategy effectively. This collaboration has been instrumental in achieving substantial enhancements in efficiency. Notably, the processing time for custodian account statements decreased significantly.
Moreover, the smooth merging of Eton’s proprietary document intelligence and knowledge graph technologies with Azure’s comprehensive suite of AI, security, and monitoring solutions has reduced inefficiencies and facilitated quick deployment. This successful implementation not only enhances operations for Shade Tree Advisors but also illustrates a viable avenue for other multi-family offices aiming to use AI for transformative improvements across the industry.
