Working for the guardians of capital

Private equity firms are good at financial due diligence and at reading a business model. What is harder is everything on the ground: the suppliers, the local partners, the permits, and the people whose names never appear in the data room. We cover that half — in the jurisdictions where checking it in person is the only way to check it.

Venture capital firms, as early-stage investors in innovative ideas, frequently encounter enthusiastic and ambitious entrepreneurs and their teams. Amidst the excitement and energy of these interactions, it can be challenging to assess the potential of these ventures beyond their day-to-day activities. At Falcone International, we comprehend the unique dynamics of these environments and offer our expertise in qualifying investment candidates and providing insights into their backgrounds, ensuring well-informed decisions for long-term success.

For a hedge fund the constraint is not access to information. It is access to information that is both timely and lawfully obtained, and being able to demonstrate which is which afterward. We build the picture of an operating environment, a counterparty, or a management team, and we document where every part of it came from.

A fund of funds carries other institutions’ money and, with it, other institutions’ scrutiny. The exposure is rarely the underlying assets. It is the managers, their other commitments, and who else is in the vehicle alongside you. We check that layer before the allocation, and again when something material changes.

Family and business overlap in ways that make ordinary governance awkward, because the difficult questions concern relatives, long-standing advisors, and people the family would rather not have investigated at all. We work with family offices, principals, and the next generation on precisely those questions — discreetly, and without becoming a permanent fixture.

For banks and institutions of considerable size, maintaining vigilant oversight of compliance, workforce conduct, and overall risk management across the entire organization can prove to be a daunting task. We specialize in assisting such institutional-grade organizations in addressing these challenges, ensuring they continue to operate with the highest levels of integrity, transparency, and efficiency in their respective industries and locations.

The German Mittelstand, the Japanese ‘Chuushou Kigyou’, US Main Street businesses: mid-sized firms carry systemic weight well out of proportion to their profile. They also face the same fraud, counterparty and duty-of-care exposure as listed companies, with a fraction of the in-house capability to handle it. That gap is most of what we do for them.

Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies grapple with the challenges stemming from their immense size and the heightened scrutiny that comes with being publicly traded. As they expand their operations, these leading corporations must efficiently manage complex organizational structures and address increasing regulatory requirements. 

Operations get set up in distant places for good reasons: resources, skills, production capacity, market access. The difficulty is that the further a site sits from head office, the more it is governed by whatever local management decides it is. Independent observers and auditors on the ground are how you find out whether your own policies are actually being followed.

Charitable capital is given on trust, which is exactly what makes it attractive to people who intend to misuse it. Before funds are committed it is worth establishing that the recipient exists as described, that the money can be traced to the stated purpose, and that nobody in the chain has a history you would not accept in a commercial counterparty.

NGOs are judged on overhead ratio and on outcomes, which creates pressure to keep oversight lean at precisely the point where funds pass through the most jurisdictions and the fewest controls. Finding leakage early protects both the program and the funding relationships that depend on it.