Company History

Start Up: 1994 to 1997

At its founding, Envision was seeded by the shareholder accounting system Mr. Gambhir developed over three years at Analytic Investment.

During the early years, Mr. Gambhir and Mr. Kan spent their time visiting mutual fund firms and service providers gaining a thorough understanding of their needs and how to best approach growing the seed product. They then used what they learned and created a high level system design, mapped out required and potential functionality and established the database design.

A master plan was laid out for the direction Envision and this new shareholder accounting system. Although the system lacked certain features, Mr. Gambhir and Mr. Kan decided to add no-load capabilities to the product and take it to market.

Five years after the beginning the programming of the product, two years after the formation of the company, and after rigorous testing, the product was ready for general release in December of 1996 under its new brand name of PowerAgent.

Envision began conducting demonstrations of PowerAgent in February of 1997. Johnson Investment Counsel based in Cincinnati, Ohio became the first client of Envision and PowerAgent a short time later. The story behind how they did remains at the core of Envision’s approach.

Johnson had been outsourcing transfer agency services to an outfit that exited the market. Johnson was close to moving to another outsourcing solution when they became aware of Envision and PowerAgent. A remote demonstration of PowerAgent was arranged and Johnson liked what they saw: the user interface was intuitive, the system design was sound and the use of a relational database provided greater flexibility. A meeting at Envision’s Newport Beach office was arranged. In the two weeks leading to Johnson’s visit, the Envision team prepared a surprise; with permission, they received and converted data from Johnson’s existing transfer agency system, SURPASS, and showed Johnson the accounts and converted data. This allayed their major concern of the conversion process.

This new business experience formed the basis for Envision’s principles to this day: provide personalized experiences and always ensure you are delivering true value so that, if called upon, your clients have no choice but to recommend your products and services.