Subscription Agreements

I just finished completing a thirty page form for an investment my wife and I are making in a limited partnership. This form is called a subscription agreement. I wrote about the frustration of having to complete this identical form again and again six and a half years ago here on AVC.

One great thing has happened on this issue in those six and a half years. Many/most subscription agreements are now sent digitally via Docusign or Adobe. That’s great. It is certainly a bit easier to complete them online and once you have done that, there is no need to scan and email.

But I remain confounded by the fact that we complete the exact same form time and time again, answering the exact same questions. One would expect that there would be registries/registrars that would onboard an entity (a person, an investment fund, etc) and then when that entity planed to subscribe to an investment, it would just authenticate with the registry and that would be that.

That’s what I was hoping we would see emerge when I wrote that blog post six and a half years ago and we still have not seen it happen. That is kind of amazing to me given how much innovation we have seen in and around financial and investing services in the last decade.