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Alexander Hamilton Awards

Virtual Accounts Bring Tangible Benefits

Congratulations to Starwood Capital Group on winning the 2023 Bronze Alexander Hamilton Award in Treasury Transformation!

Congratulations to Starwood Capital Group for winning the 2023 Bronze Award in Treasury Transformation!

Starwood Capital Group is a leading private investment firm with a core focus on real estate, renewable energy, and infrastructure. The firm has approximately $120 billion of assets under management and oversees Starwood Property Trust, the largest commercial mortgage real estate investment trust (REIT) in the United States. Starwood Capital owns and manages properties such as multifamily homes, hotels, and office buildings, and it frequently closes on new property purchases. For treasury, bank account management has long been a key pain point of supporting this business model.

“Every deal is different,” explains Gaina Dorvil, assistant treasurer for Starwood Capital, “but when we buy a property, we generally have to open several bank accounts to handle activities like deposits of rent revenue and payments for operating expenses. For one deal we just closed, we needed 30 different accounts. And we are always on a tight deadline to open accounts and ensure they’re ready to receive funding.”

Exacerbating the complexity of account management, each property deal involves numerous investors and stakeholders, so the property’s accounts often include multiple signers. A couple of years ago, the onboarding process for banks opening accounts for new Starwood Capital properties would take “two, three, or even four weeks, depending on the institution,” Dorvil reports. “They would do the onboarding, the KYC [know your customer] checks, and look into the entity that we were trying to open an account for, to make sure all the information we provided was correct.”

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Meg Waters

Meg Waters

Meg Waters is the editor in chief of Treasury & Risk. She is the former editor in chief of BPM Magazine and the former managing editor of Business Finance.

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