Interview of the Month with Ondřej Koňák, Co-Founder of NAVCalc

How do you turn twenty years in financial markets into a fintech startup? Why does fund administration still run on Excel? And what does it take to earn the trust of fund managers as a young technology company?

After approximately 20 years in public financial markets, working on both the buy side and the sell side, you co-founded NAVCalc in October 2024. NAVCalc is a modular platform that provides scalable, easy-to-use tools for automating core fund administration processes – from NAV calculations to client communication. What led you to build the company, and what was your main motivation?

After twenty years in financial markets, I felt that several different parts of my career had finally come together.

I have always seen myself somewhere between an analyst and a salesperson. I enjoy understanding complex problems and looking for solutions, but equally I have always enjoyed meeting people, talking to clients and learning how different businesses actually work. I also tend to look at problems from a different angle and search for solutions that are not necessarily the obvious ones.

Over the years, and particularly through my experience with investment funds, I became increasingly aware of a strange contradiction. The world around us is changing at an incredible speed, yet many parts of the investment industry still operate much as they did years ago — with manual processes, fragmented systems and a heavy reliance on Excel and individual know-how.

At the same time, regulation and operational requirements continue to increase. The result is that people who entered the industry because they wanted to invest, analyse companies or work with clients are spending more and more of their time on administration, controls and repetitive operational tasks. I felt there had to be a better way.

When I met my co-founder Jiří, who comes from mathematics and software engineering, it became clear that there was an interesting opportunity to combine these two worlds: deep financial understanding on one side and the ability to turn that understanding into robust software on the other.

That was the main motivation behind NAVCalc. We wanted to take real problems that investment funds and administrators deal with every day and build practical tools that genuinely make their work easier, faster and more reliable.

Could you explain in more detail what NAVCalc actually does for its clients? What are the main benefits for fund managers and administrators using the platform?

NAVCalc automates operational processes of investment funds and fund administrators, particularly those that are repetitive, calculation-heavy and still often handled manually.

Our core module is NAV calculation. In many funds, this process is still heavily dependent on Excel and can still take up a substantial part of the monthly operational workload. We move the calculation logic into a controlled system, where the fund structure, parameters, fees and share-class rules are configured in advance.

The user uploads the source data, the system performs the calculation, and the result can then be reviewed, exported and shared with the depositary. The whole process is fully traceable — you can see who performed the calculation, who approved it, when individual actions took place and whether any inputs or parameters were changed.

There is another important benefit as well. Before we automate anything, we need to understand the client’s existing process in detail. That often reveals duplicated steps, unnecessary manual work or controls that have accumulated over time simply because “this is how it has always been done”.

As an external partner, we can often see these inefficiencies more clearly than people who work inside the process every day. So in many cases, we do not simply automate the existing workflow — we help redesign it and make it significantly simpler and more efficient.

For the client, the result is faster processing, greater consistency and transparency, lower operational risk and less dependency on individual employees. It also makes the whole operation much more scalable.

Ultimately, our aim is simple: to automate administration so that investment professionals can spend more time on investing, clients and growing their business.

What have been the biggest challenges during NAVCalc’s first two years?

Probably the first challenge was simply making the decision to go all in. Leaving a stable career after twenty years, with three children, is very different from starting a company straight out of university. At the same time, my wife was making a similar career change, and despite agreeing that at least one of us should remain employed for a while, we somehow both resigned on exactly the same day.

That also meant that, almost overnight, we both found ourselves fully dependent on making our own projects work. In some ways, that was stressful, but it was also incredibly motivating. It forces you to work harder, make decisions faster and take much more responsibility for the outcome. Looking back, I think that period pushed me forward not only professionally, but also personally.

From a business perspective, the biggest challenge was trust. Fund operations are critical processes and clients understandably do not hand them over to a young technology company easily. We therefore had to prove ourselves through actual delivery rather than promises.

The third challenge is the complexity of the industry itself. Every fund has its own structure, fee model, share classes, valuation rules and operational specifics. The difficult part is not simply automating one client’s process, but understanding which elements genuinely need to remain specific and which can be handled through a robust and scalable framework.

That is also where our combination of financial, mathematical and technological expertise becomes particularly valuable. The platform needs to be flexible enough to reflect the specifics of individual funds while remaining rigorous, controlled and reusable across different structures and jurisdictions.

Looking at the other side of the journey, what would you consider NAVCalc’s most important achievements and milestones since October 2024?

The biggest achievement is probably the speed with which we moved from an idea to a platform used in real fund operations. I am especially proud of what the whole team has managed to achieve together. Building something like this from scratch requires an enormous amount of work, flexibility and persistence, and I am genuinely grateful to everyone involved for helping us get this far.

We gained our first client, Julius Meinl, only a few months after starting the project. Shortly afterwards, we began working with Conseq, and by the end of the year we signed a cooperation agreement with CODYA, one of the leading Czech fund administrators.

What I value even more is that these were not one-off projects. We continue working with these clients and, in several cases, the cooperation has expanded into additional areas as they gained confidence in both the platform and our team.

From a product perspective, NAVCalc has also evolved significantly. What initially started with NAV calculation has gradually developed into a broader modular platform covering areas such as portfolio data, reporting, investor communication and other fund administration processes.

Where would you like NAVCalc to be in another two years, both in terms of the product and the growth of the business?

Two years is a relatively short period of time, but when I look at what we have managed to build over the past two years, it is also long enough to achieve quite a lot.

I would like NAVCalc to be recognised as a reliable partner for fund managers and administrators — a partner that helps them spend less time dealing with operational and regulatory complexity and gives them more space to focus on what brought many of them into the industry in the first place: investing, analysing opportunities and working with clients. Investment management is an incredibly interesting profession, and it is a pity when too much of that time is absorbed by administration and repetitive processes.

At the same time, fund administration is much more complex than it may appear from the outside. Even areas that seem straightforward, such as NAV calculation or fee allocation, can involve highly detailed methodological questions around fee structures, rounding rules, allocation principles and the treatment of small differences that can accumulate over time.

This is an area where we already see clients turning to us not only for technology, but also for answers to very specific mathematical and methodological questions. Over the next two years, I would therefore like us to formalise this expertise into a practical methodology or reference framework that addresses these recurring issues in a consistent and transparent way.

The longer-term ambition would be for this to contribute to a common standard — a well-defined approach to questions that are currently often treated differently from one fund to another. If we can combine technology with that level of methodological expertise, I think NAVCalc can become much more than simply a software provider.

Bio

Ondřej Koňák is Co-Founder of NAVCalc, a technology company focused on automating fund administration and NAV calculation processes. He has approximately twenty years of experience in financial markets across equity research, corporate credit, portfolio management, valuation and financial advisory.

Before founding NAVCalc, he held senior roles on both the buy side and the sell side and worked with investment funds, institutional investors, banks and corporates across Central and Eastern Europe.

At NAVCalc, he focuses primarily on business development, product strategy and translating the operational needs of investment funds and administrators into practical technology solutions.