August 29, 2026 · 5 min
What boutique investment banks lose in email triage
The cost of a slow reply on a live mandate, and where the hours actually go.
A boutique competes on responsiveness. When a client or a buyer sends a question, the speed and specificity of the answer is a signal about the bank.
The constraint is that the same analyst running the model is also running the data room and the inbox. Correspondence waits until the modeling stops, which is often late at night.
Ontu's bet is that the first pass on that correspondence can happen in the background: reading the thread, pulling the relevant figures from the data room, drafting the reply. The analyst ends up editing and sending, rather than starting from a blank message at midnight.
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