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“I feel like I’ve been ahead of the curve my entire career. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a positive way, because we were out there selling web-based portfolio management before people really had a solid grasp on what the internet was. Like I mentioned, a lot of our challenges were describing what we were trying to do. So that’s not necessarily a great spot to be in.”
–Matt Abar, CEO, FinFolio
Matt has been in the FinTech industry for over 20 years, working with early-stage startups and specializing in portfolio management. His introduction to FinTech happened in dbCAMS and he later ran the technology team at Investment Advisory Network—one of the first providers of wrap technology. He launched a provider of portfolio management software called Techfi in 1998, which he sold to Advent Software (now SS&C Advent) in 2002. Matt holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
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This episode of Wealth Management Today is brought to you by Ezra Group Consulting. If your firm is evaluating new technology or looking to improve your current wealth platform, you need to contact Ezra Group. Don’t spend another day using technology that doesn’t offer an elegant user experience. Your advisors and clients deserve better and you can deliver it to them with the help of Ezra Group.
Companies Mentioned
- Advent Software [00:25]
- Advisory Alpha [26:45]
- ByAllAccounts [28:03]
- eMoney Advisor [28:50]
- Interactive Brokers [27:26]
- M&T Bank [27:27]
- Microsoft [07:29]
- MoneyGuide [28:49]
- React [20:50]
- WordPress [29:19]
- Yahoo [08:24]
Topics Covered in this Episode
- Matt’s History in Portfolio Management
- Selling Techfi to Advent in 2002
- Another Software Startup
- How APIs Enable New Software
- Why Not Become a TAMP?
- Integrations Are Key
Related Articles
- 47 Portfolio Management Systems Can’t All Survive
- #ItzOnWealthTech Ep. 55: Why Investors Are Getting Screwed by AUM Pricing with Anders Jones
- #ItzOnWealthTech Ep. 51: The Future of Enterprise Wealthtech Webinar
Complete Episode Transcript
Craig: When Matt Abar sold his portfolio management startup to Advent back in 2002, he didn’t expect to hear that they were sunsetting his system only a year after the acquisition. Needless to say, this made a lot of people very upset, including both their customers and Matt himself, but he didn’t let that stop him. He went on to launch a new portfolio management platform that he’s still running today called FinFolio. Matt and I went deep into the history of portfolio management systems, how technology has changed the way vendors are building advisor software, and a whole lot more on this episode of the Wealth Management Today podcast.
Thanks for joining me here in the wonderful world of wealthtech. I’m your host Craig Iskowitz, and I run a consulting firm called Ezra Group. We’re experts in everything related to wealthtech, we deliver growth oriented solutions to banks, broker dealers, asset managers, and their technology providers through our advice and research. On this podcast, I speak with some of the smartest people in the industry who are on the leading edge of both technology and innovation.
And I’d like to welcome my guest for this episode of the Wealth Management Today podcast. I have Matt Abar, founder of FinFolio and Matt, welcome to the program.
Matt: Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Craig: Thanks for being here. And you can’t see if you’re listening at home, but Matt is on Sanibel Island right now. You’ve just arrived for your vacation, so thanks a lot for taking some time out from your vacation to talk to me.
Matt: Oh, thanks. Yeah, it’s beautiful here. We just got in yesterday.
Craig: When you first turned on the camera and I saw the palm trees, I said, “that’s not Denver!”
Matt: No, it’s not. But it’s very nice, we’re for down here for a month. It’s a working vacation.
Craig: Smart, gotta work from everywhere. I run a virtual company so we can work from everywhere and everyone’s taken up the same charge, and I love it. So can you give us a quick 30-second elevator pitch on FinFolio?
Matt: Sure. FinFolio is a full platform for wealth managers. It prints reports, it does client portals, you can trade with it, you can push trades out over the fixed network. And we have a very sophisticated rebalancer that is kind of the front end of that as well as several direct trading tools. It also lets advisors build their accounts and there’s a lot of analytical tools inside the software itself, dashboards and things like that for you to answer questions about your practice. And that’s FinFolio.
Matt’s History in Portfolio Management
Craig: Indeed. I’ve followed you guys for a while and we were just talking, I wrote an article on my blog called “47 Portfolio Management Systems Can’t All Survive”, but you guys are definitely in the top of the ones who I think will survive because you’ve really done a good job with your platform. And I’ve kind of followed you guys over the years, but before we go into what’s going on with FinFolio, I wanted to dive a bit into your history because you’ve really got a very long history in the industry and specifically with portfolio management systems. Can you talk a bit about how you got started and what brought you into the industry?
Matt: Sure. I know you recently did an interview with Steve Strand, one of the founders of Advent, and I entered not quite that far back, but in that era, I would say. I got my start working for a guy named Dave Huxford, who founded dbCAMS. dbCAMS was the first database-based portfolio management system, and they were the main competitor of Advent. At the time I was working for them back in ’93, I think ’92, ’93, they were doing very well. they were underpricing, they were in an area of the country that probably had a third of employee cost, compared to what Advent must’ve had in San Francisco. Like I said, it was the first database-based portfolio management system, which gave them a lot of advantages and it was going very, very quickly.
Unfortunately, their founder, Dave, died in a plane crash and I left the company right around that time. You know, obviously as history played out, Advent won and dominated that market for quite some time. But that was where I got my start. I actually left dbCAMS to move to Denver. I was ultimately the CTO of a company called Investment Advisory Network. They created the first mutual fund wrap system and had clients like bank of New York and Oppenheimer, and sold that behind the scenes to a lot of the mutual fund families that were pushing their product out through their own vehicles in this mutual fund draft. I did that for a little while, then eventually went back to portfolio management and started a company called Techfi, and Techfi did some interesting things. We had a desktop product that was competing with PortfolioCenter, who also was getting started at the time. We were actually the first SQL based database management system. And that gave us a lot of advantages because you could do stuff very easily with SQL as to the old school type of database management systems.
Craig: SQL is structured query language is a computer term for databases, languages.
Matt: That’s right. Nowadays almost everything is SQL based, in portfolio management and everything else. You know, any website you go to with any amount of complexity has some type of almost certainly SQL engine on the back end doing storage.
Craig: And just to insert a little tech history there, Advent was not SQL-based, they were flat file based, meaning they had thousands of individual files in a directory that they used to pull data rather than a relational database. That’s was the differentiator.
Matt: That’s right. Yes. And Advent Access, which used to be their core product and still has many, many users, is still flat file based I believe. They have a more modern system APX that is SQL based. So even Advent eventually ended up on the SQL train.
Craig: And even more confusing is Microsoft called their database server SQL Server.
Matt: Yes. It worked. I think they’re the dominant player now. Not only were the first SQL based system, by the way, Techfi, we also went with Microsoft SQL Server, which was extremely low priced. We actually were on a version that was free to the end user because this was at a time where Oracle was dominating and I’m pretty sure even small installs were high five figures.
Craig: They charge per server CPU. It was very expensive because we were doing development on that.
Matt: Yeah. So we took a risk on Microsoft and I can remember us being in several conversations with larger companies who were just laughing at the fact were on Microsoft SQL Server saying it will never work, you can’t scale. And I could scale. We had a lot of experience with it at that point. It was a wonderful product. Still is today.
Selling Techfi to Advent in 2002
Craig: I know you’ve told this story a bunch of times, but can you talk about how Techfi became very successful and you sold it to Advent in 2002?
Matt: We did sell it to Advent, but I’m, I did miss something. Where Techfi really took off was we launched the first internet based portfolio management service. We actually called it Advisor Mark I think everybody but me actually just called it Techfi. But at the time we sold to Advent, we had close to a hundred people on that and it was a very different sale than what we do today. Back then people had heard of the internet, most people hadn’t even used the internet or if they did, it was to make their way to Yahoo and search on pictures of kittens and knitting and things like that. The concept of a service delivered, on that with sensitive client data, things like that was a very, very new concept. So the way the sales tend to go is if we were able to understand the concept and get them to understand what we were actually delivering via that they would, they would usually sign up for it because it was a very compelling offer. You got to change the model by which this type of service was delivered. At that time, every single person using dbCAMS or Advent was doing their own downloads, doing their own data reconciliation. And you had to be very, very technically sophisticated to be able to pull this off. So shifting it over to the service model where you’ve got the central group of people doing all that reconciliation, that’s a really, really big deal. And I think for this industry more than most others, because of that data management component, it’s very compelling.
Craig: So something happened when, after Advent bought you. There’s so many mergers and acquisitions going on, and a lot of firms will buy a small startup to try to learn from them and incorporate their technology into their systems and try to grow from that. But that’s not what Advent did when they bought you. What did they do when they purchased you?
Matt: Within 12 months of Advent purchasing us, they had announced that they were going to sunset the product. In our industry that’s not totally uncommon. I believe it was a lot harder to do mergers and acquisitions back then than I think it is now, all the technology plays together in a much better way. But I actually need to defend Advent here. It did go poorly with the experience that I have now, looking back on this, I was roughly 30 at the time I did this with no real business background, traditional entrepreneur, skillset, technical founder. There definitely were some things that I would have done differently contractually and trying to protect the clients a little bit better, but it was the worst timing. This was back when the NASDAQ was at 5000, and it dropped down to 1000, this was like the first .com crash. This is what I’m describing here.
So Advent stock went from something like 90 down to 10. And they entered this mode where they laid off the entire executive team, they were trying to do cost cutting. After they had relayed off the executive team with the planning of how this was going to integrate into their suite, they had nobody to explain the story in the right way to make everybody understand, this was not an overlap of the existing products that they had, there was a unique place for this. But they were just cutting everywhere they could. And they had this company that they bought out in Denver, whereas everybody else was mostly in San Francisco and it was really, really bad timing. So it really went badly, but I feel that if this had not happen at that exact point in time, I feel like that would have been a successful merger and it would have ended up okay,
Craig: So you’ve kind of come full circle on this and you seem very Zen about it.
Matt: At the time it was really tough. Because I I had clients that had counted on me, and employees and you know, this whole thing was collapsing and there was really nothing anybody could do at that point. In theory, maybe I could have sold the vision a little bit better to the new group of people that are now running Advent. But I don’t think that was realistic. It’s hard to explain this in a way where I think I’m really getting across just how fixed this was with the timing. But I don’t think there was anything that we could have done even now looking back on it. Maybe just avoid the merger altogether, but again in retrospect, like another thing that was going on was 9/11 hit and our sales went down to a third of what they were, we were going down at a very, very fast pace, so we needed to go raise capital. You know, this is why the sale to Advent ended up looking very attractive because we needed to raise capital. Nobody was actually funding companies at that point. We could have done a round, but would have been what you call a down round. We would have had to give up a huge amount of equity. I would have definitely lost control of the company and I’m not really sure what would have happened because we didn’t have anybody that was familiar with our industry interested in investing money. It would have been somebody totally from the outside that didn’t understand the nuances. It was just this perfect storm of many, many bad things coming together all at once.
Craig: Timing is very important when it comes to mergers. And when it comes to business in general, sometimes you’re at the right place at the right time, and sometimes you’re not.
Matt: Yeah. In many ways we were at the right place at the right time.
Craig: But it all worked out and now you are back. You’ve been running FinFolio since 2008.
Matt: Yep.
Another Software Startup
Craig: And you’re doing quite well. Can you talk about how you started FinFolio and what made you want to build out this entire platform end to end, rather than just focusing on portfolio management as a service itself?
Matt: Well that’s a good question. So I had a long No Compete when I sold my company to Advent, so part of this was just a No Compete completing and me one wanting to start another company and do something productive. This is what I know, and it was the obvious place to start. As far as building out the platform, I have a development background and I in a sense don’t know any other way to do this. I build a portfolio management systems for other people like me, for power users who might want to hook into things and extend it and make it their own. I think if I were to start anything, it would be, in that vein. And what I saw looking back at roughly like 2009-ish, there were a lot of systems out there, a lot of people mimicking what Techfi had been doing with the internet delivered service. And I didn’t see anybody who was really leaning into customization and creating a tool that advisors could really manipulate heavily and make their own. So I started FinFolio with the intent of it being extremely open. There’s really neat stuff you can do with our platform. You can create your own calculations, you create it in one of the Microsoft tools and you drop the DLL in a certain place and your calculation, all of a sudden it’s showing up on all the reports and the dashboards as an option for you to be able to show it. We’re doing some things that I don’t think anybody else in this industry is doing. High level, it comes from my development background.
Craig: Indeed. And what I liked about it is you’ve really built out a full, end to end system. From the beginning we look at the wealth management life cycle. You start from the beginning from opening the account all the way through portfolio construction, rebalancing, billing, client portal. That’s really a full end to end stack. So what was the difficulty in doing that? What kind of challenges did you have to overcome to build that type of robust platform?
Matt: Well, we’re doing it in a different way than most people in the industry are. I’m a builder. We don’t acquire companies. We don’t acquire blocks of technology. So the challenges that we have are putting mechanisms in place for doing everything in one code base, without it getting out of hand. And there are know many best practices now, this is much easier to do than it would have been 20 years ago. But what I think is the winning vision for wealth managers is to have everything in one platform. There was a little bit of a point 10 years ago, where it looked like you could get away with doing integrations and moving data back and forth. But I feel like that didn’t pan out the way that it could have. You certainly can hook tools together, but you do end up running into limitations.
So doing the best of breed approach, where you would have a different piece of technology for each function of a back office, I think it works, but it’s very limited right now. And I do think there several companies, including FinFolio that are on the track of having just this full back office with everything there in one place. And you were asking about the challenges like I said, it’s tough to do that all in one code base. You know, we have different blocks of business logic for rebalancing versus different calculations that we have at the engine and things like that. And it’s really just best practices, making sure you maintain the code correctly and making sure that you have product managers that make changes at one place, and they’re aware of like how that can affect other places.
I’m getting a little bit into the weeds now, but we also have a ridiculously thorough suite of unit tests that lock down every core piece of business functionality. So when we make changes to something there’s thousands, I want to say more than 10,000 at this point, automated tests that run, say for rates of return, it’s going to have 150 tests that check the simple parts of rates return, they check X dates with dividends. Every single situation that you would encounter is locked down in an automated test. So if you make a change to, I don’t know, maybe your market value calculation that accidentally changes something in your rates of return, you immediately know about it so the person who broke it can figure out what they did wrong and fix it. So there’s a lot of modern development techniques that have enabled us to do this without losing track of things and having the code base become a block of spaghetti code. That’s impossible to maintain.
Craig: A lot different than when you were programming Techfi 30 years ago.
Matt: Yes. No safety net or guide wires or anything back 20 years ago, state of development has come a long way.
How APIs Enable New Software
Craig: But it’s also allowed a lot of smaller firms to create tools that appear similar to yours. Now that’s because of the front end, the robust frameworks that are available now on the front end development, it’s much easier to build very good-looking interfaces that maybe don’t have so much behind them. And that’s what we see a lot with demos is a lot of bells and whistles and a lot of smoke and mirrors, but when you started digging deep, that’s why I like going into the weeds, because if you don’t go into the weeds, you can kind of get wowed by the bells and whistles.
Matt: Yeah. This is a tough industry on a few different levels, but that’s one of them. It’s hard to build an app that does something even if it looks really good that every advisor out there is slightly different. It still constantly amazes me just how many different slight little spins you can see on kind of what seems like the exact same type of rebalancing methodology and things like that. It’s rare that we run into somebody who is just plain vanilla, doesn’t need any customization or extra features or anything like that. And something that’s happened, this is good, but something that’s happened just in the last few years is that the front end technology, the ability to create these compelling screens and graphics, that’s really come a long way. There’s a few technologies that have come out there for single page apps we use React, which I think is the leading technology, took a big chance on it three or four years ago, but now that’s really paid off for us. But yeah, you can go out with just one or two, front end designers, create something that looks really good, but then you spend your next 5-10 years building out the back end as you start getting customer features with every single client that you sign up.
Craig: I want to get a little bit more into the weeds. I hopefully we won’t lose too many people. I want to talk about your pivot two years ago to using RESTful APIs. And I won’t get into the details of what a RESTful API is, but can you just explain what that is and why you chose it, and how that changed the way you build your platform?
Matt: I feel like I’ve almost been ahead of the curve, my entire career. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a positive way, because we were out there selling web based portfolio management before people really had a solid grasp on what the internet was. And like I mentioned, a lot of our challenges were just trying to describe what we’re trying to do. So that’s not necessarily a great spot to be in. I tend to see portfolio management technology in these waves of technologies that have hit, where it seems like it hits the mainstream. Then five years later, it trickles its way down to the space that we all live in. You know, this investment advisor, technology space. So internet was obviously a wave. The RESTful API, I think is a wave, also this modern, graphical interface, these single page apps are another wave.
So there’s two things going on that FinFolio is taking advantage of. The first is the REST API that you just mentioned. So this is almost like the database revolution where all of a sudden you’ve got with the databases, you have your information in one space, one place. It’s formatted in a way that makes sense, and you can start writing queries and pulling information out of it. The REST API is the same thing except for business logic. So if you were a user of say Techfi, or PortfolioCenter, when they were on the SQL databases, you could pull information out like transactions. You could pull up maybe like monthly rates of return because they were stored in the database. But if you wanted a point to point rate of return, or maybe realized gain or something like that, it just wasn’t there.
That was something that was calculated on the fly when you were running the report. So with the REST API, the information is there. It’s not stored, but the calculations from the stored data are available for you to query in a very similar way to how you can pull stuff out of the database. So the best example, I don’t think this is an appropriate forum for doing screen sharing and things like that, audio podcasts, but like I could open up a spreadsheet and then show you on the REST API, Hey, this is where you make a query to the database and you say, I want this account grouped by asset class with a rate of return, unrealized gain, and market value. And it generates this string that can be plugged into our web browser and it pulls back a data set. Or you can also plug it into your spreadsheet and it pulls back a data set into your spreadsheet.
And then boom, you’ve got essentially a report right there for you to format in Excel, Google Sheets, whatever you care to use and for a power user, you can start iterating on that. Next thing you know, you might have a 10 page spreadsheet that’s essentially your quarterly report, each one with a different data set that’s pulled out of this REST API. And FinFolio is leading the way on this. Some of our competitors have REST APIs, but they built them as afterthoughts. And what we did when we did our pivot two years ago, we built a REST API, we did that three years ago, and then started iterating on the screen design and things like that, and then waited until the REST API was mature and working and then built the front end entirely on top of that. So we don’t cheat.
We used to call this eating your own dog food. Like I think Microsoft coined that term where you you don’t just build something and then push it out to your users, you use it internally yourself. And that’s how your products get really solid. So we have the best API out there for professional wealth managers, everything that our main app does, everything that I was talking about with doing fixed trading and rebalancing, things like that. You can trigger it all from within the REST API, you could build a spreadsheet that would run your entire practice.
Craig: And I think that’s where you were not necessarily the cutting edge, but right in line with everyone. Everyone around three years ago, seemed like they were getting more into APIs four years ago. APIs, were really booming and REST API being a true internet based API built on the HTTP protocol was what was the dominant. So you’re right in line there, and building out your platform based on APIs is what everyone’s trying to retrofit their systems now too.
Matt: That’s right. And, a little self serving here, but if you don’t do this in the beginning, before you start writing your code, it’s always going to be this little add on. Again, you’ve got to eat your own dog food. Your own product should be using that API or else it’s never going to really solidify to the point where you can make the claim that you can do anything. You know, anything that our app can do, you can do programmatically through the API.
Why Not Become a TAMP?
Craig: When you built your company, you’re a pure technology company. There’s more portfolio management or what I call RIA platforms or advisory platforms out there that are adding, TAMP services. They’re adding investment management, launching their own RIAs to go along with technology, but you haven’t done that. Is that something you’re considering or are you, or you’re staying as a pure tech play?
Matt: Our plan is to stay as a pure tech play, and we’ve actually partnered with companies out there to help them build a TAMP. The way that we see it, our job stops at the point you would need fiduciary responsibility to do something. So we’ll give you the tools to have a single button that you click to rebalance your accounts, but we’re not going to click that button for you. And like I said, we prefer to partner with companies, I can give you names, Advisory Alpha comes to mind, they’re a TAMP out there servicing the low end of the market, smaller advisors, I should say, not really low end. Actually a lot of those guys are very sophisticated. But they deliver a really compelling service based on our technology, and we are happy to be the technology vendor to anybody who wants to build a TAMP platform. We don’t have any plans to do that ourselves.
Craig: Good to know. And what I also noticed is you have a very eclectic mix of broker dealers and custodians that you’re connected to. You know, most firms we talk to, they do the big four or not even maybe the big four, they just do two or three of them, but you’ve not only done the big four, which is soon to be the big three, but you’ve also got a lot of smaller ones like Interactive Brokers and M&T Bank. So why don’t you do that? I think that gives you a bit of an advantage with some RIAs.
Matt: Yeah, I think so. I think that to do this type of work, to sell this type of product, you’d need to have a commitment to always building out your interface library. You know, we’ve done it in a very smart way. We have an interface framework. It’s easier to add one more custodian to the platform than it would be for somebody starting fresh. And you need direct data feeds to do this right. There’s companies out there that do a reasonably good job at the screen scraping side of it, we’ve partnered with, ByAllAccounts, they do a very good job delivering it, but fundamentally they’re still in many cases, just pulling information off of a screen, literally scraping it. If they change the way the screen looks, all of a sudden the interface breaks and you have to go wait on them to catch up and get that data again. We continually build out our library of direct interfaces and as we sign up clients, sometimes they’ll come in and there’s one big custodian that they have to practice and we add a link to it.
Integrations Are Key
Craig: Before I forget, I really like your list of integrations. And there’s a couple of firms that do something similar. They post it on their website, and as a consultant, running a decent sized consulting firm, one of the things we look for is how these different tools integrate. And sometimes it’s hard to find that data, but firms like MoneyGuide, eMoney, they have it right on their website, all the integrations and you do the same thing, which I love. Here’s all the things we integrate with, click here to learn more. It’s very easy to find who you do and who you don’t integrate with. So why did you do that? What made you put that out there?
Matt: My default position is to be very, very open and publish everything. Why wouldn’t we put our list of integrations on the website?
Craig: Well, it sounds obvious now, but one of the things I notice is you have an integration with WordPress. I’ve never seen any wealth management firm, technology firm integrating with WordPress. Why do you have that there?
Matt: We used to actually do our client portal. This is pre-pivot and we about three, four years ago, we had a WordPress plugin that essentially let them take any report that was in our library and put it on a WordPress portal. And it ended up requiring a lot more WordPress expertise than we had thought going into it. So it’s not used very much anymore. It’s still out there. I’m not totally sure we have anybody actively using it at the moment.
Craig: I thought it was interesting when I saw it like, Oh, WordPress integration, never seen that before. So we’re running out of time. I have a whole bunch more questions for you. We’re going to have to schedule another interview soon. So let’s talk about some things you built from scratch and you built your own rebalancer. And I have a love for rebalancing, I built a rebalancer on one of the first projects I did in wealth management. Long time ago. So building from scratch is not an easy task. Why’d you do that? Why didn’t you go with an existing rebalancer and what are the advantages to having your own rebalancer?
Matt: It goes back to sort of the underlying philosophy behind how you build products. And you know, one way to do it is through M&A, mergers and acquisitions. You go acquire a block of code. You don’t look too closely at whether they write it in the same thing that you wrote your core product in, and you kind of integrate at a much higher level where you’re actually pushing data back and forth between different systems. That’s the fast way to do it. It gets you in a lot of cases, users coming in as you do the acquisition. But I feel that at the end of the day, it doesn’t result in as good and tight of a product as if you build it yourself. So the way that we’ve built everything, it all comes off of the same database. It is all written in the same technology.
In our case, it’s a C Sharp and it all works in the same way. We have it all locked down with test cases, I already mentioned that. So it’s harder to do it that way. It’s one of the reasons that it’s taken us a little while to build up steam with FinFolio, because at the surface area of what you have to build to be able to compete as much larger now. But now we have a rebalancer that is surfaced in the API in the exact same way that say our report engine to surfaced in the API, they all interact. You can write code that merges them all together. Like the rebalancer for example, uses some of the calculations that we have with the report engine. It checks realized, unrealized gain and then it’s all flowing through the same stack. So at the end of the day, you have a much smaller and tighter code base. It is easier to navigate as we bring in and train new developers. And I feel that it ultimately delivers a better final result too.
Craig: Those are all good points because it’s a constant battle between all-in-one and best of breed.
Matt: Yes, that’s right. Yes.
Craig: One other thing I want to talk about was your analytical tools. I’ve been writing a lot about AI and machine learning and how that’s sort of revolutionizing the way people think about wealth management. How are your analytical tools being used and how do you see them being used by your clients?
Matt: We have an area of our software and the API that we call dashboards, which is where you do firm level analytics. And you can run calculations and look across all of your accounts at once and make business decisions based on that, who’s generating a revenue, where’s it coming from? If you’re a larger firm, you need to worry about your reps from a producer standpoint, who’s adding accounts, who’s losing accounts or assets under management usually. So we have built that out. There’s a lot you can do, you can run rates of return. Mainly you worry about who’s adding or removing assets. You also can do that programmatically through the API, if you want to, you can pull this all into a spreadsheet and start doing analysis there. And this is a realtime spreadsheet that gets updated every time you hit F9 and it refreshes and repulls the data from the API. It’s really cool what you can do nowadays.
Craig: It certainly is. it’s always amazing, more and more tools being put into the hands of advisors and advisory firms, broker dealers, to make it easier to run their business, and also easier to see their data and move them up what we used to call the capability maturity model, become a more mature organization where you can optimize your business by looking at the underlying data, which wasn’t available before.
Matt: Yep. That’s right.
Craig: Well, Matt, we’re out of time and I appreciate you coming on and sharing and doing a deep dive on technology with me and kind of geeking out on the underlying tech of wealth management.
Matt: Yeah. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on.
Craig: We’re going to do it again. I’ve got a whole list of questions I didn’t get to ask. So thanks, have a great vacation today’s your first day on Sanibel Island, thanks again for taking the time out and enjoy.
Matt: Thank you. Take care.
