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“We really think for the next generation of clients and advisors, crypto is going to be like any other asset class. You have to have a solution for it. It has to be part of the financial plan in a way that today, it would sound absurd to us, if an advisor said that I don’t touch equities or I don’t touch tech stocks. That’s not part of my financial plan. That’s how crypto is going to be in the next 5-10 years, you’re not going to be able to ignore it.”
— Max Lane, Co-Head of Product, Flourish
The WealthTech Today podcast features interviews, news, and analysis on the trends and best practices in wealth and technology for wealth management, asset management, and related areas. This episode is part of our November focus on alternative investments. We’re talking to influential industry leaders who can provide technology solutions that help advisors build stronger relationships, improve outcomes, and enrich their clients’ lives. A quick shoutout to our sponsor, the Invest in Others Foundation, please go to InvestInOthers.org, and be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss future episodes.
Companies Mentioned
- Acorns [08:30]
- Coinbase [07:00]
- Gemini [07:00]
- Goldman Sachs [05:20]
- Kraken [07:00]
- MassMutual [02:46]
- Merrill Lynch [05:15]
- MoneyLion [08:30]
- Paxos [19:06]
- Stash [08:30]
Topics Mentioned
- From Flourish Cash to Crypto
- Crypto as Lead Gen for Advisors
- Starting With Bitcoin
- Will Advisors See on Their Screens?
- How Advisors Will Buy Bitcoin Through Flourish
Episode Transcript
Craig: I am excited to introduce our next guest, Max Lane, Head of Product for Flourish. Max, welcome to the program.
Max: Thank Craig, great to be here.
Craig: This is exciting. I’m super pumped about any special crypto products that are in the wealth management advisor broker dealer space and that’s what we’re here to talk about, Flourish Crypto. And so, can you please give us a 30-second overview of Flourish, and the company behind Flourish Crypto?
Max: Happy to and Craig, thanks for having me today, I’m really excited to dive in on crypto and Flourish. So Flourish overall, we’re a platform that provides innovative access to financial products that help our is registered investment advisors, secure their client’s financial futures, and to unpack unpack that a bit. What we really focus on is providing products in areas where end clients are underserved and they might be underserved because of regulatory reasons, technology reasons, practice management business model constraints, what have you. If we think they’re underserved, we’re hearing demand from RIAs, we see a need, we’re trying to overcome those blockers, overcome those hurdles and plug those gaps for the RIA so that they’ve got more tools in their toolkit to better serve their clients and help them secure their financial futures.
On top of that, how we do it, is we’ve got a what we call “it just works” product and design ethos here at Flourish. And so in finance and with financial products there can be a lot of complexity that can be overwhelming and intimidating, and we try to obfuscate all that complexity away from the advisors, away from the clients, and deliver our products, which are digital products, deliver digital solutions in a modern, simple, easy, delightful, experience for the advisors and the end clients. We really believe the end clients experience with Flourish is an extension of their overall experience with their advisor, and we want to make the advisors look good, we want to deepen that relationship, put advisors in a strong position.
On top of that we really see ourselves as the technology innovation engine for RIAs especially independent RIAs, who just simply don’t have the same war chests that the large financial institutions do to invest in technology for their end clients. So we really see ourselves as that engine for RIAs to help them deliver these digital products, stay competitive against these large financial institutions.
To date we’ve got over 400 RIAs on the platform. They collectively represent over a trillion in assets under management. We’re also a wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Mutual though we do operate separately from their existing wealth management and insurance departments. And we’ve got two products in the market, the first one being Flourish Cash, which launched in 2018 is a cash management solution, offers higher yield higher FDIC insurance for cash inside the portfolio and held away assets, all deeply embedded into the RIA workflow, piping into reporting systems, and we’re really excited to talk about is Flourish Crypto, which launched the last week of September. It’s a turnkey cryptocurrency investing solution for advisors, built from the ground up for advisors so advisors have the ability to take discretion if they so choose. It pipes back into their integration systems they can report on it, they can bill on it, we provide 1099 monthly statements, all delivered in a simple, secure, compliant manner for advisors, and so we’re really excited to talk about that today.
From Flourish Cash to Crypto
Craig: I am excited to talk about it as well but I want to roll back a bit, so full disclosure, we’ve done some work for you guys, not on this product, but on some other stuff. And I always liked the Flourish Cash idea, and the held away cash and be able to manage that, as you said, giving RIAs the capabilities that investment banks have to move their high net worth clients monies around. So, with the success of Flourish Cash with 400 advisor for on our RIAs and the assets, how did the idea for a crypto product come about?
Max: Good question. I think it really goes back to what we’re all about as a company, which is where are advisors underserved and how can we provide new innovative access for them. When we think about just the genesis of Cash which I’ll touch on quickly we can see where crypto came about. When we look at Cash back in 2017, we’re seeing that typical advisory client hat is worth say somewhere between $1-3 million. On top of that, or when you break that down, 10 to 20% of that is held in cash and advisors did not have good solutions for hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash. And on top of that they were losing these assets to competitive institutions who were putting out high yield savings accounts, internet only banks and really using those high yield savings accounts as acquisition tools into their wealth management divisions.
An article just came out in the Journal, Merrill Lynch is doing this, you can certainly look at Goldman Sachs’s strategy with Marcus and the acquisition of United Capital to see that savings tools, and cash management tools end up being lead generation into the deeper wealth management space. And so we said advisors need their version of a high yield savings account replacement that is non competitive that they can offer their clients that’s offered through them, embedded in their technology ecosystem and so that was really the driver of Flourish Cash. And when we take that same framework and apply it to crypto, we said, look, this is another area where advisors are underserved. We’ve really been seeing over the past, say, 18 months that we’ve been looking at crypto on and off for probably three or four years at this point but the past 18 months, we saw two key observations in the RIA market.
First, the conversations we were having with RIAs, the sentiment was rapidly changing was going from less of a neutral or even an anti stance towards crypto and saying, you know what, I need to get educated, and that has grown into not only do I need to get educated, I need to have a solution, because I have this bottom up demand from my clientele. The second observation was an analysis of the current product marketplace for crypto solutions for advisors. And what we realized is from talking to our advisors through tens if not hundreds of conversations, is they had three main options, up until recently. Number one, they could ignore it and secretly hope it would go away and say you know what we don’t touch crypto we don’t think you should either. That is starting to get phased out. Number two, they could send their clients to the major retail exchanges like a Coinbase like a Gemini like a Kraken. Easy to use product, but now you’ve created another held away asset that they can’t see they can’t touch they can’t build on. And then number three is they could use a host of private funds that trade over the counter that it’s great that they can access them inside the brokerage account, but they come with some meaningful trade offs. High minimums, accredited Investor qualifications liquidity constraints, don’t trade 24/7, on a 24/7 asset, and often come with high fees.
So we said you know what, there isn’t a great solution here and there certainly isn’t an RIA specific solution, we’re going to go build it with Flourish Crypto give them that secure, easy, compliant direct ownership model, and then build in all the advisor functionality they need. They can view on it, take discretion, tax reporting and all built in a compliant way thinking about the advisors act thinking about the custody rule, etc., to make sure not only the advisors are happy, but the compliance officers for the advisors are happy as well.
Craig: And that is important, compliance officers like to be happy. No one’s happy if they’re not happy.
Max: Exactly everybody else is happy if the compliance officer is happy.
Crypto as Lead Gen for Advisors
Craig: Indeed. But back to something you mentioned, good points about savings and cash management becoming the lead gen for wealth management. I’ve seen this trend over many years looking at firms like Acorns and Stash and MoneyLion and then come into the market from different angles, either from savings, micro savings roundups or lending, then working that into wealth management, do you see crypto as a lead gen for advisors into wealth management?
Max: That’s a great question, and we do. Especially for the next generation, not only of clients, but the next generation of advisors, and so crypto is really this new piece of technology that aside from it being an investable asset class, there’s lots of interest in the underlying technology and what’s going to come out of that ecosystem over time. We really think for the next generation of clients the next generation of advisors crypto is just going to be like any other asset class, you have to have a solution for it. It has to be part of the financial plan in a way that today, it would sound absurd to us, if an advisor said you know what I don’t touch, equities, or I don’t touch tech stocks, that’s not part of my financial plan. That’s how crypto is going to be in the next 5-10 years, you’re not going to be able to ignore it. You’ll have different approaches, you’ll have different opinions of how to own it and what you should own and what’s best for your client, just as you do today with any other asset class, but there’s no way you’re going to be able to full stop reject it and not have an answer and have it live outside.
And so we think that the advisors who adopt crypto and really invest the time in becoming educated on crypto and have a solution like Flourish Crypto, they’re going to be the ones that win out, they’re going to attract new clients because what we’re seeing is with that bottom up demand, clients are getting involved in crypto, whether it’s through their advisor or not. We feel strongly that they’d prefer to do it with their advisor, but if the advisor is going to reject it or refuse to embrace it and have the conversation, the client is going to go do it on their own, and then eventually, another advisor is going to embrace it and they’re going to take that client. And so, advisors, we believe every advisor in America needs to have somebody on their team who’s getting educated, looking at crypto, understanding what this means and figuring out how they’re going to implement it into their practice what solutions they’re going to use, etc.
Craig: I would agree. Mass Mutual acquired Flourish in February, and it seems to be the perfect company for you now, with this product considering they’re the private first insurance company that I know of that invested in Bitcoin in 2020 through NYDIG, they made $100 million investment into Bitcoin. So did that have anything to do with this or that just was a sort of icing on the cake and just maybe grease the wheels of the product?
Max: We kind of found kindred spirits let’s say in MassMutual leadership. We of course, you know, prior to the acquisition didn’t know you know what MassMutual’s plans were how they thought about crypto we had sort of secretly been looking at crypto for a while at that point and we’re starting to talk to RIAs and talk about a solution. And it was just serendipitous that by the time MassMutual got more public with their crypto stance in making that investment, and we had this on our roadmap, there were great synergies between the two organizations. It’s been fantastic, that we’ve been acquired by such a forward thinking company when it comes to crypto and a company who is willing to put their name out there and put resources behind this new asset class and really help us bring this to the RIA world. And on top of that, loved the support we’ve gotten from MassMutual with our Chief Investment Officer Tim Corbett, writing a great blog post about how MassMutual as a company thinks about crypto, how that plays into the broader MassMutual strategy, and we’re just really happy to be a part of it and really happy to have that support from our parent company.
Starting With Bitcoin
Craig: It seems opportune, seems like a great match. So, talking more about how this came about, looking at the features trading, transfers, billing, integrations, 1099 statements, how are you doing all that and this is all with Bitcoin right, the first crypto out of the gate is just Bitcoin?
Max: Just Bitcoin, and I’ll talk about how we’re doing it but just on the decision to start with Bitcoin first, I think it’s important to mention that we are a feedback driven product and technology organization and so we’re in the business of providing solutions for RIAs, and in those conversations we had to validate this product and craft this product. The overwhelming majority of those conversations, plus 90%, RIAs are only talking about Bitcoin. And if we look at how others in crypto and in mainstream have adopted crypto, everybody starts with Bitcoin everybody starts there, they learn about Bitcoin as the longest running cryptocurrency, and then maybe they evolve and expand on their crypto journey from there. Advisors and their clients have been no different, they’re just a little bit, I don’t think it’s controversial say, a little bit further behind the crypto market and their adoption.
Craig: Woah woah woah, what are you saying there? It’s pretty controversial.
Max: Is that controversial?
Craig: No, no it’s not.
Max: So just to clarify that is it’s not a philosophical stance of being a Bitcoin maximalist shop, or trying to pick winners in this rapidly evolving crypto space, ti’s just saying that’s what the RIA need is, that’s what the demand is, we’re going to start there and then expand over time.
And then to your question about how are we doing all of this, we are first and foremost, a team of technologists, we’re engineers, we’re products, we’re designers. We want to build the best products for advisors, and so we were well equipped to go interact with the traditional financial institutions, deal with the RIA technology ecosystem to make sure crypto plugs in a way that it’s easy to use for RIAs and for clients.
On the client side, you can open an account in a couple of minutes, you can fund an account from an existing Flourish Cash account, or you can move money in from an external bank account into your Flourish Crypto account, really simple trading to buy and sell Bitcoin, easy statements and, and, and balanced views to see your balance over time to your positions. And then on the advisor side, it’s all about plugging into their existing workflows, and that’s where those technology stack integrations with their systems is so important, reporting back into the Tamarac, Orion, eMoney and Black Diamonds so advisors just bring it into their existing workflow when they think about consolidated client views portfolio management, consolidated reporting billing floors crypto is just another piece of that.
Will Advisors See on Their Screens?
Craig: This is an area that I know a lot about and how does this work? So you have Tamarac, Orion, and Black Diamond, three of the biggest providers of RIA platform technology eMoney, one of the biggest providers of financial planning technology. I’m in Tamarac, I’m looking at my Tamarac rebalancer I’m looking at my portfolios, how does the Flourish Crypto product appear, does it doesn’t look like a mutual fund, does it look like a stock, what am I seeing on my screen?
Max: It’s a good question. For many of these providers we’re their first crypto solution. And so sort of depends on the provider of how it will look sometimes it’s kind of an alternative asset or a miscellaneous asset that you can name, we’re working with them over time though to make crypto a specific type of asset to appear on those screens. As far as the data you get though it is very similar to what you would see in an equity or fund position, you’re going to get your quantity, how many, how many units of a cryptocurrency do your clients hold inside of a specific account, you’re going to get market value information, you’re going to get price information, you’re going to see transactions. And what’s so great about that and what’s so important is, you’ll see that for in all the ways crypto is new and different and maybe a bit overwhelming, in a lot of ways it’s a lot like other things advisors are used to. You have quantities, you have market values, you have prices, you have transactions. And so hopefully that is going to go a long way towards driving advisor adoption of Flourish Crypto and crypto more broadly to see we can model this we can bring this into our practice.
Craig: Alright so I got it I gotta beat you up a second so you said, it looks like an alternative asset that you can name. Does that does that mean it’s like a one off manually inserted holding or is it something that feeds automatically and prices update automatically?
Max: The price is a manual feed so I should back up. The integrations are for Flourish holistically. And so if you’ve got a client John Doe who’s got a Flourish Cash account and a Flourish Crypto account, all of that data is going to flow into you automatically. You’re going to get daily positions daily transactions, just like you would any other feed from another provider. It’s all automatic, how exactly it shows up on a Tamarac or Orion, I don’t want to speak too specifically. Some of them put it in different classes and give you different functionalities around how you want to handle it. But from our side, what’s important is, all of that data is flowing in automatically. It’s not a manual workflow. You do not need to be manually updating positions. Everything is automatically fed in.
Craig: Good. That’s good to hear because the advisors do not need another manual feed, manual updates, they’ve got enough of that. And with so this is going through a separate custodian called called Paxos, so if I’m an Orion customer and I clear through Fidelity for all my assets, now Paxos looks like another custodian that Orion is now handling on their multi custodial platform, correct?
Max: You’ll actually see Flourish, and I think that’s the beauty of the Flourish platform is with Cash and Crypto what you’ll see sitting from a proverbial Orion dashboard is Flourish is a custodian that you can pipe into your system so you don’t need to worry about Paxos on the other side, when it comes to the reporting side of it.
Craig: Cool. All right, but still, that’s what these tools do these are multi custodial platforms so they’re bringing in the data from Flourish as a custodian or what appears to be a custodian to them, and fidelity Orion or whatever their custodian is. Now you talk about units. Are these units of Bitcoin? 1.0 means I’ve got a full Bitcoin or is it some other like a GBTC kind of unit?
Max: No, and I think this is a key, key point when we think about Flourish Crypto versus the other solutions out there. This is a direct ownership solution. And so, we’ve made it really easy for RIAs and their end clients to directly own Bitcoin. When a client buys Bitcoin on Flourish Crypto, they are owning units of Bitcoin which for those who are familiar with crypto the smallest unit of a bitcoin is called a Satoshi, which goes out to eight decimal places.
Craig: 1/100,000,000th of a Bitcoin.
Max: Correct.
Craig: Which will soon be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, we’ll all be filthy rich.
Max: That’s right, that’s right. So anybody who works on the operational side of the house will love the precision Bitcoin provides.
Craig: Maybe, they might go, what the hell is this, eight digits?
Max: A new world. Our end clients will own Bitcoin directly, and so to your question about when I’m looking at an Orion dashboard. And I see units pop in or a quantity pop in, you are looking at exactly the number of units of Bitcoin that an end client owns. There’s no fund in the middle, there’s no vehicle in the middle, and this is really an intentional decision on our side because we believe direct ownership of crypto is the most efficient way and best way to own crypto right now. It’s more cost effective, because it’s more cost effective, we don’t have any account minimums, there’s no liquidity constraints, and you can trade it 24/7 because it’s a 24/7 market. We don’t have high fees relative to some of the private funds out there, no accredited investor qualifications. So when you’re looking at crypto and getting your clients into crypto you need to take all this into account, to make sure that you’re accessing crypto in the most efficient best way possible.
How Advisors Will Buy Bitcoin Through Flourish
Craig: I agree with you 100%. However, I’m going to take issue that this can’t be. Of course we all know Bitcoin trades 24/7. But I’m an advisor, and I’m on Tamarac or Orion, can I put an order to buy crypto through Orion, or do I have to go to the Flourish crypto website to place the buy order?
Max: Right. So, initially the initial integrations that we have with Tamarac, Orion, eMoney, and Black Diamond are on the data and reporting side. And because it’s a new asset class, as you can appreciate, there’s lots to be figured out on both sides, on how to get this fully integrated so that is all in there going to be piping in so you can report on it you can see it. Trading integrations between these two systems is something that we’re going to actively be investing on in short order with our partners there. And so, for now I don’t know the answer to that question but we are going to get trading integration build it into the order management software, we’ll need to see sort of what limitations we’ll have around timing there but on the Flourish side, you will always be able to trade 24/7 or on a weekend or on a holiday if you need to. And the beauty of Flourish Crypto is because it’s a turnkey solution, advisors will always have their own dashboard that they can access directly, the same way if you wanted to you could access the Schwab platform directly and place trades there, if you needed to. And so I think that’s the important piece here is direct ownership gives you that option, where if you’re going through a private fund or security route, you don’t have that option full stop on any dashboard, the market’s closed.
Craig: Of course, so this is a 1.0 I mean we all know that’s better to get a 1.0version out a minimum viable product test the market, see how it works. I’m all for it. But just to be clear, if you want to buy or sell Bitcoin through the Flourish Crypto, you need to go to the Flourish Crypto website to do that, buying and selling, then the data will flow through as a custody feed into Orion, Black Diamond, Tamarac or eMoney.
Max: Right. That’s correct. And I think that’s really an important feature because as you can appreciate, advisors are in different journeys when they think about their crypto adoption in their practice. And so we’re seeing a smattering of advisors that want to go discretionary, and then we’re seeing a, I’d say a larger population that is going to do a mix discretionary maybe for some clients non discretionary for others, or to start non discretionary. Meaning if it’s non discretionary, the end client who owns the account, absolutely has to have a tool to interact with their account, place trades on their own behalf, and then the benefit to the advisor is all that’s going to pipe back in. You have to have be able to support both of those options because that’s where the RIA market is right now it’s a mix of I’m going to take discretion, or I’m not or I’m going to pick and choose depending on the client relationship.
Craig: Of course. Got it. I can talk about this for hours, but we’re running out of time. So, on your website, it says, hot/cold storage insurance. Can you tell explain for people who don’t know what that means, hot and cold storage, and how do I switch between them? Can I say well I want hot storage meaning I want Flourish to hold it, or I can say cold storage, I want this Bitcoin now on my ledger hardware wallet, is that what you’re talking about?
Max: No, not exactly. So the way we built Flourish Crypto is to be that turnkey solution to take these decisions out of the equation so that we, in conjunction with our partner at Paxos, manage the custody of the crypto on your end clients behalf. Now, as you know Craig, there are going to be people, certainly in the crypto community and maybe some of the RIA market, who want to go the self custody route of holding crypto, holding Bitcoin on their own hard wallet. If they want to make that decision that is fine. We’re really trying to solve the problem for the other part of that population which is they don’t want to self custody, they don’t feel comfortable with it. They want to have a solution that does it for them in an easy to use way. And so that’s what we’ve built with our partners at at Paxos, and the breakdown of hot and cold is really built into the system we have with Paxos. For those who don’t know, cold is basically holding your crypto at rest in an offline wallet, which just makes it sit relatively safer, where a warm or a hot wallet is when a crypto is about to be in flight, so think you’re about to trade you’re about to exchange it for US dollars. You have to take it out of that cold kind of safety secure box, because you need to move it elsewhere in exchange for dollars, typically.
So that’s what hot and cold is at a high level, Paxos manages that whole process for us, and what Paxos has done as one of the leading crypto custodians in this space has gone and gotten private insurance on their hot and cold wallet system.
Craig: I see.
Max: This is something that not every crypto custodian has, this is a key point that RIAs who are looking to bring a crypto solution, and they think about not only the qualified custodian problem or the qualified custodian requirement and the custody rule and best execution and books and records and all of that. On the crypto side, they should be looking at custodians who have insurance have protection, have the most secure system possible, because in crypto there is no equivalent of FDIC SIPC and so that’s going to be a unique difference when ra firms are doing due diligence on crypto solutions, and who you choose as a custodian, is a huge, huge, huge, important question when you’re looking at onboarding a crypto solution.
Craig: So would this be hacking insurance in case Paxos gets hacked and loses keys?
Max: So the details of the insurance really depend custodian to custodian. For Paxos, I can’t speak specifically how their insurance works without, without an NDA as you can appreciate, there’s some privacy and how they design their security system, and that keeping it private and keeping it proprietary is a security feature. And so, with any RIAs who want to be due diligence-ing Flourish Crypto, that information can be provided, but I’m not at liberty to disclose the details of insurance.
Craig: If that’s a differentiator, I don’t want to know their specific technology they’re using to secure their storage, my question is, is it hacking insurance? Meaning does the insurance come into play in case they get hacked.
Max: Right, and that is a really important question when you’re doing due diligence. What I can say is insurance covers many risks. The specifics of those risks for the insurance and policy, I’m not at liberty to disclose publicly at this time.
Craig: On the product roadmap, what’s coming? Are we going to see more cryptos? You already mentioned as more trading, hopefully you’ll be integrating with the portfolio rebalancing tools so I can go into Orion or Black Diamond or Tamarac and run a portfolio rebalance and say, hey I want to allocate, I want to keep my Bitcoin at 1% and bitcoins going up so I’m going to sell some bitcoin to keep it a 1% and then the rebalancer can do all that, I imagine that’s coming. What else is coming?
Max: Yeah, so I’d say the going back to the conversations we’ve been having with RIAs, as I said, the vast majority of were Bitcoin only focused conversations. What we’ve seen over the past several months is those conversations have started to expand beyond Bitcoin with Ethereum being the the next convention mentioned after Bitcoin, and then maybe a longer tail of other crypto products afterwards. We are planning to roll out Ethereum here in short order, add it to flourish crypto so that you could purchase both Bitcoin and Ethereum and hold it all in the same Flourish Crypto account.
The nice thing about Bitcoin and Ethereum is that there has been SEC guidance that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. That’s a really important piece of information for RIAs to take into account when they think about the tokens that they might be offering to their clients, and I’d say from the Flourish Crypto standpoint, we’re in the business of providing solutions providing access. We are team of technologists that’s well positioned to move where the demand is as far as rolling out new crypto products or new tokens, but we do think beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum is a real question around the regulatory guidance for the other tokens. For RIAs who are thinking about a solution they really should be looking at this, getting educated on what the SEC has said, read the risk alerts, and we’ll be watching very closely to see if the SEC or other regulators give more guidance give a framework, how RIAs can think about other tokens beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Craig: There are a lot of tokens, they don’t seem to stop. But yeah, the most important ones clearly are the top holders, but are you thinking of doing any DeFi, such as lending products?
Max: I think it’s I think it’s a similar view from our side of, we watch both the regulatory landscape in crypto and the crypto ecosystem overall very closely. There’s lots of interesting projects going on in DeFi with lending or yield generation, lots of peer to peer protocols. I think that it’s an exciting time if you’re somebody who is a big believer in financial technology and how this technology can impact our financial lives in the future. But again it come back to that regulatory piece of without that regulatory guidance, it’s just a different equation for RIAs and I think an example of this is when we talk about Flourish Crypto to folks who are not familiar with the advisory space, they don’t fully understand what we’ve done, and it’s because on the retail side, there’s so many great options out there to get involved in crypto, and the reality is is advisors have been left behind. And it’s because advisors have a unique set of needs, they operate under a unique regulatory regime. They cannot move as quickly into crypto as a do it yourself investor who wants to experiment with DeFi, wants to experiment with a new protocol, they have to take into account the regulatory guidance. And so, from where we sit at Flourish Crypto, we take that into account we watch that closely. Again we’ll move where we think the demand is and what’s going to best serve RIAs and their end clients, but have to watch that regulatory piece as well.
Craig: So the answer is, stay tuned.
Max: Stay tuned. That’s right.
Craig: Awesome. Well this has been fantastic Max thanks so much for taking the time. Sorry I beat you up a little bit. I just have a lot of questions, I still many more questions but I’d love to get a demo and see some more I’m sure advisors listening and broker dealers listening will also be interested, where can they go to find more information?
Max: Yeah so you can come to Flourish.com, and I think the last thing I’d like to add Craig which I think you’ll appreciate is just to all your listeners out there, all the advisors who are thinking about crypto, the time is now. Don’t wait for some abstract milestone that that may or may not come. There are great solutions now to get involved, Fourish Crypto being a great solution for advisors. There’s guidance from the SEC on what you can get involved in and how to think about this, and there was a great quote from Ric Edelman recently that he said, he’s been saying a Bitcoin ETF is coming in six months for six years. And we hear that a lot from certain advisors, I’m waiting for the ETF and waiting for this and waiting for that. How much longer are you going to wait if your clients are ready?
As we talked at the top, other advisors are going to adopt crypto solutions that is going to be the way forward, they’re going to be the ones who compete. The time is now, get educated, get involved, start having conversations. www.Flourish.com. We’re here to help you with that journey, help with that education help with those conversations.
Craig: Excellent Max thanks so much.
Max: Thanks, Craig. Really appreciate it.