The WealthTech Podcast Transcript

Guest: Kartik Srinivasan, Adyzon Auria

Host: Mark Wickersham

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Mark Wickersham: all right. Welcome to The WealthTech Podcast. I am happy to have you on the show. Would you mind giving a brief introduction of yourself, and advise on.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, sure great to be here, Mark. So yeah, I'm Karthik Srinivasan. I I'm president of our institutional business at Advise on.

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Kartik Srinivasan: I joined advise on close to a year and a half ago and I head up our offerings for the ultra high net worth and family office space which is a newer part of our expansion into different segments and products at advise on so excited to be here and look forward to our conversation.

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Mark Wickersham: Great. So you've recently launched a a new family office, a specific product, Aurea.

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Mark Wickersham: Could you talk a little bit about that that offering. What? Why, the launch, what? What's the focus? What makes it different.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah. Sure. So you know, advise on. Has been around for 1212 years, 12 plus years the core product has been in market for 10 years, and you know we've started

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Kartik Srinivasan: by serving ria firms and have grown quite significantly. We serve over well over 2,000 firms today, and as we as we sort of kept growing in the RIA space we would encounter firms that either were

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Kartik Srinivasan: family offices like a multifamily office, or at least serving ultra high net worth investors. And they had some unique needs that advise on really wasn't built to serve most of our clients are serving the mass affluent, or the high net worth, but not really clients that have, like over 2030, 50 million in assets. But we were starting to see that, and realized that there was a huge opportunity

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Kartik Srinivasan: to enter the ultra high net worth space with a differentiated offering. And so we, we decided that the time was right to set up a new business build a new product that was

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Kartik Srinivasan: that really took the advice on core product offering and extended it into

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Kartik Srinivasan: the family office. Ultra high net worth space with some purpose built capabilities. And so yeah. The, you know, we feel like it's a it's an untapped market the family office ultra high net worth is looking for a

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Kartik Srinivasan: bundled solution that really can help solve a lot of the pain points that exist in that space. So that's why we created Aurea. And we're really excited to enter the space and provide a new solution for firms in that market.

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Mark Wickersham: That's great. There's definitely, obviously, it's a dynamic market. There's a lot of growth in that area. And you see a lot of overlap with the single family office as well. Multifamily office, and having

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Mark Wickersham: kind of common needs and serving that ultra high net worth individual, especially around, you know, alternative investments

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Mark Wickersham: and the need to be able to be multi asset class. One of the things that that kind of makes advise on unique. I think when you take a look at the kind of the comprehensive or the all-in-one solutions within the the family office space is around

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Mark Wickersham: CRM and workflows. I think on the family office side in particular. CRM. Kind of gets overlooked a little bit. Can you talk to me about that? What? Why is that part of your secret sauce? Why is the CRM so important? And how does that differentiate Aurea in the marketplace.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, certainly. So the CRM you know, we decided to build CRM into advise on a couple of years into our journey. And at that point a lot of folks were like, well, just integrate with what's out there? Why, build it and so. But we? We really felt that we could build a more tightly woven experience by building it ourselves and

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Kartik Srinivasan: And so we started building the CRM and fast forward many years. Now we're one of the highest rated CRMs in the Ria space, according to a lot of the surveys out there. Whether it's the Kitces survey or the T3 survey. So you know, our, our CRM is a very robust system. It does everything from emailing calendar management to notes, tasks, workflows

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Kartik Srinivasan: automations. And so obviously, they're huge value for the ria space we have strong usage of CRM and combining with the core portfolio accounting, reporting platform. It provides a lot of efficiencies

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Kartik Srinivasan: when we you know, launched Oria and started talking to a lot of family offices @firstst you know, I was somewhat skeptical about how important CRM was going to be in in a family office setting. Given that obviously a single family office. It's just one family, maybe multiple members. But there wasn't a need for sort of a

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Kartik Srinivasan: CRM. In the traditional sense of managing. You know, hundreds of relationships and whatnot. But what we found is it? It was very important for family offices to really, have

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Kartik Srinivasan: really great information, engagement, and communication going on with the family members with the centers of influence, and so having the CRM system that could really be that point of contact. For where all emails are centralized in one area, all the documents are centralized

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Kartik Srinivasan: the ability to kind of do notes and tasks and workflows at every level of a family office, whether that's at the family level, the households, the individual members

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Kartik Srinivasan: to obviously the investment accounts, but then also to things like assets like, whether it's a home or a car or an art collection being able to have

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Kartik Srinivasan: notes and tasks, workflows, document management, all of that tied to those various levels. Really wasn't something that exists in the market with a solution that also does things like reporting balance, sheet

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Kartik Srinivasan: performance, portfolio accounting, etc, so that that was very valuable. As we started having conversations with a lot of firms was, you know they would. They would have a separate system for for client communications and task management and whatnot, and it was disconnected from their broader reporting solution. It did not have the same data model of, like their entity structures

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Kartik Srinivasan: in the CRM versus their accounting system. And so given that we're all

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Kartik Srinivasan: the Aurea platform. Everything is single data model, single source code. We're just able to weave the CRM components into every aspect of the family. And every record in our in our database. So that was really powerful. And where we saw a lot of excitement from our clients and prospects is how just, how tightly connected the CRM aspect is within the broader platform.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think if you take a look at some of the comprehensive systems out there, CRM is probably the most underwhelming component of it. But maybe family offices don't necessarily have the marketing component of it. They're not necessarily bringing on new clients, but they certainly have entity management components of it. Lots of 3rd party relationships fund managers, dozens and dozens of not only entities that they're managing, but 3rd party relationships that they're managing to be able to see that in a

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Mark Wickersham: kind of a succinct relationship view, I think, is incredibly powerful. You've had a chance both, you know, at Schwab you manage 3rd party integrations now with advise on. So you've you've been on both sides of the the best of breed versus the all in one camp. I'd love to be able to get your perspective. Given your front row seat on on that. About how should firms be thinking about which technology approach

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Mark Wickersham: to take and and what your kind of perspective is on on both camps.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, obviously, I'm gonna be a little biased here. But given again, you mentioned like my experience at Schwab, where obviously, I headed up all the 3rd party integrations, relationships, partnerships. I did get a really good view of

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Kartik Srinivasan: all the solutions in the market serving the Ria and family office space. And so you know, I think couple of things I'll mention is one it's

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Kartik Srinivasan: every firm is gonna have its own unique needs. And so they're gonna there's gonna be a best of breed type solution.

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Kartik Srinivasan: which is gonna be a better fit for a certain type of family office or wealth manager versus a different firm may prefer and move towards more of the comprehensive bundled solution. So so I'm certainly not gonna say that you know, all in one or bundle is always the right answer each firm is gonna have to kind of think about what their unique needs are.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Take a look at the solutions and then put together the right technology stack. But I would say the the promise of the best of breed was.

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Kartik Srinivasan: we're gonna be super laser, focused on one particular vertical and be really good at it. And we're gonna integrate with

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Kartik Srinivasan: systems that are in other areas that we're not gonna touch. And so at a high level, that vision sounded good. But where it fell apart is that integration really did not deliver.

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Kartik Srinivasan: You just don't have that tight integration between a lot of the best of breed systems. And there isn't the motivation to invest heavily

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Kartik Srinivasan: to integrate and maintain and keep innovating on that integration. And so what we have seen is a lot of systems out there. They say that, hey? We've got 100 200 300 integrations. But if you start looking at the quality of the integration, it tends to be very

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Kartik Srinivasan: lightweight, like single sign on maybe a a 1 way data feed or a 1 way. Api. But it really does not solve the pain points and challenges and workflow needs that most family offices and wealth managers are looking for. So I think what happens is a lot of firms end up picking the best of breed.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Thinking that. Yep, I've got the best of each of these verticals, but but then, once they start using it, they quickly realize that

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Kartik Srinivasan: data is inconsistent. They're ending up, spending a lot of time switching between applications, trying to figure out and get that complete picture. And they end up wasting time. And so one thing we've seen in our surveys of our clients is.

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Kartik Srinivasan: firms are saving hours and hours, and sometimes days in a week, just because of the tight integration we've got.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Between all the various capabilities in our system, whether it's the performance reporting CRM document management portal, all of that. And so when a

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Kartik Srinivasan: bundled or all in one solution is built the right way, and each of the components does provide the depth and of and breadth of capabilities that firms are looking for. I feel like that ends up saving advisors a lot of time delivering much greater value, and also delivering a better user experience overall.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I I think there's, you know, there, there's pros and cons to both sides, and no one right? Answer for all firms. But there is a right answer for each firm. Right? I think it depends on their

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Mark Wickersham: technology personality. You do see in in a lot of surveys out there that that advisors are still would rank lack of integration as one of the biggest pain points they face in

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Mark Wickersham: in in the, in the firm with technology. It's still one of the areas that that probably still has a way to go. You do see some cases where

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Mark Wickersham: vendors have really committed to each other to have tighter integrations. But not every vendor has tight integrations with everybody within your particular tech stack, so that could be a challenge, and they change over time, or they can wither over time right? Due to lack of attention. And it is, I think, firms that

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Mark Wickersham: are gonna go. The best of breed approach need to realize there's probably an additional level of overhead and cost with that that they need to be involved in that process and put that work in to make sure that those integrations are good. They can be and work with their vendors to make sure that they integrate tightly. Based on your.

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Mark Wickersham: you know.

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Mark Wickersham: experience both at Schwab and advise on where do vendors kinda in the space when it comes to client experience and implementation. Where?

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Mark Wickersham: What? What makes an event to succeed in those areas? And where do you see vendors kind of falling a little short.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, I mean, I I would say, implementation certainly is. Is gonna be

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Kartik Srinivasan: it. It's difficult. I mean, each implementation has its own nuances, uniqueness depending on the types of technology tools that firms were using, the amount of history they have in there, how much customization they did in those tools. And so it does vary from for each case. And so I think the keys to success there are really, ensuring that 1st of all, that there is a very strong

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Kartik Srinivasan: technology process and experience in terms of converting data from one given source into

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Kartik Srinivasan: the system that they're moving into. For, for instance, you know, we at advise on, we've built database conversions from all the leading portfolio, accounting and management systems as well as the leading CRM systems, and we've converted hundreds and hundreds of firms over the last years. And so with each one, we get better at it. We've seen now a different

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Kartik Srinivasan: sort of use case or something unique, which we are now able to go in and make it even better. So the 1st 2 or 3 are going to be. You know, they're not gonna work per perfectly. They're gonna have some issues. But I would say, as as a firm gets more and more experience converting a given system.

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Kartik Srinivasan: it just gets better over time. And so, you know, for instance, we're really good at converting data from all the major systems that I mentioned. But it's taken years to get there. And so so I would say that one thing is obviously having the technical capability to move data from

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Kartik Srinivasan: System X into your system. That is something that's important. Whenever a firm is talking to a new technology vendor. They need to really dig deeper and ask questions around.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Have you converted data from this system to that? What is your experience? Can you outline? What are the various data points you bring in? How much history are you bringing in? Are you bringing in just the returns or the actual

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Kartik Srinivasan: transactional pricing all that history. Because the you know, the reports that you can run and the data that you can get is gonna vary, quite a lot depending on the actual type of conversion that's being done. And so those are all very key elements in a successful implementation is.

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Kartik Srinivasan: does the technology process exist? Is it tried and tested? And how much experience does the does the vendor have in doing those conversions?

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Kartik Srinivasan: And then, you know, a lot of times it is. Gonna take longer than potentially what they're saying. It's gonna take. So just have a buffer of time. You know. Don't.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Don't have a a renewal coming up in like 3 months, and then

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Kartik Srinivasan: quit the contract and then select a new vendor because you want to make sure you give enough time to run both systems in parallel.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Maybe do one month, or at least one quarter of reporting cycle. If it's a portfolio counting conversion so that you're able to compare both systems and look at the accuracy of the returns and the output of the reports and whatnot. Right? That's really important. So ensure that you've got enough time on your contract to in order to successfully test out that conversion, and you're not Really.

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Mark Wickersham: Not under the gun right.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Right. That's super important. And then, just you know, you need to be. Training. Training is very critical. The implementation itself could go successfully. But if the advisory firm or the family office doesn't adopt a good training and onboarding protocol within their firm in order to use that new technology that they've just spent a lot of money to adopt.

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Kartik Srinivasan: You're going to have a failure, because now people change is difficult. People don't love change, even if it's moving from a legacy system to a better technology, it is still going to be change. You're going to do things differently. And so it is important to have a very, very

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Kartik Srinivasan: thorough onboarding and training and all and implementation program and work with your new vendor to implement that. Ensure that all the users at your firm are trained, educated, and know how to use the new system.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Because otherwise, if you don't get the adoption you're, you've really spent a lot of time and money on something that that you're not gonna get the full use out of. So so it's important to think through the technology, the process? Who are the people who are driving the implementation and the change ensure that you've got accountability for the right people at your farm who are in charge of that training, the onboarding the implementation?

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Kartik Srinivasan: And then you know, if you put all of that together, you can have a a successful implementation.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, change is hard. And it's just human nature. No matter what the change is.

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Mark Wickersham: it can be a difficult process for people to go through. You sometimes see firms. They'll spend 12 months evaluating and selecting a system, and then expect it to be stood up in in 3 months, and accounting conversions and implementations are hard portfolio accounting general ledger accounting, counting conversions are they're not easy. Even the best ones are can be difficult to go through, and I think

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Mark Wickersham: firms family office in particular, want to have a lot of historical data. But the historical data, the data quality, could be somewhat suspect, and that can add on to the length of the implementation. So I think your advice on on having a buffer

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Mark Wickersham: have some room for case things that that pop up that were unexpected is good advice as well. You really don't want to be under the gun to do a hard conversion, because you have a system that's gonna be shut off, or you have a system that's no longer being supported by the vendor. You see that a lot, too, where

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Mark Wickersham: they're on some legacy system. They probably should have been off it a while ago, because the vendor stopped supporting it. And then they're really under the gun because they're under a hard deadline to be able to do that conversion, and that that just puts everybody the vendor, the client the staff on under a lot of stress. When it comes to user experience. I think that's 1 area that you see on the institutional side. That that is.

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Mark Wickersham: it's better now, but it's been lacking, I think, especially even on the family office side, in particular, around quality design, user-centric design.

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Mark Wickersham: Talk to me about that and talk to me about the approach that advise on has had in terms of the user experience and the importance of a quality user experience.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, certainly. Yeah, definitely, we put a lot of premium on that user experience. We want our product and our tools to be intuitive, easy to use and solve actual pain points and critical things that advisors and wealth, managers and family offices are looking to do. I think sometimes we feel like we see a lot of products in the b 2 b institutional space that

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Kartik Srinivasan: just have a lot of features. It's just a laundry list of features and

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Kartik Srinivasan: customizations, and we can do 500 different reports, and it's it gets overwhelming. The key question is. Well, you've got a lot of features. But what are the actual pain points that you're solving? What are the how are you solving a key workflow like a capital call you might. You might have all these bells and whistles. But if you can't solve a very fundamental

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Kartik Srinivasan: common workflow and a process that happens at a family office that allocates a lot to alternatives like a capital call. How do you process it from

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Kartik Srinivasan: step one to step? 10. You know, does it? Does it? Is it intuitive? Is it easy for you to do it? And is it quick? That's what it's all about. And that's, you know, the the experience of that, the

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Kartik Srinivasan: the ability to automate it, do it quickly is more important than having a a very beautiful user experience, or having a lot of different features and reports and whatnot. So so we try to think of it as

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Kartik Srinivasan: when we talk to advisors who ask us to do certain things. We we like to ask why and and why are you looking to do that? And then, just to help us better understand, you know. Get to the bottom of it. What is the real pain point? What are they looking to achieve? And why are they looking to do it a certain way, and that can help uncover things that

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Kartik Srinivasan: you know superficially, we may just build a feature, but if we ask the questions around why? And and we come to the to really the the crux of the matter, we can solve and provide a better solution, a better workflow

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Kartik Srinivasan: and a better experience for for the firm. And so so I think we we put a lot of premium on that is, really collaborating with our clients, asking a lot of questions and then and really just testing testing it to see? Or how. How can we better

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Kartik Srinivasan: provide a a a solution to these pain points? They're having without necessarily complicating the process and building a lot of

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Kartik Srinivasan: UI to solve it. And I think this is why also, AI is going to be very powerful, and I know we'll talk more about AI here. But just the fact that AI agents can in the background be doing a lot of this work for clients instead of having them go into a UI and click on a hundred different buttons to execute on a task.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Having these AI agents can also be powerful and really help make the overall experience better for clients and wealth managers.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, think that's a good point. You know, you could have a AI agent that- that just does the cap call. And we'll focus on on that or

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Mark Wickersham: you could have, you know, the ability to have a conversation with you, data around reporting with the like large language models and to be able to ask good questions. I do think around

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Mark Wickersham: user centric design. I think it's

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Mark Wickersham: to your point, like what is what is the goal of the task. What are the problems they're trying to solve? And how simple can you make it? And can you reduce it to that level where where it's just that you're solving the task and no more. I think that some of these products can get so bloated that and complicated. I think that that's the more features you add, the more complication you have. And

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Mark Wickersham: when you see products that need a lot of training that tends to be that kind of key indication, not to say that the training is important and people should have training, but when they need to be thoroughly trained on how to do a capital. They know how to do their job. The product should facilitate them doing their job in a natural way. So I think having a user centric design usability testing are really important. It's great to see the importance of that.

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Mark Wickersham: Let's talk about AI. How do you see AI impacting the wealth management, industry in general, and also advise on in particular.

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Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah. Yeah. So it, certainly. We do see AI having a pretty high impact on the wealth management space in general.

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Kartik Srinivasan: You know, it's definitely getting to a point where you're seeing every

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Kartik Srinivasan: firm in the industry, whether it's large enterprise wealth management firms down to

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Kartik Srinivasan: startups are investing quite heavily in AI coming out with AI strategies what their AI roadmap and playbook is gonna look like. So so it is it is gonna have a huge impact. And there's gonna be

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Kartik Srinivasan: we've started to see, obviously, a lot of innovation in this space. For instance, if we look at AI note taking and meeting management tools, right? We

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Kartik Srinivasan: it seemed like

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Kartik Srinivasan: overnight. We saw, like dozens and dozens of these tools come out. And that's a it's a great sign. It's the 1st sign of like innovation. And you, you see, a lot of startups pop up that are solving this critical pain point, which is, you sit in a meeting for an hour, and at the end of that meeting, how many times have you been like, what did we actually talk about? And I I don't remember if there was any takeaways. And

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Kartik Srinivasan: and so that it having that AI note taker really be there and solving for that, while you can be kind of 100 focused and engaged in the conversation. That's just important that it helps advisors with their client communications, helped internal teams and all that. So that's 1 example that we've seen of. A lot of AI innovation. And and over time we'll probably see

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Kartik Srinivasan: the dozens of AI note taking tools whittled down to maybe a few of them. But we're gonna see that in every area, right? Whether it's in the CRM financial planning estate planning. We're seeing a lot of AI use when it comes to anytime. There's a lot of unstructured data

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Kartik Srinivasan: documents, Pdfs that are involved, the value of AI large language models, natural language processing to extract the data and then summarize it or extract critical information is very powerful. So you could take a 50 page trust document and then it. It knows exactly

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Kartik Srinivasan: the key members, the trustee, the grantors? What are the key assets involved? What? How should the trust be distributed? And all of that? So what could take hours and hours reading through a document can be done in just minutes or seconds even now. So there's a lot of powerful use cases with AI. So we're seeing a lot of that come in into the industry and and lots of great innovation going on.

00:28:01.060 --> 00:28:21.530

Kartik Srinivasan: For in advance on. Specifically, we feel like we're well suited. To deploy AI, because, you know, the key thing with AI is data. And the reason the most successful firms out there that are leading the AI race are firms that have tons of data. Google.

00:28:21.530 --> 00:28:33.909

Kartik Srinivasan: Microsoft, Meta. They. They have so much data billions of users. And so that's critical. So advise on

00:28:34.090 --> 00:28:37.669

Kartik Srinivasan: the fact that we have a lot of data across

00:28:38.189 --> 00:29:04.189

Kartik Srinivasan: CRM across portfolio accounting and reporting document management. You know, it really helps us better extract insights out of all that data and surface that in an intuitive manner and in a powerful way for our clients. And so we feel like we were really well positioned to deploy AI agents across our entire platform that can solve

00:29:04.781 --> 00:29:18.850

Kartik Srinivasan: time consuming tasks that can help surface important and critical information, whether it's related to client meetings or portfolios or trading and rebalancing type situations. So

00:29:19.010 --> 00:29:32.150

Kartik Srinivasan: so we're doing a lot of work, you know. For instance, we're doing a lot of work in the alternative investment space reading documents like capital call notices, distribution notices, capital valuation

00:29:32.220 --> 00:29:50.070

Kartik Srinivasan: statements, and extracting a lot of that information and pushing that into our Auria and advise on product. So that's that's 1 example of our internal team getting a lot of efficiencies from using AI. We're also working on AI agents that really help

00:29:50.210 --> 00:30:01.489

Kartik Srinivasan: be a true assistant to the advisor. So when they log into our platform and they have, let's say, a review meeting with a family or a client they can just ask

00:30:01.490 --> 00:30:21.419

Kartik Srinivasan: our AI, you know. Just help me summarize. I've got a meeting with the Smith family next week, and it's gonna look through all of the communications, the notes, and extract out key things that you need to be thinking about like. Was there a concern that they brought up like 3 months ago that you just forgot about. But we're able to surface that

00:30:21.450 --> 00:30:26.169

Kartik Srinivasan: because we have access to all those communications that have been archived in our system.

00:30:26.637 --> 00:30:42.679

Kartik Srinivasan: You know. Are there any alerts that are triggered that we can surface like? Maybe their cash allocation is a little too high, or they're drifting a little too much from their model portfolio. Those are the types of things that we have the data on which we can

00:30:43.119 --> 00:30:57.729

Kartik Srinivasan: really analyze and then provide the key insights to our clients and wealth managers. So we feel really bullish about our ability to serve our clients. Save them a lot of time

00:30:58.014 --> 00:31:16.219

Kartik Srinivasan: and help uncover information that otherwise is just gonna be hard for them to. And you know, they're gonna have to spend a lot of time looking through various things we can using the power of AI and the data that we have, we can, we can do a lot of great work for them and save them a lot of time.

00:31:17.040 --> 00:31:30.099

Mark Wickersham: I I think that's a great point. I think there is a strong correlation between the effectiveness and the usefulness of of AI and data like you have to have good quality data, you have to have be able to have access to that data. The fact that you have a

00:31:30.250 --> 00:31:41.960

Mark Wickersham: comprehensive system that it that includes, you know, accounting information, entity, information documents, all that information that's in the CRM. To be able to

00:31:42.170 --> 00:31:56.320

Mark Wickersham: pull that together and harness. That information with AI is is really powerful. So I do think you're well positioned in that. Obviously, the other big area that AI has had a big impact on. And what you see with family offices is

00:31:56.450 --> 00:32:11.439

Mark Wickersham: alternative investments. Other. You, starting to see advisors start to have greater appetite and exposure for alternative investments as well as the people are saying that, you know it's it's going mainstream for alternatives.

00:32:11.500 --> 00:32:27.619

Mark Wickersham: Where do you? Where do you see family offices? And or let's talk about advisors in particular. Do you see advisors increasing their exposure to to alternatives? And what is Auria doing in terms of the ability to manage this important asset class.

00:32:28.600 --> 00:32:42.469

Kartik Srinivasan: Yup, so definitely. Yes, we're we are seeing advisors allocating more and more to Alts. We're definitely as we're looking at the trends within our own data, we are seeing more and more, and then

00:32:42.470 --> 00:32:59.539

Kartik Srinivasan: not just that. But even like we're having advisors reach us, reach out to us all the time asking us questions about how can we better help them manage their Alts? Report on their Alts, track the Alts, all of that. So we're seeing a lot of interest, a lot of growth and demand for

00:32:59.830 --> 00:33:26.770

Kartik Srinivasan: for alternatives. And so we've also started working with firms like iCapital and building building an integration so that advisors who are using our platform and want to use iCapital's marketplace are able to kind of see some benefits of the integration. So more specifically, kind of what we're doing in Orea as well as advise on. I think I've mentioned already, like, we're, we're using AI tools to help

00:33:26.770 --> 00:33:44.529

Kartik Srinivasan: extract what is otherwise like very unstructured data in the in the world of alternative investments. You know, in the in the public investment space. As we know, there's nice clean data feeds and Apis that send all that data from a custodian to a reporting system.

00:33:44.929 --> 00:34:11.709

Kartik Srinivasan: And you know that this is a process that has evolved over decades to become pretty efficient. We're able to process millions of accounts overnight from sources like the Schwab's, Fidelity's, Pershing's of the world. But with the alternatives, investments, it's not the same case. Right? We're dealing with lots of different fund managers Fund admins there's no standardization in the way data is.

00:34:11.719 --> 00:34:14.359

Mark Wickersham: There's no queue sips or security identifiers right.

00:34:14.360 --> 00:34:20.960

Kartik Srinivasan: Exactly. Yup, there's no standard identifiers. But then there's also different types of

00:34:21.100 --> 00:34:32.720

Kartik Srinivasan: Pdf formats. And so it can be challenging a lot of advisors face, I think frankly, a barrier to adoption of alternatives is the operational headache.

00:34:32.760 --> 00:34:48.559

Kartik Srinivasan: And so, if we can solve that operational headache and just make it easier for advisors to allocate to Alts. We feel like that's only going to increase the allocation, then into the alt space. And so, with the use of our AI tools as well as having humans

00:34:48.560 --> 00:35:05.840

Kartik Srinivasan: in in the loop that can help reconcile these Alts, we're able to bring in data directly from Portals and fund managers and Admins, extract all the key information and post the transactions into Aurea and into advise on. And our team helps reconcile it.

00:35:06.030 --> 00:35:17.359

Kartik Srinivasan: And then we're also, you know, we have a lot of reporting capabilities. That you know, the big benefit of having Consolidated reporting is you can show a family

00:35:17.400 --> 00:35:27.909

Kartik Srinivasan: a complete picture of all their assets. You just. You don't want to show them, you know, just their public investments in in one report, and then have them go into another system and generate their alts. And

00:35:27.940 --> 00:35:43.459

Kartik Srinivasan: and then you just have a disjointed experience and inconsistent sort of reporting so bringing it all together into our platform producing a consolidated report that shows the complete asset allocation, whether it's publics.

00:35:43.460 --> 00:36:11.259

Kartik Srinivasan: alternative investments, or even passion assets, collections? That is all possible in our in our solution. And so putting it all together and producing reports that can show what are my committed commitments to date. What's unfunded? You know? What are my distributions to date? What's the IRR? All of those are important data points on alternative assets and investments that we're able to provide for our clients.

00:36:11.632 --> 00:36:34.350

Kartik Srinivasan: And so, you know, we're definitely continuing to add features and capabilities in order to better surface alternative investment data points for our clients. And then we're investing also in just the more operational work that can. That can be very painful for advisors, so that they can outsource that piece to us, and

00:36:34.350 --> 00:36:47.480

Kartik Srinivasan: we serve almost as an extension of their office, and when they log into our platform. You know they don't have to worry about any data being stale or unreconciled. All their data, their publics, as well as Alts are all taken care of.

00:36:48.330 --> 00:37:11.850

Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I mean, there's been so much friction, or there's still so much friction in almost every stage of the investment lifecycle for private markets, and so much of it is document based that it has been an operational burden for family offices to do it, and I think it has been in a barrier to adoption within the advisor market for sure. So it's great to see

00:37:12.408 --> 00:37:39.179

Mark Wickersham: firms providing solutions to be able to kind of reduce that friction within that process. I think AI has been obviously a major component of that, whereas OCR and other types of technology really didn't work. As you mentioned, there's lots of it's not just a Pdf, there's probably 5 6 different types of PDFs and it just never, you know, 80% accuracy was not good enough for that being a reliable solution. So

00:37:39.260 --> 00:37:57.949

Mark Wickersham: it's great to see innovation in that area. Where else are you seeing innovation within the family office marketplace, the wealth management marketplace, and what it is Adyzon's, you know, roadmap looking like in terms of innovation.

00:37:59.150 --> 00:38:04.693

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're we're definitely seeing a lot of innovation when it comes to

00:38:05.070 --> 00:38:17.869

Kartik Srinivasan: things like planning estate planning the ability to just better manage the complexities that come with tax optimization

00:38:17.870 --> 00:38:35.109

Kartik Srinivasan: for families that may have a lot of assets, and they want to protect that those assets. And so you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of tools pop up that are automating things like estate planning and bringing efficiencies there. So that is a

00:38:35.260 --> 00:38:45.121

Kartik Srinivasan: subset of like the financial planning umbrella where we we're seeing a lot of innovation. You know, traditionally financial or family offices. They don't care so much about

00:38:45.600 --> 00:39:06.769

Kartik Srinivasan: retirement planning, because, it's you know they don't. You know, they're fortunate not to have to worry about accumulation of assets. That's more about protection of those assets. So things like better estate planning tax strategies and all of that. So we're seeing a lot of innovations there

00:39:07.140 --> 00:39:31.619

Kartik Srinivasan: with solutions like, you know, wild.com or vanilla, and others pop up that are that are doing some good work there, and then also with tax optimization and helping really ex advisors uncover opportunities to save their clients. Some money when it comes to taxes, is another area. We're seeing a lot of innovation

00:39:32.160 --> 00:39:37.000

Kartik Srinivasan: and then and then just the ability to really

00:39:37.871 --> 00:39:50.469

Kartik Srinivasan: put it all together and execute on things like trading and rebalancing at scale. We're seeing some innovations there as well. That whether it comes to direct indexing

00:39:50.470 --> 00:40:10.310

Kartik Srinivasan: strategies, and again using direct indexing as a way to get some tax benefit. The challenge with direct indexing has been. It generates a lot of trades, and you need to be able to process that. And so we're seeing some innovations where you can trade at scale and get the benefits of direct indexing and the tax benefits and

00:40:10.440 --> 00:40:22.689

Kartik Srinivasan: and the diversification benefits. So we're seeing a lot of different areas that that that are that there is innovation. And you know, we're also participating in a lot of these areas. For instance, we've

00:40:22.840 --> 00:40:50.259

Kartik Srinivasan: we've come out with some direct indexing strategies and tax optimization strategies that that advisors, wealth, managers, family offices can can leverage from us. We do have an investment management division within our firm, where we provide a lot of these capabilities like Ocio services and direct indexing and tax transition services as well as partner trading where again firms can really

00:40:50.600 --> 00:41:16.190

Kartik Srinivasan: you know a lot of family offices we talked to there. They don't have the staff to be able to do all of these. All of these things, whether it's trading or doing due diligence on all the managers in the public space. So we can. We can help with a lot of that. And through innovations of technology and making things more efficient, we're able to offer a lot of these services that are very attractive value for for a lot of our clients.

00:41:17.260 --> 00:41:24.320

Mark Wickersham: Do you have a prediction where? Where the market might be? Wealth management 3, 5 years out? I know such a dynamic market is changing.

00:41:24.320 --> 00:41:42.140

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, it's a. It's a tough one. And you know, if anyone's watching this 5 years from now, they can come back and be like, Wow! He was way off there, or something right but I mean, I would say, I'm willing to say that AI is, gonna have a huge, huge impact. It is not a fad by any means.

00:41:42.610 --> 00:42:06.449

Kartik Srinivasan: It is going to be fundamentally changing the way we all operate. It's changing all industries. And so, you know, I see, when I was at Schwab they would do a lot of surveys, and they found that there's going to be a shortage of talent in the wealth management space and a lot of that shortage was going to be really operational talent

00:42:06.760 --> 00:42:24.219

Kartik Srinivasan: to help advisors kind of help grow, grow their businesses and scale their businesses. But I feel like AI is going to help solve some of that you're gonna have through the use of agentic AI and tools that are just more efficiently using AI to solve a lot of operational tasks.

00:42:24.430 --> 00:42:53.100

Kartik Srinivasan: You're going to be able to see advisors and family offices that can grow to be many billions in assets with a very, very lean staff, managing all of those assets, and you can have like for a wealth manager or ria. You're going to have a lot of client facing advisors and very minimal back office staff, because a lot of that is going to be automated with technology and so that that I think, is going to be something we'll start to see. A shift over the next few years is the

00:42:53.130 --> 00:43:03.910

Kartik Srinivasan: composition of advisory firms could change where it's gonna be more and more client facing revenue, producing roles and less

00:43:04.090 --> 00:43:20.259

Kartik Srinivasan: cost center, less operational roles because of the power of technology and the modernizing of the technology stacks at all of these firms. So I would say, that's something we'll certainly see as a key trend in the next few years.

00:43:20.810 --> 00:43:32.550

Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think that's a solid prediction. I think talent, acquisition, retention has been a struggle in the industry for a long time. I do think back-office talent, operational talent, like

00:43:33.020 --> 00:43:57.749

Mark Wickersham: advisors, has never been really great at it. Anyways, they want to be client facing. It's about managing clients. And that AI will have a major impact in that area. I think you know single family offices like, I think there's a couple of things that you're probably going to see. I think that the barrier to entry for single family offices over the past 10, even 20 years, has gone up and up and up

00:43:57.850 --> 00:44:19.320

Mark Wickersham: 100 million 200,000,250, I would even say even a more comprehensive family offices is really around the 1 billion dollar mark, and I think that number is going to start to come down again, and that you're going to have very lean family offices. They're going to be able to provide a wide range of services because of AI and because of technology. And I do think it's going to force family offices to modernize

00:44:19.710 --> 00:44:37.119

Mark Wickersham: even advisors. There's been a lot. There's a subset out there that are reluctant to modernize or on legacy software, and that, you know, I think there's 2 factors. One, I think that the innovation and productivity gain is so great that you get with AI. You're talking 10 x type of

00:44:37.300 --> 00:45:02.060

Mark Wickersham: capabilities in some areas. And that's not hype. That's, you know, reality. The other area, I do think, is you also have the threat of AI right with cyber security and the ability to have to have a more secure cyber posture. So I think it's got to be the hype is. It's not hyped enough, probably in terms of AI. And I think the impact's going to be

00:45:02.060 --> 00:45:26.240

Mark Wickersham: huge. And I think it's gonna have a real positive impact on the industry in terms of scale productivity, additional services that firms can provide. I think family office services will be much more common for advisors, too, where they've been reluctant to offer certain services just because of the operational burden of them. Things like bill payment and concierge services that you're going to see a wider degree of that. So

00:45:26.663 --> 00:45:34.890

Mark Wickersham: I think it's you know. It could already be the Golden Age. But I I think we're about ready to enter that. So it's exciting times, for sure.

00:45:34.890 --> 00:46:01.049

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, we just we just need firms to get off of excel, at least right? We still have a lot of firms we talked to that are using excel. And I'm impressed that they're able to run a a you know, several 100 million dollar or even 1 billion dollar family office using excel. But I I feel like, in order to really help scale grow, be secure. We need. We need that modernization from firms, and they'll be able to

00:46:01.140 --> 00:46:07.190

Kartik Srinivasan: take advantage of a lot of the lot of the the great technology leaps that we've seen in the last few years.

180

00:46:07.730 --> 00:46:12.080

Mark Wickersham: Yeah, well, you know that excel spreadsheet has 2 or 3 significant errors, and it is

181

00:46:13.130 --> 00:46:30.959

Mark Wickersham: unaudible. But glad to end the podcast on a personal note with 3 questions that have nothing to do with wealth. Tech, you're a citizen of the globe, having grown up in India, Bangladesh and Liberia is, that is, that the right.

00:46:31.830 --> 00:46:46.909

Kartik Srinivasan: Yup, yup, yeah, yeah. I my, my dad worked for the United Nations, and so yep, I was born in India, lived in Liberia and West Africa for a few years. Bangladesh back to India, and then I did my high school in Kuwait

00:46:47.395 --> 00:46:58.449

Kartik Srinivasan: and then I came to the Us a little over 25 years ago for college and been here ever since. So yeah, that's it's been quite the journey.

00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:03.270

Mark Wickersham: What? What's something that that folks might not know about India, that you'd like to share.

00:47:04.030 --> 00:47:10.554

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, it's, you know, it's got a rich history, a lot of lot of different

00:47:11.490 --> 00:47:17.819

Kartik Srinivasan: different, wonderful places to visit that you can really soak up like thousands of years of history.

00:47:17.930 --> 00:47:32.599

Kartik Srinivasan: great culture. The food is amazing in different parts. I think a lot of people. They say they like Indian food that they're really thinking of like a particular region. But if you go to India you'll notice that any region has like its own cuisine, and it's very.

00:47:32.820 --> 00:47:39.009

Kartik Srinivasan: very rich again in in the history of the cuisine. And so I love. I love Indian food from all the different regions. And

00:47:39.140 --> 00:48:06.889

Kartik Srinivasan: and then, yeah, I mean, I would say, there's a huge growth in. There's a lot of young people in India that are hungry for and looking to make a mark on this world. And they're entering the technology space, the wealth management space. We're actually seeing a huge growth in the independent wealth management, space in India, lots of advisors, lots of independent firms.

00:48:06.890 --> 00:48:08.599

Mark Wickersham: Growing family office space as well.

00:48:08.600 --> 00:48:38.389

Kartik Srinivasan: Yep, yep, family office space is growing. So yeah, that's it's pretty exciting to see what's going on outside the Us. And in in India here, in terms of like the growth and wealth management. And so we're you know, it's I'm sure. That's just gonna continue to grow as the overall wealth in the country keeps growing, and more and more people come out of the lower income levels into middle class and then into the higher income levels as well.

00:48:39.650 --> 00:48:45.729

Mark Wickersham: You currently live in Colorado. I love Colorado. What's your favorite spot in Colorado?

00:48:46.730 --> 00:48:55.620

Kartik Srinivasan: I love the mountains. You know I'm we're we're in the Denver Metro area. But whenever we can, we try to escape into the mountains, and

00:48:56.120 --> 00:49:18.619

Kartik Srinivasan: whether it's in the winter we do a lot of skiing and in the summertime lots of hiking. So you know the mountains are always a place where my family we like to be, and get away from a little bit of the hustle and bustle of the metro area. Get some fresh air. Get a lot of.

00:49:18.620 --> 00:49:19.940

Mark Wickersham: Favorite ski resort.

00:49:20.600 --> 00:49:25.020

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, that's a that's a good question. I would say. It's either

00:49:25.709 --> 00:49:40.750

Kartik Srinivasan: Winter Park or Copper Mountain. Those are both really good resorts, although I've had some pretty nice times at Breckenridge and Vail as well. But you know, as long as there's you know I I love the

00:49:41.301 --> 00:49:47.620

Kartik Srinivasan: groomers. I'm not. I'm not. I don't love the deep, deep powder unlike many of my

00:49:47.730 --> 00:49:55.690

Kartik Srinivasan: local Coloradans here, so if you can get me a a sunny, cool day with the groomers I can. I can spend hours and hours on the slopes.

00:49:56.050 --> 00:49:56.770

Mark Wickersham: Taking notes?

00:49:57.428 --> 00:50:03.150

Mark Wickersham: And finally, is there a charitable cause that's important to you? And why.

00:50:04.180 --> 00:50:09.280

Kartik Srinivasan: Yeah, I love anything related to education. You know, in my prior

00:50:09.390 --> 00:50:32.399

Kartik Srinivasan: roles I've helped mentor students and high schoolers in particular, and just help them just get better prepared for college or their careers. And so I think education is, you know, the gateway to success, for anyone doesn't matter what your income level is or your background is so I do believe a lot in

00:50:32.530 --> 00:50:43.920

Kartik Srinivasan: the power of just knowledge and education. So anything to do with that? I'm very passionate about. And I think again coming back to AI, and just the power of AI to help

00:50:44.030 --> 00:50:54.990

Kartik Srinivasan: people just get better educated and leverage the power of AI to build businesses, build skill sets is pretty powerful. So you know, I'm pretty

00:50:55.535 --> 00:51:04.899

Kartik Srinivasan: excited to see how people from underprivileged backgrounds are gonna be able to potentially leverage technology and AI and.

00:51:05.260 --> 00:51:06.660

Mark Wickersham: As an equalizer.

00:51:06.660 --> 00:51:08.509

Kartik Srinivasan: As an equalizer. Yep, exactly.

00:51:09.770 --> 00:51:16.340

Mark Wickersham: All right, Kartik. This has been great. I really appreciate you sharing your years of insights. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

00:51:16.340 --> 00:51:17.920

Kartik Srinivasan: Yup, thanks, Mark, it's been great.