Our CEO Bob Santella speaks with Julia Smollen at Advisorpedia about revolutionizing wealth management with cutting-edge data integration, personalization, and innovative tech solutions.
This is Advisorpedia's Power Your Advice podcast, and I'm Julia Smollen. Today we have on Bob Santella, the new CEO of BetaNXT, powering the next generation of frictionless end-to-end wealth management solutions. Welcome to the podcast, Bob,
Thanks, Julia. I'm ecstatic to be here.
So before we talk about your new role, can you share a little bit about your background and how you got into this position?
I've spent well over three decades in the financial markets. Varied from running my own financial advisory practice to working in trading and wealth technology firms. I was an alternative asset space for over a decade. So I have a really diverse and varied background in all aspects of financial markets. The common theme with my background, though, Julia has been really working in the financial sector, particularly for the firms that serve trading in the wealth industries. So whether it be front-end facing or the technologies that support the front-end, that's what I've done most of my career. I've run large divisions for Fortune 250 companies. I've been entrepreneurial and co-managed hedge funds for a financial advisory. In the last 15 years or so I've been a senior leader in the FinTech space. Prior to joining BetaNXT, I was CEO of another company that was a market leading firm when it comes to trading and wealth technology.
And in your new role, what are your plans for innovation and growth, say, in the next three to five years.
We have a lot of goals, but our top goal always with our clients is really help them grow their businesses. Every firm that we support, every client that we have, similar to every other firm, generally their primary goals, how can they grow their business? How can they expand their customer base? How can they expand their product set? So our goal when it comes to innovation is finding ways to expand our product set. So therefore our clients can therefore serve their clients better. Making sure our clients have access to the latest technologies, latest tools, and other things that are evolving much quicker today than that they ever have been, as far as the acceleration of pace of change in the marketplace. What our clients generally want...they want their customers to have a better experience when it comes to how they look at wealth, wealth accumulation, evaluating the performance of their portfolios, and the data and information that they're getting. And therefore our primary job at BetaNXT when it comes to innovation is having a singular focus on the type of technologies that allow our clients to give their clients a better experience; because ultimately, that's what they want to do. They want to make sure that their ultimate customer is really happy with the wealth services they're receiving.
And speaking of innovation, you recently announced the DataXChange, which is powered by Snowflake. Can you tell us about that and how it will benefit clients in the industry.
Yeah, I'm going to start high level here, because we have a very strong partnership with Snowflake, the market-leading firm when it comes to data capabilities and data maintenance capabilities. And one of our key themes at BetaNXT is connected wealth. And by connected wealth, we simply mean how our clients can connect seamlessly from front- to mid- to back-office technologies, how they can create a unified approach, a unified platform for their customers, and now they can deal with us in a more holistic fashion. That extends into our DataXChange initiative. So when you think about data generally, every single firm that we deal with in financial markets use data in one way or another. Data is a core and critical component of how they support and how they deal with clients, whether it be market data, wealth data, just general personal information, and other data. The value-add and really the challenge and the opportunity in this space, and what our DataXChange is doing, it's really addressing what we view as our clients' critical pain points. How can they bring this unstructured data together in a more unified and structured manner? How can they have a single source of data rather than multiple sources of data. Fragmentation now becomes unification. Then how can they share this data in a secure manner, where things like data governance and the quality of data is actually enabling new products and not disabling.
Coupled with data use, and the value of data, is security, and the governance around the data. They're married and they cannot be broken apart. We think our differentiator, and working with snowflake, is the way we bring data governance layer and security layer as enabling new products and services. We all read about the acceleration: of things like AI (artificial intelligence), analytics, and data in the marketplace, that really is down to the integrity of data that's driving the AI use cases. AI is only as effective as the underlying data that's actually being fed into those engines and other technology platforms. DataXChanges is our initiative, which is getting rave reviews, by the way, in the marketplace and with our client base, of how we can better use the data, more quickly use the data, and use it in a way that really does connect wealth. And connects wealth to connecting opportunities. Ultimately, what we want to do for our customers is create more opportunities. Connected wealth also connects opportunities for our customers.
And focusing on the greater wealth space, what are the top three challenges facing the wealth space, and how is BetaNXT addressing them?
There're multiple challenges, always. There're obviously more than three, but we want to look at top three or four. Obviously, number one is data modernization. And again, we already talked about DataXChange and how important data is to our clients, to industry overall, and to the marketplace. We talk about how we're managing data, data modernization. The number one focus is, how can they better manage their data capabilities? How can they reduce their risk around data security? How can we deliver and transform their experience for their customers? Again, we're addressing this and much more with our DataXChange, but data modernization is definitely a top challenge, yet an opportunity within the industry for our customer base.
Second challenge, which also couples with an opportunity, is the effective use of a lot of new technology trends. We talked about things like AI (artificial intelligence), LLMs, data analytics, and other things. These are great tools and great technologies to have. However, they need to be productive; they need to be managed effectively; they need to be managed expertly, you need to have a good partnership with firms like BetaNXT and others to make sure you have best practices when you're managing these things. So I think new technology, in many ways, offers exciting opportunities for all of us, including our customers, but it also offers a lot of challenges. And I think what we see with our customers in the marketplace is that, because the pace is accelerating compared to five or ten years ago, customers need to make sure they're abreast and they're on top of the pace of change. They all work in a very competitive environment. They all they all have competition, and they're very cognizant of what the competitors are doing. They're from making sure they're keeping up with differentiator tools, things like AI and analytics for them is really important, and they look to thought leaders like us and others to make sure we're providing the information, the data, and really the insight and advice that they need.
And the third, I think that's a challenge, that affects all of our customers primarily, is how the how the investor is changing. So ultimately, our customers, and firms we serve, are dealing with investors. And when you look at the investor demographics and just how things are going well, in one hand, the population is getting older, so people are accumulating more wealth, and that's affecting how customers have to service those type of customers when it comes to, let's say, trust capabilities, retirement planning, guaranteed retirement income, and other things that advisors look for.
But on other hand, when you bifurcate the base and you have younger generations now investing more aggressively than the prior years, they're much more in tune with new technologies, with analytics. They care about things like performance metrics. They want clear, transparent reports. They want to be able to understand what reports say so they can compare how they're doing versus others, and how their firm is doing versus others. And they want information quicker, so things like real-time data instead of overnight data, monthly reports or daily reports versus quarterly reports, and having predictive analytics and other value-added tools much more important to investors today than they ever have been, and we're going to see that continue to develop over the next couple of years. What that means that those that actually utilize these tools more effectively are in touch with their investor needs and are listening to their customers. They'll be winners in the marketplace, but for every winner there is a loser, and there'll be firms that actually lose customers and lose advisors because they're not doing what they should be doing.
How do BetaNXT's capabilities enhance personalization for your clients?
We talked about our data capabilities quite a bit already, Julia, in this conversation. So when we talk about connected wealth, that also extends to connected data, how we connect data with an approach where we integrate all information which necessary for clients wealth experience to be effectively managed. Ultimately, when you're doing that, you have then the ability to personalize and customize the data that clients see, the data that clients use, and really the data that clients want to look at, how they evaluate performance. Our platforms consolidate multiple data points, we're an API-friendly platform, we have myriad of partnerships that we work with that offer transaction records, account data, events, and other information onto a platform that previously was fragmented, and now it is unified and united in a way that allows for personalization, customization, so forth.
We have extensions into other firms, through ownership, through industry partnerships, and really through our reputation, that helps us actually provide a holistic approach and how to serve customers that stems beyond BetaNXT's own capabilities. So several examples, we deal with firms that have front-end solutions, that have data solutions, that have alternative asset solutions, as far as offering different type of investments — all these types of solutions, all these types of investment options, asset classes and others, are easily assimilated into our platforms. Are easily accessible by investors. They can be personalized depending on the demographics of the investors. Some of the tools we talked about, these are the AI, analytics and data, allow almost immediate profile of a customer, profile of an investor to give that sort of personal touch, which, again, would have probably taken months five years ago, now it's a matter of minutes how you can actually focus and provide the value that customers want.
And as we come to the end of 2024 what new technologies or trends within the space do you believe will have the biggest impact on the industry in the next year?
Well, once again, we always say this, it's hard to believe another year is almost over, and we're looking forward already to 2025. Some of the trends we are looking at into next year, are repeated themes we may have said last year, but again, I think we're farther along. We're a year farther along with some of these trends.
One of the topics that we've already discussed several times in this conversation has been artificial intelligence, or AI. We think it's top of the list. We see continuously more rapid growth of AI across the wealth [industry] and wealth technology industry and across the broader financial industry. We read in a common marketplace, whether it be in the retail marketplace or education, consumer products and everything: AI is touching every aspect of our economy. The wealth industry is not immune to that. A matter of fact, I think that the opportunities that AI offers when it comes to things like personalization, real time capabilities, predictive analytics and all that stuff we see with AI, we're going to see more and more these tools rolled out and adding a really value, enriched experience for the ultimate consumer and ultimate investor. And I think it's exciting, but I think it requires focus from our clients and and requires to make sure that they're on top of their investment prioritization and they pick the right partners for it.
Second thing that I think we'll see is cumulative expansion of investment capabilities and asset classes where previously investors had limited capabilities or access. Examples, alternative assets, private equity investments, hedge funds, and other things. More and more of our clients are emphasizing these type of investments. When they emphasize these type of investments, they're providing platforms to their broader client base to make investments in a more creative and more customized fashion. So five years ago, a small percentage may have access to alternative investments through through a retail investment platform. Today, much larger percentage will have access to alternative assets, crypto, digital currency, structured fixed income products, structured OTC products and so forth. So where we're seeing more and more creative asset class offerings that are coming for our platforms, and we're going to, we expect this trend to actually accelerate into next year. I think firms are looking to differentiate themselves beyond the typical 60/40 model that you hear many times when it comes to asset allocation and so forth.
And the last trend that we're going to continue to see, and we talked about it already, is data. It's not just the data from AI. I think almost every business, whether it be financial industry or otherwise, sits on a ton of data, and one of the largest questions most firms ask themselves is, "What can we do with this data that's more useful to our clients?" And I think AI is just one way, but I think there's a lot of other ways — from just better technology platforms, cloud platforms that are more modular, therefore they're quicker to market and more nimble than older on-prem type technology stacks and technology platforms — that allow firms to more quickly assess data, make more efficient use of data. They're able to extract data that they actually need and kind of sideline, or get rid of the white noise of data that they don't need to look at. By being able to focus and laser focus on the data they need, we're going to find many more use cases for that data that go beyond just the foundational. We're going to find more value-added use cases that get to real-time use of how you might evaluate your tax situation, real-time use of things like corporate actions and how it might affect you as an investor, immediate access has changed the markets internationally, and other things that investors didn't have a couple years ago. And then we're seeing a pickup in this trend, and I expect that we're going to see, if not an explosion, a very large acceleration over the next couple of years.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Bob and we wish you luck in your new role.
Thanks for your time, Julia. I appreciate you and your listeners, and I look forward to hearing it.
To learn more about BetaNXT, please visit BetaNXT.com. Please follow us for timely updates on X, LinkedIn, and Facebook, all at Advisorpedia. For everyone at Advisorpedia and the Power Your Advice podcast team. This is Julia Smollen.
Source: Advisorpedia
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