Partner ecosystems

How can wealth management firms leverage best-in-class solutions using partner ecosystems? Richard N. Hart III of Advisor360° and Nick Diodati of Charles River Development discuss.

Video transcript

Rich Hart: Medium to larger sized wealth management firms, they generally take a build versus buy approach, classic build versus buy business case, what do we want to do, what problems are we trying to solve for?

And then they look at the plethora of what we call point solutions, individual solutions where they may say, well, you know what, I don't want to build my own trading capability. So let me go outsource trading or I want to outsource CRM, and then I'll build the rest myself. And so then what they do is they build an ecosystem around that. And then what we see is that never actually solves the real problem that they were trying to get to.

And so then they say, well, ok, is there another solution out there? And so we believe, you know, the creation of not only the all-in-one platform, but also the all-in-one ecosystem, that's what we're seeing where there's a platform out there that has all of the components, but also is integrated with other third parties into the ecosystem as it relates to data integration and workflow.

Nick Diodati: And I think that's the best way to represent what we're trying to accomplish with our partnership. And the whole idea behind the partnership is let's bring together applications that are best-in-class, but both systems are also open architecture and so being open architecture and being able to integrate with other leading third-party providers and certain components of the overall tech stack becomes a key differentiator.

And having the ability to do that integration and that plumbing and that infrastructure work in advance of a client ever needing it is kind of where we're going.

I think the other thing that's important from the perspective of what is different about what we're trying to solve is that, you know, there's a lot of capability within Charles River and within Advisor360° to allow a firm to bring their own intellectual property to bear.

So if a firm has their own thinking around investment management or if they have their own thinking around underlying data, we can work with that and integrate that into the broader ecosystem and then have that become the foundation of what serves all these other applications on an integration.

Rich: Yeah, spot on.