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Evan Rapoport is the Founder and CEO of SMArtX Advisory Solutions, a. Building on years of experience in the institutional asset management segment, Evan pioneered managed accounts technology that would allow wealth managers of all types to access the same strategies typically only available to the largest investors. He has been featured on the FOX Business Channel, FOX News, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, and in leading publications including the Wall Street Journal.
Take away quote: “What we’ve found is that the advisors who are able to outsource not only provide better returns but it also allows them to focus on areas that are more important to the advisor.” #BecomingReferable @evanrapp
Show Timeline:
08:38 An introduciton to SMArtX Advisory
15:39 Outsourcing as a means to enhance the client experience
20:11 Communicating the value of outsourcing to clients
21:44 The concept of an outsourced chief investment officer and how it works
27:18 Building an experience to separate yourself from other advisors
Links:
Website: https://www.smartxadvisory.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/evanrapp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smartxadvisory/
Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog
Episode Transcript:
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing.
Custodians, asset management platforms, and technology each have influence over your client experience, and the combination has the potential for even more significant impact. On this episode, we invited Evan Rappaport to discuss all that with us. Rappaport is the founder and CEO of SMArtX Advisory Solutions, a managed account technology platform. We discuss outsourcing partners and how they overlap, including an innovation he’s pioneering, the outsourced chief investment officer. We talk about separately managed accounts versus unified managed accounts, and even some pitfalls of overly relying on technology, analyzing the recent outage of the totally virtual direct to retail platform Robin Hood, as an example.
So, here now is our conversation with Evan Rappaport.
Evan Rappaport, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast, thanks for joining us.
Evan Rapoport:
Thanks for having me.
Steve Wershing:
So we want to ask you about SMArtX, and the innovations that you bring to the industry. But, let’s start with something else that you are at the forefront of, and that’s outsourcing. There are lots of different things that people can outsource to a tech platform, or to services like yours. Generally, what kinds of opportunities do you see in outsourcing, and what kinds of outsourcing do you think advisors may not be thinking of these days?
Evan Rapoport:
Well, sure. Outsourcing is probably more important now than it’s ever been, as we’re all sitting at home, looking at our laptops or our desktops, and not having the support system that we typically had around us.
So, when I think about what we offer at SMArtX, we provide outsourced back office, middle office, trading support. So, gosh, if you don’t have your traders available to be able to make those trades, or if you had one trader and that trader is sick, and now you’ve got the responsibility of trading, and you’re not used to trading, you can imagine how detrimental that could be to your business. As it relates to outsourcing, specific to what we do, I think it’s more important now than it ever has been.
Julie Littlechild:
Are you seeing this, Evan, as a generalized trend over the last number of years, that advisors are really starting to move increasingly in this direction? I mean, irrespective of where we’re sitting right now, in the current crisis.
Evan Rapoport:
That’s a great question, Julie. Absolutely, we’ve seen the usage of TAMP specifically, UMA platforms, grow by … It was 24% annually, I think this last year, Cerule reported 20%, 19 to 20 percent growth in usage of TAMP platforms. It is actually one of the fastest growing areas within investment advisor services today, and it has been for the last five years, call it, maybe more.
Steve Wershing:
Okay.
Julie Littlechild:
Go ahead. Go ahead, Steve.
Steve Wershing:
Go ahead, Julie.
Julie Littlechild:
No. I was just going to pick up on outsourcing chief investment officers, in particular. I know this is just drawing on your area of expertise. So you’re seeing it as a generalized trend, but what were some of the opportunities, what were some of the problems that you were really trying to solve in your business?
Evan Rapoport:
So there were lots of problems that we were trying to solve for, when we created SMArtX. But Julie, I don’t know if that’s specifically what you’re asking, or what you want me to respond to. Is there a specific issue that you were looking for?
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