WealthTech Today

The post Ep. 122: Avoiding a Compliance Overload with Robert McGill, Jaccomo/Docupace appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “We talk about avoiding adverse outcomes from regulatory scrutiny, and that’s important and that does cost money. But the other side of things is we have to help our clients build a process that is convincing, and that when FINRA looks in they have comfort and...

The post Ep. 121: Building a Better Mousetrap to Manage Goals with Franklin Templeton appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “We’ve got a platform that we built along with Bambu and Apex Clearing that’s called Tango that has full robo-advice capability. The difference between a traditional robo-advisor and Tango is that it’s built using the GOE algorithm. So you may be an RIA firm t...

The post Ep. 120: Alternatives: the Final Frontier of Investing with Matt Brown, CAIS appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “It’s a very competitive world out there right now and alternative investments are stepping in and filling the gap in client portfolios. Advisors are disappointed with traditional long only approach to investing, that broken 60/40 model. It’s never been about...

The post Ep. 119: December WealthTech News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . Come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy episode 119 of the WealthTech Today podcast. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, the founder and CEO of Ezra Group Consulting. Over the past 16 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of FinTech vendors and enterprise wealth management firms to guide them towards maki...

The post Ep. 118: Crypto as Lead Gen for Advisors with Maxwell Lane, Flourish appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “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...

The post Ep. 117: An Advisor’s Guide to NFTs with Lex Sokolin, ConsenSys appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “I’ve got a maximalist view on this I’ve sort of self radicalized but it’s not just that advisors have to compete with now, banks and insurance companies and fintechs and Google for the distribution of financial products. And I think the opportunity for advisors there is m...

The post Ep. 116: Digitizing Delivery of Annuities for Broker-Dealers with Rich Romano, FIDx appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “Think about a large broker dealer, they have advisor personas that manage assets, that allocate assets,  that are career insurance producers, and they all want a consistent framework to do that.  So if you had two people sitting side by side and one of...

The post Ep. 115: Advisors Hate Annuity Fees with David Stone, RetireOne appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . “Advisors don’t like the fee structure of annuities, that’s one of the things they always say to us. They know they have to insure against sequence of return risk. They love the idea of guaranteed income, but at some point they don’t want their clients paying the benefit-b...

The post Ep. 114: October WealthTech News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . Come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy episode 114 of the WealthTech Today podcast. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, the founder and CEO of Ezra Group Consulting. Over the past 16 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of FinTech vendors and enterprise wealth management firms to guide them towards makin...

The post Ep. 113: Building a Seamless Tech Stack with Jeff Haines, Thrivent Advisor Network appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . “In the independent RIA space, there’s a great opportunity to provide a community for advisors. I know a lot of advisors that go independent miss the community that goes along with being part of a larger organization. And I know there’s been a lot of pla...

The post Ep. 112: Focusing on the Voice of the Client with Julie Littlechild, Absolute Engagement appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “Maybe it’s just me, but I feel different at this moment than I did yesterday. Things change, the context changes. I think this has raised an interesting challenge for advisors, how do I gather data from my clients that is in the moment and can sup...

The post Ep. 111: September Wealthtech News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . Come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy episode 111 of the WealthTech Today podcast. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, the founder and CEO of Ezra Group Consulting. Over the past 16 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of FinTech vendors and enterprise wealth management firms to guide them towards mak...

The post Ep. 110: How the Risk Ecosystem Helps Clients Invest Differently with Jeff Schwantz, Morningstar appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “At the end of the day, Morningstar is a data company and we’re a research company, and we expose that through software. Twenty years of history and academically validated research is really hard to replicate in the FinTech space. And part...

The post Ep. 109: Building A Globalized Data Strategy Delivered Locally with Sabrina Bailey, LSEG appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “If we think about the underpinning of our future growth strategy we’re specifically looking to accelerate growth by developing and delivering on a globalized strategy that’s delivered in a local way to meet client needs. What I mean by that specif...

The post Ep. 108: Why a Digital TAMP is the Best Way to Invest in Cryptocurrency with Dan Eyre appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “Just buying Bitcoin and Ethereum, for some clients and for some advisors, maybe it is good enough. But at the end of the day, you don’t want to be the one that’s picking the AOL or the Yahoo of this age. If you look at the the whole Dot Com era and a...

The post Ep. 107: August News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . Come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy episode 107 of the WealthTech Today podcast. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, the founder and CEO of Ezra Group Consulting. Over the past 16 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of FinTech vendors and enterprise wealth management firms to guide them towards making better bus...

The post Ep. 106: Uncovering the Lifetime Costs of Healthcare with Bipin Agarwal, AiVante appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “Healthcare expenses is the leading cause of bankruptcy in this country. And 95% of the people in our survey do not have any idea how much they’re going to spend on healthcare. Our goal is to help financial advisory firms to bring this cause in front of th...

The post Ep. 105: Merging Health & Wealth with Robert Kirk, InterGen Data appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . “When we started InterGen Data, what we did was to say give us your client data and we’ll turn it around and send you back a list of life events, especially around critical illnesses and how likely they are to happen. Because people don’t plan for those types of things, t...

The post Ep. 104: July Wealthtech News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . Thanks for joining me on the WealthTech Today podcast, I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, Founder and CEO of Ezra Group. We help wealth managers, asset managers, and wealthtech vendors make better business and technology decisions. This podcast features interviews, news, and analysis on the trends and...

The post Ep. 103: How to Purchase and Manage Protective Investments with Biju Kulathakal & Jason Barsema, Halo Investing appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “The first thing that Biju and I wrote down before we even wrote our business plan is that we want to create a positive impact in the world before we worried about profits. And from that perspective, we think that the state o...

The post Ep. 102: The Rise of Alternate Marketplaces with Jason Broder, SIMON Markets appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . “Financial advisors are looking to differentiate their value to clients as we are on the precipice of the largest wealth transfer in history. I think the playbooks for the next 5, 10, 20 years in the financial advice business will most likely be different than...

The post Ep. 101: June WealthTech News Roundup appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . Thanks for joining me on the WealthTech Today podcast, I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, Founder and CEO of Ezra Group. We help wealth managers, asset managers, and wealthtech vendors make better business and technology decisions. This podcast features interviews, news, and analysis on the trends and...

The post Ep. 100: The T3 Conference is a Wealthtech Startup Accelerator, with Joel Bruckenstein appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “One of our calling cards I think has always been that we try and showcase some of those firms that don’t get a lot of attention. I get calls from probably 30, 40, 50 of those firms. We don’t want them all at T3 because a lot of them, we just think,...

The post Ep. 99: Digitizing the Back Office of Wealth Management Firms with David Knoch, Docupace appeared first on and was written by Craig Iskowitz . “When I say we digitized the back office of wealth management firms, the reality is we only digitized part of the back office of enterprise wealth management firms. So the question for me, having run Docupace for the past year, is do we change the...

The post Ep. 98 – Taking the Emotion Out of College Planning with Joe Messinger, CollegeAidPro appeared first on and was written by Elana Iskowitz . “There’s so much emotion wrapped up in this college buying decision, we’re saying can we help families shop smarter. You can be proactive instead of reactive using our predicted outcomes that provide about 90% accuracy for out of pocket costs, and we...