Jun 16, 2024 - Last Updated: Jul 31, 2024
If it seems like there are a lot of industry changes coming at CTOs these days, it’s because there are. Some are disruptive threats, some will be a flash in the pan, some are growth opportunities, some are new regulatory obligations — and all are competing for your team’s finite time, attention, and resources.
Just ask Andy Lientz, CTO of Apex Fintech Solutions Inc. (“Apex”), who’s previously worked at Google, Smartsheet, and Microsoft. We sat down with him to talk about how he cut through the constant clamor to focus on the strategy behind our new custody, clearing, and investment infrastructure, Apex Ascend.
Apex Ascend in a Nutshell
Apex Ascend is a real-time, cloud-native, B2B investment infrastructure designed to help you build and run the future of investment experiences. The idea is to help your brand deliver a modern experience for executives, advisors, operators, developers, and end-user investors. Apex Ascend includes:
- Real-time ledger
- Real-time information to aid your risk mitigation program
- Cloud scalability
- Real-time data access
- Cloud flexibility
With forward-looking architecture and configurable settings, Ascend flexes to help make technology leaders more nimble as they take on tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.
Q&A: What It Really Takes to Redefine Wealthtech
Why was it even necessary to rethink investment infrastructure?
Andy: When people think about the wealth management services industry, the first thing that often comes to mind is how outdated and slow-paced it can be. Much of the underlying technology is decades old. We’re living in an increasingly digital world where we need to be moving towards 24/7 capabilities. That’s the demand and expectation of retail investors who want to be able to trade whenever it’s convenient for them.
Why did Apex decide to take on rebuilding core investment infrastructure?
Andy: It’s what we do — we’re innovators and disruptors. It’s why I joined Apex — to move wealthtech forward and into the cloud. We’re not trying to be at the forefront of new technology as a whole; we want to be at the forefront of financial services.
Strategically speaking, what were your platform priorities?
Andy: When building this platform, our first goal was developing a modern experience for all, which includes both wealth management firms and their customers. We wanted to create a highly distributed, highly secure application across the whole spectrum of core services, including the flexibility to add capabilities and innovate at scale. Our roadmap is bursting with enhancements… features I won’t detail here, but am very excited to reveal when they’re ready for the spotlight.
Our second big focus was on accurate and accessible data. How do we provide firms with timely access to all their customer data to help mitigate risk? That’s why we wanted to give our clients the ability to systematically address whole risk categories. And how do we fold it all into a unified interface so advisors don’t have to toggle between a bunch of tabs? We built out dashboards to help inform critical business decisions.
Finally, because of regulatory requirements, we focused on putting proper security precautions and controls in place. We’re in the financial services business, and we know how important it is to address security for our clients. While we’re among the first in this industry to adopt these cloud-based technologies, they have already been proven out in other industries.
How did you make your data more accurate and accessible?
Andy: The data solution was exactly what you would expect: a built-in business intelligence tool layered on top of a data lake embedded in the platform. Ideal for executives and advisors, this new feature also has a view designed to keep end-user investors informed and up-to-date, with the power to dig into their own data.
Plus, we’re sensitive about the issue of potentially stale data, so we also prioritized other real-time services — for example, we automated corporate actions such as split or dividend calculations — in an effort to improve data accuracy.
What types of investment firms are you targeting with this platform?
Andy: You’re not going to believe me, but the real answer is all of them. Apex has experience helping companies from the big enterprise institutions down to the startups. Our corporate mission is frictionless investing for everyone, so we want to reach as many investors as possible.
But to answer the real question, we understand that the “wealth management” category encompasses very diverse firms. Our technology has handled the unique scale of retail’s large trade volumes and small dollar values and institutional’s lower trade volumes and huge dollar values. The platform itself is agnostic about the type of data that needs to be managed and shared — the key for us is having the scale to handle what our clients need.
Could you run us through a few of the notable improvements Ascend offers?
Andy: Absolutely. I know dev teams never have enough bandwidth to do everything on their boards, so we followed current API standards to make implementation as easy as possible for our clients. This faster-to-launch strategy is actually standard in fintech, but fairly new to the wealth management space.
I’m particularly proud of the flexibility we’ve built into the platform. It can power an array of business models, including self-directed or full-service brokers, robo advisors, independent RIAs, treasury managers, global firms accessing US markets — whatever the next big idea is.
Last but not least, we’ve eliminated many of the operational inefficiencies that have been holding wealth management firms back. Automation frees up valuable human time. Now, advisors can work on winning new investors and increasing business value, instead of getting mired in administrative tasks.
What’s in it for clients? What are the key advantages of Ascend?
Andy: Our existing legacy platform runs like a very traditional model, connected to a big database that runs all the time and then exports data. From a technical perspective, Apex Ascend is a series of services that all run independently and record data into our central data lake in near real time.
In the past, these independent services were often entangled with others, making it difficult to improve any single feature on its own. We believe that the ability to scale services individually will help us accelerate the future enhancements we make to Ascend.
In the end, we’re here to serve our clients by providing more tools to further differentiate themselves from their competition.
What are the important platform features that matter to developers?
Andy: Apex offers a modern developer experience. That starts with a try-before-you-buy developer sandbox. All the tools they need to connect efficiently — SDKs, APIs, UIs. Then it continues throughout their relationship with Apex. Again, we are using proven frameworks to provide seamless service, even when we release something with our APIs. Our clients’ devs simply need to update their SDKs — no code modifications required.
As we look to the future, we hope to self-service this developer step, so they can just show up, give us credentials, and start working with our platforms. Let’s give them more time so they can think of the next great brokerage idea.
How did client and developer feedback help define the shape of Ascend?
Andy: The very batchy nature of trading is not ideal, and we heard that loud and clear. By taking advantage of the cloud, the latency gets lower and the speed at which we do things is now much faster.
Our clients told us that reliability is important. Uptime is absolutely essential. People want information and data to show up when they’re supposed to show up, be correct, and work the way they’re supposed to. It shouldn’t be too much to ask technology to simply work, but it’s been a common problem with legacy systems.
We’ve also heard frustrations about the old style of buying a whole wealthtech system, whether it’s needed or not, and leaving it to developers to build patches and workarounds. That’s why we chose a modular strategy, to let our clients buy bits and pieces to create a bespoke solution.
What’s the main takeaway you want everyone to know about this platform?
Andy: Apex Ascend enables our clients to have it both ways. You can be nimble in how you build your solution and adapt it over time. And you can run vast, operating efficiently at a global scale.
How can I get a closer look at Apex Ascend?
Andy: Someone on my team would be delighted to give you a tour. Just request a demo.
And our developer portal is a perfect place to kick the tires and get rolling yourself.
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