Vestmark’s CEO Karl Roessner and Chief Revenue Officer Ananya Balaram spoke with WSR at the recent MMI Annual Conference. Roessner took the reins at Vestmark two years ago. Balaram is a 16-year veteran of the firm who held executive positions in sales and relationship management before his appointment as CRO in 2022.
We talked about the firm’s current and upcoming initiatives, alternative investments in portfolios, agentic AI and its recent hires.
Current And Upcoming Initiatives
Roessner said that the company intends to do more in the advisor space, leveraging its core technology. “Now is time to take that powerful technology and turn it into something that not only investment managers can use, but also look more toward the aggregators and the large RIAs.”
He said the VAST portfolio management service, launched in April 2023, was the firm’s first major initiative to leverage its core technology to serve advisors. The firm is now developing other offerings for advisors, including a reporting solution, which will be the first in a suite of products Vestmark plans to bring to market in the next 12 to 18 months. The reporting solution’s first on-platform user is expected approximately three weeks from the time of the MMI conference.
“The reporting solution was a proof point that we could pull together a team of individuals, align them toward a goal and have them actually deliver within a 12 month period,” said Roessner. “That gave us the confidence to say, ‘We can do the rest of this.’”
He added that the firm is currently leveraging its partnership with PureFacts for an internal billing partner for the VAST platform, and plans to roll out billing solutions to clients based on this partnership.
The firm also plans to update its proposal generation system with a specific focus on the user interface that serves advisors. Balaram said this offering is projected to have its first client by the first quarter of 2025.
The next project on Vestmark’s agenda is household rebalancing, or householding. Balaram said the first phase of this service will be focused on asset location and tax management from an asset location perspective, and is expected in mid-2025.
One of the goals Vestmark aims to achieve with its new suite of services is making advisor solutions friendly through implementing APIs that advisors can use to access functions without having to work with the full system designed for investment managers. Advisors often want to access only the parts of the system that pertain to their work, according to Roessner.
Roessner stated that Vestmark wants to provide “a single user interface that will allow advisors to access the tools they want to use.”
Roessner borrowed the phrase “single pane of glass” from Shirl Penney, Founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, and stated that Vestmark wants to provide “a single user interface that will allow advisors to access the tools they want to use.”
Advancing Alternatives In UMA Structures
Balaram said that clients are asking for alternative investments of various types in the construct of a single custodian account, being delivered in a unified managed account (UMA). “You want to be able to manage a portfolio that has alts in whatever form of liquidity available to your client.”
“Most asset managers are delivering custom model portfolios – that’s the next frontier for us – and making that simple for the advisor without the advisor having to jump through hoops and operational inefficiencies,” he added. “Given our background with building from a UMA as a baseline over the last 20 years, we’re extraordinarily well positioned to accommodate that.”
Agentic AI
Roessner said that another area Vestmark is exploring is agentic AI, which Tech Target defines as “artificial intelligence systems that are capable of autonomous action and decision-making.” Vestmark has been working with Amazon AWS and some firms recommended by them to move this initiative forward.
“If you have groups of agents, each having distinct tasks, and then have the master agent that can collect the data and put it a way that’s easily accessible for the advisor, you can cut their workload and time down significantly,” he said.
Balaram added that the firm is looking for ways to make it simpler for an “advisor to interrogate the data they have access to without having to go through the steps they typically have to go through.” He emphasized that AI is about providing an assistant to productivity, rather than a decisionmaker.
“We will use AI for ability and functionality for advisors to work faster and more efficiently.”
– Karl Roessner
“It’s still a probabilistic solution, and I would never be happy going out to a client with 95% certainty that this will work,” said Roessner. “We will not be in the advice space. We will use AI for ability and functionality for advisors to work faster and more efficiently.”
Team Buildout
Roessner said that the firm has been selectively upgrading its management team by hiring “industry forward individuals who know how to execute.” He pointed to the hires of Corey Fiedler, EVP, Head of Products; Steve Gottschalk, VP, Head of Marketing; and Rob Battista, SVP, Head of Advisory Solutions, among others.
“Those individuals are the ones that will drive the change that we talked about. You can’t do that without the right talent, without the right people in the right slots,” Roessner said.
Julius Buchanan, Editor in Chief at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at jbuchanan@wealthsolutionsreport.com.
