This blog recaps a recent article in ThinkAdvisor by Jane Wollman Rusoff | April 24, 2024

MyVest CEO, Anton Honikman, spoke with Jane Wollman Rusoff of ThinkAdvisor about MyVest winning a 2023 ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES award for executive leadership and various trends in the wealth management industry and discussed how MyVest is addressing the latest trends. 

In the interview, Anton discussed trends in the RIA space, the end of “swivel-chairing” (advisors needing to switch between programs, screens, or sources to complete a task) and the one-system integration for advisors and clients’ portfolios. 

Below are a few highlights of the conversation.

Personalization & tax management

When asked about the greatest challenge in the financial services space today, Anton noted that, “the industry’s historical model of how we add value is under threat. Two ways we need to evolve to address that is through personalization in tax management and the breadth of services.”

Anton described how MyVest’s tax management software helps combat these challenges. 

“Personalization was generally done as a hand-crafted, highly manual construct and delivered only to the wealthiest clients because they had the assets to justify the extra manual work,” Anton noted. “MyVest’s vision is applying technology to automate a lot of that and thereby expanding the universe of people who can benefit — not only the ultra-wealthy but those who are underserved.”

Through addressing that challenge, MyVest recently extended its tax-aware portfolio transition capabilities in its latest Strategic Portfolio System™ (SPS) platform update to help wealth management firms and advisors deliver more tax efficient portfolio transitions at scale.

Impact of RIA industry consolidation

Over the last 10–15 years, many RIAs have been consolidating into much larger firms under more notable brands. Anton observes that, “These big RIAs are now operating like enterprises, whereas before they were operating like small businesses. When you have an enterprise and look at it through the lens of a large company, you begin to look differently at enterprise technology, data management, and cybersecurity. These RIAs are starting to look like larger banks and broker-dealers.” 

This consolidation is creating a software domino effect, especially related to data storage, collection and modeling, as these organizations become larger.

Technology’s role in making the advisor more efficient

Anton outlined the importance of technology improving advisor workflows. The swivel-chairing many advisors experience creates friction in their practices, delaying services and creating unnecessary challenges.

Anton points out that “the biggest stumbling block comes from the need to remove that friction and re-keying information to multiple systems.”

With the technology MyVest provides, platforms can become an integrated experience for advisors and their clients. While it’s a problem that still exists and will for the immediate future, Anton relayed that firms are working on addressing swivel-chairing. “We’re trying to get an integrated experience for advisors … it’s coming, but it’s certainly not there yet.”

Read the full article on ThinkAdvisor.