“How many times have you heard Apex’s name?” asked Apex Clearing CEO Bill Capuzzi during a recent interview. The question was directed not so much at me as to the wealth management industry at large to highlight his point that this up-and-coming Dallas-based custodian remains a relative unknown compared to the traditional legacy custodians familiar to the financial advisor community.

Apex’s bread and butter during the past five years has been providing clearing and custody services for Wealthfront, Betterment and other leading robo-advisor online platforms. But for the past year or more, Apex has pivoted its focus to play a bigger role in helping human-based advisory firms keep up with the times by bolstering their digital wealth management capabilities.

“We open more than 450,000 accounts a month, and add roughly $1.5 billion to $2 billion in assets a month, but most people don’t know who we are,” Capuzzi says. He adds that’s largely by design because Apex’s purpose is to create a fast and seamless online investment experience for its financial services customers and their clients while staying in the background as much as possible (aside from the Apex name appearing on client statements, as required, because it’s the custodian).

But as Apex aims to raise its profile and become the digital wealth management enabler of choice for traditional advisor firms, it’s throwing around the “D” word a lot—i.e., it sees itself as “disruptor” in the custodian space.

Capuzzi says the legacy clearing and custodial platform infrastructure is decades old, making it difficult for the incumbent players to provide quick turnaround on setting up accounts, transferring assets and other related chores.

“Why is it in our industry that it can take multiple days to open an account or transfer money from my bank to a custodial account?” he asks. “We’re disrupting by focusing on those pieces that are behind the scenes and automating them to whatever extent possible.”

Apex was formed in 2012 by PEAK6 Investments, the parent of online brokerage OptionsHouse (since bought by E*Trade Financial), in order to acquire some of Penson Worldwide’s client accounts after Penson exited the clearing business. Penson, a former securities clearing brokerage, got into hot water in 2011 after it disclosed it held a large chunk of illiquid bonds issued by a horse racing track operator that had ties to a Penson board member. Peak6 took over the business that became Apex as part of a restructuring at Penson, and subsequently refined its focus.

“Over the next few years the management team eliminated any clients that weren’t fintech-focused like robos” Capuzzi says. “That business really took hold in the 2013-2015 timeframe as the robos took off”.

Apex’s value-add is creating what it calls a sophisticated stack, or series of application program interfaces (APIs) that enable the integration of different software programs in a plug-and-play way involving such tasks as client on-boarding, account aggregation and portfolio rebalancing.

“We measure account openings in seconds,” Capuzzi says. “Betterment needed the ability to make that experience for its clients as fast and seamless as possible. No paperwork needed, no web signatures or DocuSign, no waiting … it’s opened immediately.”

Will Trout, head of wealth management research at Celent, calls Apex the custodian of choice for digital advisors. That said, Wealthfront last year parted ways with Apex.

“If you talked to Andy [Rachleff, Wealthfront co-founder and CEO], he’d say we really helped launch their business,” Capuzzi says. “But they got to a place where they wanted to control more of the client experience and have it more exclusive to them, and it’s something that was the next step in Wealthfront’s evolution.”

Wealthfront wouldn’t comment for this article, though the company did highlight a blog that said it had decided to build its own banking and brokerage platform to better control its destiny.

Beyond that, the retail investor-focused robo, or B2C, space is maturing as smaller firms exit the business and the larger ones—think Wealthfront and Betterment, for example—seem best positioned for the long haul. That means less potential robo clients for Apex.

At the same time, Capuzzi says, traditional enterprise advisor firms are scrambling to offer digital advice as well as fast, automated online account features to appeal to younger investors used to doing business on mobile phones. And they want to find ways to profitably serve younger investors who have fewer assets than the typical RIA client.

“And even ultra-high-net-worth clients want some kind of pleasant, digital type of solution,” Capuzzi says. “Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean they don’t want immediacy and the ability to quickly open an account or transfer assets. We find that advisors want a solution that spans from the robo solution up to the high-net-worth solution. And that’s where Apex has started to make a name for itself.”

Trout says Apex is well positioned to be a significant player in the next phase of online digital advice—what he calls Robo 2.5, with the emphasis on enabling traditional advisors to provide a digital investment experience for their customers.

“This is an exciting time in the B2B space because you’re seeing a lot of legacy institutions with complex architecture struggling with digitizing their capabilities,” Trout says. “So you’re seeing the emergence of dedicated B2B platforms like Trizic, RobustWealth and InvestCloud that aren’t necessarily wealth advisors but are providing the digital tech for financial institutions to offer digital advice.”

Apex forged relationships with all three of the above-mentioned companies last year. “Their technologies are brand new, so there’s no legacy code,” Capuzzi says. “Their space is the front office, while ours is the back office. It’s a good partnership because our respective offerings don’t overlap.”

Capuzzi is also excited about Apex’s partnership with a company called Quovo, which he says will potentially disrupt the account transfer process by automating it, a task that’s easier said than done.

He adds that Apex is making headway in the traditional advisor space. “We’ve added 30 new clients in the past year, and about 75% of them were advisors,” Capuzzi says. “It’s still early, but we’re seeing a mix of smaller, nimble and fintech-minded RIA firms and more enterprise-level advisories.”

Assuming that Apex has first-mover advantage in the B2B platform space, Capuzzi realizes it won’t last forever against the likes of Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, Pershing or other larger, formidable custodians.

“We’d be naive to think the competitors won’t catch up to us sooner or later, but I think they’ve got a long way to go because much of their infrastructure is built on 1980s/1990s technology,” he says. “Trying to fix that is a monumental task.

“I love our position as a kind of new entrant into the space as a challenger brand,” Capuzzi adds. “I think there are some significant, sustainable differentiators [between us and them].”