Name: Alastair Cairns
Title: Head of Insights
Company: Addepar
Web Address: https://addepar.com/

Alastair Cairns is the head of Insights and Marketplace at Addepar, a wealth management technology platform. Insights is a new venture within Addepar that delivers comparative analytics based on Addepar’s proprietary data set, while Marketplace which offers digital access to a wide range of financial products through Acervus Securities.

What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Addepar is a wealth management technology platform that specializes in data aggregation, analytics, and performance reporting for even the most complex portfolios. Our software is highly flexible and customizable, and is designed to bring transparency to all types of portfolios and ownership structures. We have nearly $2 trillion of assets on our platform managed by hundreds of family offices, RIAs, and banks globally.

A few weeks ago Addepar launched Marketplace, a digital platform that supplements ourreporting capabilities and gives our clients access to a wide range of financial products through Acervus Securities. Our launch partners cover cash management, hedge funds & private equity, and secondary trading in private securities and LP interests. We selected these areas to start because our clients are heavily invested in alternatives and other private assets - over 35% of their total portfolios - and these are products that are traditionally challenging to access in a digital way.

How do you feel consumers are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
Consumers are seeing technology transform their expectations across sector after sector, and are increasingly asking why their wealth manager can’t deliver the same digital experience they receive from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other technology companies. Ironically, this is especially true for wealthier investors, since their portfolios typically have a significant share of alternative investments, which are notoriously opaque and difficult to process from an operational perspective.

We continue to see that advisors are hungry for technology that can consolidate and unify data so they can easily analyze any portfolio, provide clients with a complete and meaningful financial picture, and offer the best possible advice. In an increasingly competitive environment, the right technology can help set them apart from other firms and offer a differentiated client experience. In fact, the power of this technology was validated by research from RIA Database which found Addepar clients are growing faster than their peers. In 2018, firms using Addepar with less than $2.5B assets under management (AUM) outgrew the market by 465 basis points, and firms with $2.5B to $10B AUM outgrew the market by 295 basis points.

What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
Recent events have shown us all that remote working is easier and more sustainable than we thought. While this will not change the fundamental, personal, nature of the advisor-client relationship, I do think it will accelerate pre-existing trends toward increasing the use of technology in delivering wealth management services. As a cloud-based reporting platform, Addepar is well positioned to capitalize on these trends, and help our clients deliver high quality advice supported by a data-driven, digital platform.