Name
Title: President & CEO
Company: CircleBlack
Web address: www.circleblack.com
Alex Sauickie currently serves as president and chief executive officer of CircleBlack. CircleBlack is a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) wealth management platform designed to be quick to deploy and easy to use. Sauickie is a veteran in the enterprise software and SaaS spaces.
What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
CircleBlack is a next generation software-as-a-service (SaaS) wealth management platform that gives a complete financial overview of an advisor’s complete book of business and their investors’ portfolios, in one simple-to-access location including mobile. CircleBlack provides a holistic view with aggregated data feeds from custodians, direct holdings, as well as clients’ held-away accounts. CircleBlack provides the advisor the ability to generate daily performance reports, basic billing, access to clients’ 401k investment choices (not just their holdings), rebalancing (pushing out to trading), a model marketplace and much more. CircleBlack has deep level integration with other advisor platforms such as CRM, Financial Planning and Risk Analytics, and is committed to providing innovative technology solutions that are a competitive advantage for an advisor, allowing them to gather new clients and grow their assets.
What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
If fintech firms learned nothing else with the events of 2020, it is they need to be mobile. CircleBlack, as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, that includes the ability to access client portfolio data from any desktop, tablet, or phone was postioned well to support advisors through this unprecedented event. Those fintech firms that weren’t there already, are scrambling to catch up, and finding it’s not that easy. Hopefully we’ll be putting the pandemic behind us soon, however I think it has changed forever how advisors will work, as well as how they will need to interact with their investors. In addition, today’s investor and the next generation will demand mobile access to their portfolios. If their advisor can’t provide it, they’ll go somewhere else that does. CircleBlack provides that level of access today.
What do you believe the next major innovation in financial technology will be and why?
An area that I think the majority of fintech firms have yet to embrace is what I refer to as FinTech Social, the bringing together of financial services technology with the aspects of social media. Generations to come won’t know a world without the 21st century phenomenom of social media. It’s a part of their every day life because it’s engaging. Providing more engagement opportunities, while maintaining certain privacy requirements, in fintech solutions is a good thing. On the consumer side, you’re already seeing FinTech products that have clearly shown great success in this area, most noteably Paypal’s peer-to-peer money movement application Venmo. In historically more traditional wealth management applications, social aspects coud include for example the ability for a 35 year old female investor to annonomously compare her investments and performance results to those of the other 35 year old female investors within the same financial institution. If that same investor is already thinking ahead, she could dynamically compare what she is doing today with the average 45 year old investor. It’s not only engaging, it’s real life.
What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?
CircleBlack from the beginning was built in the cloud and with a mantra of “provide robust functionality but make it simple to use and understand”. In today’s world, for today’s generation of both advisor and investor, and for generations to come, advisor’s need a solution that they can take anywhere. They also need a solution that is quick to deploy and user friendly that doesn’t require they call or email a support desk to understand the functionality. Lastly, they need a solution that connects them to their investor, and allows the advisor to permission and provide a highly innovative technology solution for an investor to access their portfolio. If their advisor doesn’t provide this type of technology, today’s investor will go somewhere else. CircleBlack thought years ahead and by doing so has positioned itself as an innovative solution for RIAs as well as broker-dealers to gather assets and grow their business.