How did you personally become involved in fintech?
I’ve been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. When I was 15, I helped my dad start our first business, which focused on scaling mission critical web sites with high performance requirements. At the time, the internet was still nascent, and many websites hadn’t been properly designed for scale. We saw this as an emerging problem, and won eBay and Priceline as customers, among others.
My focus evolved when I moved to New York in 2000 to attend Columbia, where I studied computer science and began working for Lehman Brothers. It was during this experience that I really noticed how inadequate technology was at helping people make financial decisions. I noticed that the financial industry was tackling some major long-term problems, but the data was lacking as technology wasn’t being geared towards the end customer and solutions were not as helpful as they could be.
These experiences led me to meld my interest in technology with the problems facing the financial industry. In 2013, I joined Addepar for this very reason. Here, we have built a sophisticated technology platform that enables our clients to enhance efficiency, transparency, and deepen customer relationships.
What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Addepar provides wealth managers with an advanced, tech-forward platform that enables our clients to more efficiently service complex portfolios and sophisticated investment needs. To do this, we provide our clients (primarily financial advisors) with advanced reporting and analytics tools that allow them to leverage a complete view of performance metrics across all assets in a portfolio.
What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?
I would say that our biggest success to date was getting to the point where clients use our platform to manage $1 trillion of assets, which we reached in April. This milestone reflects an expanding client roster of more than 300 firms, including Morgan Stanley, AB Bernstein, Oppenheimer, and many others spanning single and multi-family offices, wealth advisors, large financial institutions, endowments, and foundations.
Clients using our platform to manage $1T of assets is reflective of our continued business momentum as a technology partner that provides our clients with access to best in class data aggregation, analytics and reporting. Addepar allows financial advisors to adapt to an evolving wealth management industry and solve business problems along the way.
Eric Poirier is Chief Executive Officer of Addepar, and spearheads Addepar’s mission to build the new operating system for our financial world. Eric’s focus is on solving tractable data and scale challenges in the financial sector with innovative technology.