Name
Title: President and CEO
Company: Luma Financial Technologies
Web Address: https://lumafintech.com/
Tim Bonacci is president and CEO of Luma Financial Technologies, which provides a platform for advisors to acquire knowledge and request, compare, price and select structured products and annuities that meet their clients’ needs. Bonacci created the Lua platform by spinning out and developing the technology platform of Navian Capital, a structured products wholesaler and distributor he co-founded in 2005.
What does your firm do/offer?
Luma was designed with the sole purpose of elevating the value-add financial advisors can offer their clients by utilizing structured products and annuities. We provide the broadest, most objective, multi-issuer technology platform available for advisors to easily request, compare, price, trade and manage these products over their entire lifecycle.
Our platform is versatile, easy to use and is equipped with educational content aimed to train advisors to better understand the role structured products and annuities can have within portfolios. Also included in our platform are various modules that can be utilized by advisors to meet the individual needs of their clients. It is these features and tools that differentiate our platform and enable advisors to deliver an elevated value and a more predictable investing experience.
What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?
I would have to say our biggest success to date has been the development and deployment of our Product Creation Tool, which we launched to the advisor market in June 2019 and has been very well received. With this offering, advisors now have the ability to customize structured products at an extremely efficient rate. Custom pricing requests can be closed from start to finish in under an hour on average. This is a vast improvement over traditional and customary offline processes that could take multiple hours to several days to price accurately and complete. This speed, efficiency, and transparency make custom pricing more viable for advisors since they can now be responsive to client requests and demonstrate a proactive and timely response to client needs. In turn, clients are receiving a value add of timely-priced custom products tailored to match their individual investment need that would not be available to them should their advisor request custom pricing of a product through typical offline processes.
How do you feel consumers are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
Lack of educational materials and accessibility to structured products and annuities has hindered the widespread adoption of these strategies in the United States. Luma strives to educate and provide advisors with the materials and tools they need to better understand these products so they can feel comfortable utilizing them to benefit their clients and help achieve their goals. Previously, about 5% of structured products had been transacted on multi-issuer fintech platforms. That number is expected to balloon to about 50% by mid-2020, as efficient and easy-to-use technology platforms expedite the democratization of these strategies.
As the conversation around structured products broadens and advisor education improves, we continue to diffuse common stigmas facing the product category; particularly, that they are too risky – these products are designed to minimize risk, not increase it. With an ambiguous business cycle and an unprecedented economic expansion that grows older each day, investors are becoming increasingly interested in strategies that help insulate portfolios from broad market drawdowns. As uncertainty persists and volatility creeps back into the market, structured products will likely see continued growth as advisors become more mindful of their benefits.