Name: Brian Ross
Title: CEO
Company: Flyer
Web Address: www.FixFlyer.com

Brian Ross is CEO of Flyer, a provider of trading tools, connectivity and infrastructure for the wealth management industry.

What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Flyer provides advisors and wealthtech firms with software that helps advisors navigate critical steps in the investment lifecycle. From portfolio management to position management and order management to compliance management, Flyer’s technology streamlines operations and delivers better results for advisors and their clients in a variety of ways:

  • Flyer’s Co-Pilot is a cloud-based, multi-asset portfolio trading platform, backed by the firm’s Flyer Trading Network, that enables advisors to make investment decisions faster, trade with more control and sophistication, streamline middle and back office operations and go to market with leading trading tools and APIs. 
  • The Flyer Trading Network processes over $2 trillion in trading volume per year across more than 10,000 accounts for over 1,500 advisory firms. Our clients include the top four RIA custodians, as well as global brokers such as UBS and RBC.

In addition to its work with advisors, Flyer also powers the industry’s leading wealthtech vendors including Orion, Envestnet | Tamarac, Riskalyze and Morningstar. Each of these firms access the Flyer platform in different ways to enhance their advisor solutions and address their clients’ individual needs, which includes:

  • Customizing their own order management system (OMS) via Flyer’s API
  • Accessing Flyer’s advanced order routing network to trade thousands of accounts in seconds.
  • Integrating Flyer’s Co-Pilot front end system into their existing platforms.

Across all of these partners, one thing remains consistent - they each use Flyer to provide advisors with the fastest way to execute their investment decisions.

What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
With cloud-based rebalancing and trading readily available, the industry will experience significant consolidation of these platforms over the next five years. Accelerated by the global pandemic, advisors will increasingly work remotely, powered by the best and most sophisticated technology offerings, in other words: a flight to quality. As traditional desktop workstations become less prevalent, new agile technologies will flourish that allow advisors to do more with less. These platforms also enable advisors to trade from anywhere, any time. This transition will be supported by a flourishing API economy which provides advisory firms and technology providers with the tools they need to integrate specialized solutions and take control over the experience they provide to advisors. Firms will continue to move away from obsolete technologies to optimize the advisor experience, ultimately improving investor performance and better positioning their teams to attract top advisor talent.

What do you believe the next major innovation in financial technology will be and why?
The next innovation in financial technology will be the expansion of the wealth management API economy. Investors are demanding best-in-class across the board, and advisors are no longer able to get by with a cookie-cutter technology offering. As advisors look to grow and scale their businesses, bringing on a modern client-base, they will in-turn require more sophisticated systems and tools to maintain a competitive advantage. To meet this growing need, existing technology providers will enhance their open architecture platforms, allowing advisory firms to use best-of-breed solutions at each stage of the advisor lifecycle. As the wealthtech ecosystem expands, APIs will be the critical delivery mechanism that allow customization and interoperability between systems, so firms will not need to deploy one-size-fits-all products. Most importantly, platforms will control the user experience to the leading software tools with developer-friendly APIs resulting in improved advisor-client relationships.

For example, an advisor may want to use one vendor for financial planning, another for portfolio management and another for accounting. There will be a proliferation of easy-to-use APIs that allow advisors to plug-and-play solutions based on their specific needs at each point of the investor journey.

What are the biggest problems facing the fintech industry in the future?
The single biggest problem currently facing the fintech industry is agility. Especially in periods of heightened volatility, it is critical for advisors to minimize time between order generation and order fulfillment to ensure fair and equitable trade execution prices when the market is moving. The biggest barrier to fixing this issue is that many advisors have been using the same, outdated trading technology for years, even decades. Bringing in new technology that fits into an advisor’s existing tech stack can be a quick, and meaningful way to effect change in how they trade, and positively impact the results they can secure for their clients.

One thing is clear in the current market – volatility is here to stay. The fintech industry must adapt to this new normal and provide advisors with the best tools and technologies at every touchpoint in the investment process. We know that an advisor’s time is best spent working directly with clients, so as the fintech industry looks to streamline all operational components of an advisor’s workflow, it is essential that they address key issues on how these advisors currently conduct trades.