CircleBlack’s founder and CEO John Michel passed away in July of last year, but nearly six months into the tenure of new CEO Alex Sauickie, Michel's vision of wealth management software that could connect everyone with investments and money in the way of their choosing lives on.

Kingston, N.J.-based CircleBlack has thrived with Sauickie in the CEO role in part because he has enthusiastically embraced Michel’s passion for developing a cloud-based platform that allows advisors and clients to take their financial information anywhere and that plays well with all of the other technology advisors want to use in their day-to-day business.

CircleBlack is a software-as-a-service wealth management platform enabling a complete overview of an advisor’s or firm’s book of business and investor portfolios, aggregating data feeds from custodians, direct holdings and held-away accounts. It also offers advisors the ability to generate performance reports, as well as basic billing, access to clients’ 401(k) investment choices, portfolio rebalancing and a model marketplace.

Immediately upon becoming CEO in September, Sauickie had to deploy funding from private equity firm Long Arc Capital, which acquired a majority interest in CircleBlack in June of 2020.

“That really has allowed the company to invest and expand in a way that it couldn’t do for its first seven years,” said Sauickie. “We’ve been spending our time on adding to the product and really focusing on expanding the breadth of data available.”

He said CircleBlack has also been hard at work adding new third-party integrations to maintain its founder’s vision as a unifying technology for financial advisors and their firms.

Sauickie says he’s also taken on Michel’s role as chief evangelist for the platform by trying to make connections with new and potential clients.

“He was a visionary and was thinking years ahead of where the industry’s technology was,” said Sauickie about Michel. “I think CircleBlack has kind of made its own category. Though we’re usually compared to a typical all-in-one solution, the difference between us and the typical all-in-one is that we’re a unifying best-in-breed solution. We aren’t just a one-stop shop where advisors take what we have, and we’re not trying to be.”

While a lot of fintech companies have been adding to their platforms through mergers and acquisitions to create a platform that does everything, CircleBlack dedicated itself to pursuing integrations with third-party fintechs at an early stage.

For example, Sauickie points out that rather than settling on a single CRM system, advisors are using Salesforce, Redtail and Wealthbox. Rather than make an acquisition or partner with one of those providers, CircleBlack has chosen to integrate with all three.

In addition to a recent integration with Wealthbox, CircleBlack has added Riskalyze and risk tolerance software developer Totum Risk. And it has two more risk-management providers in its integration pipeline. It is also adding account-opening platforms.

“We want to give advisors multiple opportunities to choose which technology works best for their firm,” Sauickie said. “From our perspective, we’re indifferent. We’re very much the Roku of wealth management platforms.”

He’s referring to the video streaming service Roku, a “connective tissue that brings together all of the different streaming channels,” said Sauickie.

At CircleBlack’s heart is a wealth and portfolio management platform designed to work across multiple custodians with ease.

Sauickie is trying to market CircleBlack to four main segments: RIAs; aggregators and turnkey asset management programs; custodians and large institutions like major independent broker-dealers; and banks.

“The two areas we’re experiencing a lot of success in right now are the custodians and the banks,” he said, noting that one of the firm’s largest clients is RBC. “This model resonates really well in what they’re looking to offer to their clients, which interestingly end up being the small to midsize RIAs, the clients who have the greatest need for technology solutions like ours. We do have a direct business, but custodians and banks are supporting those clients in mass quantities.”

Custodians, TAMPs and banks in particular are looking for unique, customizable technology stacks that they can offer to advisors and potential clients, said Sauickie.

That gives CircleBlack a leg up on all-in-one technology providers, he said.

“It’s not that they don’t want to do what we’re doing now, but all-in-ones usually have a technology debt that’s measured in years and decades because they failed to pursue integrations for so long,” he said. “Our technology is more modern and open in a way that some larger companies haven’t been able to keep up. In order to do what CircleBlack does, they would have to start from scratch.”

For that reason, CircleBlack is not looking to grow into an all-in-one solution via acquisitions and mergers, said Sauickie.

In addition to adding to CircleBlack’s universe of integrations and adding new clients, Sauickie has also been expanding the firm’s management team.

“I’ve been lucky to inherit a great team,” he said. “Everybody who was here as part of the original management team is still here because they are already really good at what they do. In addition, we’ve filled roles like chief revenue officer, chief financial officer, head of marketing, head of product management, and we expect additional leadership on the technology and development side as well as operations over the next one to two months.

“I had some big shoes to fill, and I was sensitive to that coming into this situation,” he said of his predecessor. “We still want to execute on his vision, and we’re all kind of rowing the same way. It was that vision that brought me to CircleBlack.”

Sauickie said the platform’s users should look for improvements to CircleBlack’s investor application in 2021, including additional reporting for clients to enable more co-planning across different devices between advisors and the end client.