Wealth management platform CircleBlack announced on Tuesday that John Michel, its CEO and founder, passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. He was 62.

“John helped build some of the most innovative technologies to fill the white spaces in investing,” said Martin Beaulieu, a director of CircleBlack and former CEO of Artivest, in a statement. “As a well-known financial innovator, he was passionate through his entire career about finding a better way for people to manage their wealth and lives.

Michel founded CircleBlack after serving 14 years in different capacities with Merrill Lynch, where he is credited as one of the creators of the Merrill Edge digital advising platform. He also helped create Bloomberg Wealth, Bloomberg’s first direct-to-consumer offering.

Before joining Merrill Lynch in 1987, Michel graduated from the United States Military Academy and served six years in the Army.

Created in 2013, CircleBlack was an early entrant into wealth management fintech emphasizing comprehensive aggregation of client financial information and deep integrations with as many platforms as possible, recognizing a demand among advisors for an elimination of time-intensive, repetitive data entry tasks and more efficient workflows.

“We are all personally devastated to have lost a giant of a man like my father so unexpectedly,” said Jay Michel, John Michel’s son and CircleBlack’s managing director of marketing. “He built CircleBlack with the idea that people could live their lives to the fullest if advisors could give them a more transparent view of their wealth. Nothing can replace him in our hearts, but his values and legacy will clearly live on in everything we do, professionally and personally.”

In recent months, New York-based private equity firm Long Arc Capital acquired a majority stake in CircleBlack. In announcing Michel’s passing, Long Arc hinted that it will be releasing more information about the strategic plans for the company he founded in the near future.

“John was a visionary who built a number of successful businesses enabled by technology,” said Gaurav Bhandari, managing partner of Long Arc Capital, in released comments. “In getting to know him and the business he had built at CircleBlack over the past year, it was clear John had developed a powerful proposition addressing an important gap in the market. His loss shocks and saddens all of the Long Arc team, and we know his legacy of innovation will be a cornerstone of CircleBlack’s continued growth in the years to come.”