The firm also houses its technological infrastructure on-site rather than farming it out to a remote location and keeps its own IT department instead of contracting a third-party vendor.
In the past, the firm’s IT professionals have helped it integrate much of its technology and software, so that Condor has been able to seamlessly move among programs—even before the major custodians and software providers seriously focused on developing their own integrations.
In 2017, Condor launched a new client portal for its clients. “Our clients tend to be very hands-on, which may be because so many of them are from New Jersey,” says Michael Walliser. “They want to be able to log onto our portal and see what’s happening and everything that has already happened.”
In recent years, Schapiro has taken his love of technology and his mission of transparency a step further, spinning off a research firm, Backend Benchmarking, to show the results of different investing strategies over time.
He believes that transparency should be the rule across the financial advice industry, and that’s led him to pursue the first in situ research of robo-advisors, the Robo Report, originally launched by Condor Capital in 2015.
“I’m an entrepreneur myself,” he says. “This started out as kind of a garage project initially. It turned into a desire to bring transparency into something I don’t think is very transparent. In fact, advisors in general aren’t as transparent as I think they should be.”
He noticed that robo-advisors were not forthcoming about their investments and performance, so he began funding robo accounts with his personal money and tracking their performance with the help of Condor Capital’s four-person research staff.
To date, Schapiro has invested over $500,000 of his own money into the venture (which evolved into Backend Benchmarking). “We started Backend Benchmarking because there was a need for research into investment strategies and services being offered to the public,” says Schapiro. “We started with robo-advisors because they were largely an unknown. The most robotic thing advisors do is investment management. It can easily be automated away. Advisors need to see the numbers out there in order to make an effective decision about the future of investment management.”
Moving forward, Schapiro wants to use Backend Benchmarking to track the performance of the entire investment industry, making it another idea that, like Condor, could grow into an enterprise that changes many lives.
Apart from skiing slopes that few people have the pleasure of ever seeing, perhaps it’s the privilege of watching something large grow from an idea and watching successful advisors and support staff grow from adults barely over the age of majority that imbues Schapiro with the optimism and openness usually reserved for men half his age.