John Stuart, CIO of Beverly Hills Wealth Management, has a background in both IT and business. Having worked at a very large investment firm not so long ago, he moved to BHWM and was charged with building an environment that improves upon the broken elements of the financial industry while applying best practices. In an interview with FierceCIO, Stuart described some of the technologies he has deployed to make his firm attractive to the best advisors and consequently more valued by its clients. 

FierceCIO: Can you describe what you mean when you talk about improving the financial services industry?

John Stuart: The last great improvement in financial services was Internet banking and trading 20 years ago, and we like to work at re-engineering such a disruptive improvement local to us. The change in trading from a fixed platform to an online Internet banking tool was very disruptive to the market. With financial services the way they are, we really want to take this to the next level on the local level. We try to create disruptive technologies that financial advisors haven't seen at their current firms.

2008 kind of created an environment where [clients] really needed to trust the advisor, and the large firms didn't really offer everything that might have been promised. The underlying theme is that we've spent time at large enterprises, and we are building a boutique advisory firm that is state of the art and scalable to advisors' needs. 

FCIO: What kinds of technologies are financial advisors not seeing at their current firms?

JS: We are in a growth stage, and the interest of [financial] advisors that want to be a part of the team is a reality. A big concern for financial advisors that leave a large enterprise banking environment is the magnitude of services and partners needed to source a true open architecture of products and features for clients. Every service provider manages credentials and policies differently. We are streamlining this headache with an SSO tool that is managed and authenticates at the home office here to create a seamless environment between our advisors and support groups and the services that run independently of our firm. Sounds simple but not a lot of advisory firms offer this type of solution.

FCIO: What other technologies have you deployed toward creating disruptive technologies in the industry?

JS: Information is our business--it's like oxygen around here. We source data globally and need tools and partners to turn that data into information. The tools required at a firm like ours need to be multifaceted and tactical. You could say we are high maintenance.

Our performance reporting partner has a seasoned leadership team but very responsive and scalable to market and business requirements. We have a nightly process that extends to our primary custodians and direct business product providers to capture the entire net worth of clients such as account balances, trade execution, position information, asset classes, etc. This helps a client and their advisory team such as CPA's, business managers and of course the BHWM investment advisory team to make the most educated decisions that provide real value to our clients.  We have the luxury of gathering business and market information and customizing easy to understand BI and reports for all types of clients. Sometimes an overall snapshot broken down in a one-page macro view is all a client really wants. Of course, some clients want all the information they can handle. We are happy to scale our offering for all types of investors. We are 100 percent transparent.

Our client service and operations group leverages a CRM instance that is integrated with our custodian. CRM information, tasks, scheduling, reporting, and account maintenance notes that co-mingle with custodial account data is key. Every node in our eco-system talks to each other in one way or another. Compliance, service, ops, sales and management need an open door policy to each business unit. This level of clarity was designed to engage new and existing employees quickly. Large wire houses have functional silos and profit centers that create hurdles between business units that can slow down the sales and client service models. We aim to reduce the noise by integrating the tools we each use.

FCIO: What technologies do you foresee implementing down the road?

JS: We are testing a virtualization environment that will decrease the resources needed to fully provision new books of business. These resources can then be dedicated to the clients. I am excited about an elastic eco-system that will give the tools and services to all employees on an as-needed basis. This helps us keep our overhead low and in turn, reduce costs. We pass these efficiencies right on to the client to remain competitive in our market.