1. Tell us about your role in Oranj.
My role is founder and CEO at Oranj.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I started out as a financial advisor. In October 2008, I started a Registered Investment Advisory (RIA) firm with an overall focus on holistic wealth management. As I got into the business, early on I had some good success and grew my business pretty quickly. Through that growth, I identified some areas in my business where I felt technology could help, and that was largely around (a) connecting with prospective clients, and (b) communicating, collaborating and serving my existing clients. I quickly realized that all of my clients had very busy lives and it was challenging to convert the referrals I got into exploratory business meetings; it was also challenging finding times that were convenient for my clients to meet with me in person. I really felt that technology could help. I went out into the market and tried to find a platform and software that could help me. I didn’t find it so I made the decision to actually build something to help me with my RIA business. As I went through that process, I discovered that was there was a bigger need in the marketplace. Independent advisors were starting to hear about what I was doing and reached out to me wanting to learn more about what I was doing why I was doing it. That helped me identify and confirm that there was a greater need. Since then, Oranj has expanded into more than just a client portal. More about that in a bit.
3. How do you think technology is developing the finance sector?
I think there’s never been a more exciting time to be a financial professional. Whether you’re an asset manager, or a financial advisor, or an institution serving financial advisors, technology is advancing the finance sectors very quickly. When you look at things like blockchain and other types of technology, our industry has been in desperate need of innovation. I think that there’s a growing interest by technology providers who are looking to solve decades-old problems in our industry and that we’ll continue to see better consumer experiences. I believe we’ll see better investor experiences coming, and I think we’re also seeing the decoupling of different products and services that these larger institutions have typically owned in the marketplace.
4. How has digitalization contributed in the evaluation of wealth management methods?
There seems to be a software application for just about everything in our business now – and I think it’s great. Some of them are features to help advisors assess how their clients can make smarter decisions relating to things such as their taxes, all the way to the advisor side where they are helping to educate their clients and get them to where they need to be. It’s interesting because investors typically come to advisors with one single problem that they’re looking to solve. That problem usually has other opportunities attached to it and that’s what makes working with a personal financial advisor so unique and special. Somebody may come to an advisor and say they really want to be on a better track for retirement, but once the advisor starts peeling the onion back, they find that there are other issues and other areas of opportunity with which the advisor can help. There’s a lot of software out there today that is aiding the advisor in being able to do that.
5. Can you explain how your platform helps wealth managers?
At a high level, Oranj helps wealth managers with four primary things:
First of all, we help advisors keep their costs down. Costs are front and center — and not just as it relates to the cost of trading or the cost of investing their clients’ assets, but time. The more time that the wealth manager has to spend with their clients, the better off they are. We are focused on freeing up the advisor’s time so they can spend less time managing and more time advising.
When it comes to money, the cost of running an advisory business today has increased significantly over the last five to eight years largely because of all of this great new technology that’s being brought to market. But that raises the cost of their overhead to run their business to the point to where the profitability of their business has decreased significantly. By reducing software costs and sourcing low-cost third-party managed investment solutions, Oranj is helping make the advice business more profitable for both advisors and investors.
A lot of advisors are spending well into the six digits for software and tools that they need to run their business, serve clients, and be more efficient. Those tools carry a pretty significant cost so Oranj helps them bring down their cost. Not only is the Oranj platform a great end-to-end solution, but there is no cost to use the client/advisor portal, the model marketplace, our award-winning account aggregation, and rebalancing tools. We even offer free service and support from trained real human beings who can help the advisor get up and running on the platform faster and working with their clients in the most effective way.
Secondly, Oranj helps advisors streamline their investment management. We have portfolio management training and rebalancing as a core part of the Oranj platform today, and we designed it to be user-friendly without sacrificing the sophistication that they need so we’re able to help them streamline their investment management.
Third, we are helping them improve the client experience. We’re bringing the conduit and the meeting place into the digital world so advisors don’t need to spend 90 minutes meeting with clients every quarter just to catch up. They can do that on a daily basis because they’re able to see their clients’ lives change, whether that’s tracking to certain goals that they have or a client’s overall net worth and balance sheet. The advisor can monitor that on a daily basis and not have to wait for the quarterly review or annual review.
Lastly, is the ability to really simplify the software that they’re using. With all of this emergence of new technology, advisors are using anywhere from five to 11 pieces of software to run their business. Oranj simplifies that and cuts down on the number of platforms that an advisor has to log into. Advisors can utilize really modern user experiences and user interfaces to make complex tasks very simple with a really elegant design and workflows.
We accomplish all this without sacrificing the sophistication.
6. What features of Oranj make it the perfect software for financial advisors?
This goes back to the earlier answer that I provided: we are taking complex, clunky software that exists in the space today and making it very user-friendly. We are also able to provide advisors with the service that they need. We don’t just hand software over to advisors without supporting them. Something that I experienced firsthand as an advisor was signing up for software and not getting the service and support needed to really employ it into my practice. We’re very proud of our support and service team –we actually call them our Client Success Team. I think that combination of helping advisors by lowering the cost of licensing the software, making it really simple to use without sacrificing the sophistication, and supporting that with white glove service makes it a really attractive software option for financial advisors.
7. What advice would you like to give to startups?
Drawing from my own personal experience,
I would say it is essential to have first-hand experience of the problem that you’re trying to solve with your technology.
Avoid trying to cobble together different software-type features to create an actual software platform. Know the one thing that you’re trying to solve for and just stay disciplined doing that.
8. Which start-up technology has grabbed your attention?
There’s a startup called Snowflake, which has made working with databases and in data very quick and simple. It’s actually something that we use in our business here at Oranj. But, really, there are so many interesting start-ups out there. I think one of the biggest challenges, particularly in building software within the financial technology space, is the data — how you actually store the data, and how you provide the data of back to your customers.
9. How do you prepare for a technology-centric world?
You really have to start with what your business is. I think that this question leads to the wealth managers or financial advisors but you have to outline the core of your business, the experience that you want to provide to your customers, and really have a strong vision for what that is. Too many times we see that advisors are just collecting different software applications because at one point in time they had a need for something. Just like any other business, it’s important to have a very strong outline, a vision and mission of what your business is, and then build the technology that you need around that.
10. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
We’re very lucky to have a phenomenal team here. We’ve looked at our business in a couple of different silos that all work together really well. We have sales and marketing, product and development, and our overall business operations. They have really been able to take Oranj to levels that I didn’t even envision when we started this. They have supported me in taking the vision that I initially had and really looking at the industry and the problems that are going on in the industry, as well as the overall needs of our financial advisor and wealth management customers. We have been able to identify that this is the direction we need to be taking. They have helped me identify the areas that are going to help us really innovate and blaze a trail within the financial services industry.
11. What are the major developments you are planning in recent time?
This goes back to one of the earlier questions, which is what makes Oranj different and unique. Without talking about any specific things that are on our roadmap, we’re continuing to try to help the advisor advance in today’s world. That means looking at innovative solutions and thinking about our business differently in terms of how we want to provide value to advisors. I think one of the things is looking at the overall distribution chain in our industry. Take investment solutions as one area where, on one end of the spectrum, on the far left, you have asset managers who are creating a tremendous amount of value for financial advisors and wealth managers. They’re the ones with the IP. They are creating the funds and ETFs and investment solutions that can help their clients achieve better outcomes. But then you have all kinds of other businesses that are in between the asset manager and the actual financial advisor. I can’t emphasize this enough: Anything we can do to help advisors get direct access without going through third-party intermediaries is really important to what we’re continuing to build and bring to market for financial advisors.
12. What books are you reading these days?
I am always reading anywhere from two to three books at a given time. I like to bounce back and forth. One of the books I’m reading right now which I really enjoy is a book called The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. He was the founder of a technology platform called Behance and he has a lot of really great philosophies on how to take your business not just from the start-up phase but after you’ve gone through the starter phase and you’re entering into that growth phase and weeding through what I’d call the sophomore/junior year of your business. It’s a great book and I constantly find myself writing down quotes from it to reflect back on as areas of a kind of inspiration. Other books that I’ve read in the past include Malcolm Gladwell books. There’s a new book that that he’s written called David and Goliath that I just picked up. I’m in the early pages of that book. Another book I just picked up is Benjamin Franklin written by Walter Isaacson. I got that book not because I’m a huge history buff, but I really love Walter Isaacson’s book about Steve Jobs. I’ve gotten about a quarter of the way through the Benjamin Franklin book and it’s an excellent read for anyone who is an entrepreneur.
13. We’ve heard that you have a very joyful work culture and we would enjoy seeing some of the pictures. Can you provide some?
14. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
One of the applications I use a lot on my phone is Slack, which is an internal communication application that we use for business. I don’t know what our business would do without it. I’m also really trying to get back into shape. Starting your business and finding time to work out and do those types of things is very difficult, so I use MyFitnessPal quite a bit. I use the Amazon app because I have little to no time to go to a store to buy anything. I’m a big music lover and I use Spotify quite a bit. I also really love the Apple Wallet app because I hate carrying around my wallet. I use Keeper for all my passwords. I live in downtown Chicago so I use Uber quite a bit. I don’t own a car and it’s been pretty liberating. The Gmail app on my phone probably gets the most use out of all of them. Those are the primary apps that I use on my phone.
