Optimizing Alts Data Management, ft. Arch’s Ryan Eisenman & Kelly Moore

In this episode of The WealthTech Podcast, host Mark Wickersham welcomes Ryan Eisenman, Co-Founder & CEO of Arch, and Kelly Moore, Executive Director and Head of Strategic Accounts at Arch. Together, they explore how technology is transforming wealth management operations, enhancing efficiency, and redefining how firms manage alternative investments.

Ryan and Kelly share insights into the challenges family offices and wealth managers face when tracking and organizing private investments. They discuss how automation and digital tools can streamline complex reporting, reduce administrative burdens, and improve transparency for clients. Additionally, they highlight key trends shaping the industry, including the growing demand for real-time data access and the shift toward modernizing legacy systems.

Whether you're a financial advisor, family office professional, or fintech enthusiast, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how innovative solutions like Arch are reshaping wealth management. Learn how embracing technology can help firms optimize workflows, enhance client relationships, and stay ahead in an evolving digital landscape.

About Ryan Eisenman, CEO & Co-Founder
With over six years as the co-founder and CEO of Arch, Ryan Eisenman brings extensive private investment expertise to the table. Before founding Arch, he gained valuable experience at eight financial service companies, including Deloitte, Routier, and TechStars. 

Ryan is well-versed in the evolving trends of the private investment sector and the transformative impact of technology on the industry. As private markets continue to gain popularity, Ryan remains dedicated to helping advisors and their clients easily invest in private markets and efficiently diversify their portfolios.

About Kelly Moore, Executive Director
Kelly Moore serves as Executive Director and Head of Strategic Accounts at Arch, where she leads new client engagement across family offices, RIAs, and institutional allocators. Prior to joining Arch, she served in varying capacities across sales and partnerships, and Corporate Strategy at a large financial services firm. She is based in NYC where Arch is headquartered.

About Arch
Arch is the first Alternatives Management Platform, going beyond Alts Data Management to provide a back to front digital experience for managing alternatives. Arch streamlines alternatives operations by automating the tedious work of logging into portals, extracting data out of documents, collecting K-1s, managing capital call workflows; while also providing a deeper understanding and insights into alternatives portfolios. With Arch, investors have on-demand access to reporting, real time metrics, and insights across their private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, and other private investments. Arch supports over 360 of the world’s largest allocators, including 150 single family offices, 100 RIAs and multi-family offices, four of the top 20 global banks, and fund administ

About The WealthTech Podcast:
The WealthTech Podcast is a bi-monthly interview series hosted by Mark Wickersham. Each month we present conversations with various industry leaders that focuses on the challenges family wealth firms face with technology, people and process. The podcast is produced by Brad Oliver.

The WealthTech Podcast is brought to you by the generous support of Risclarity. Risclarity fills the technology gaps family wealth firms face when serving the complex needs of ultra-high net worth families.

Transcript

Optimizing Alternative Investment Data Management
Guests: Ryan Eisenman & Kelly Moore - Arch

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Mark Wickersham (00:55):
Well, I'm excited to have you guys, guys on the podcast. Thanks for making the time. Ryan and Kelly want to just have you guys do a brief introduction and then we'll get into it.

Ryan Eisenman (01:08):
Yes, absolutely. Mark, this one's fun because usually it's a solo show when we do a podcast, but we get to bring Kelly on. Kelly's a real personality behind arch. Quick introduction. Ryan and I as we wanted to three be the co-founders of Arch and have run our business side since we started the firm in 2018, and Kelly was the first business sales hire to join us.

Kelly Moore (01:28):
Yeah, so I joined Arch just about three years ago as the first sales hire and really focused on building out our strategic segment that services, family offices, multifamily offices, RIAs and institutional allocators. So excited. You talk about Arch and all things Alts,

Mark Wickersham (01:46):
I'm excited to have you both on. I know Ryan, it kind of puts the pressure on you to keep that energy level up because Kelly likes to bring it. She's a fantastic business development person, so what a great early hire for you. So let's talk about Arch for a little bit. Obviously we're going to talk about how firms can scale around alternative investments, alternative investment data management, some of the trends that are going on there, but what problems does solve and for who?

Ryan Eisenman (02:19):
Great question. So we solve the operational and reporting and portfolio monetary problems for anyone that is either allocating their own capital or supporting a capital allocation process. So that could be single family offices, multifamily offices, RIAs, OCIOs, any type of institutional allocator, private banks, fund to funds, fund admins. Accounting firms are increasingly building family office services and fund administration style businesses. So it really is for this broader LP community and their advisors.

Mark Wickersham (02:56):
Congratulations on the recent RMS deal. They're a great team over there, so that's a big win for you. Congrats.

Ryan Eisenman (03:04):
Thank you. We're excited.

Mark Wickersham (03:07):
So I'd like to ask this, what makes Arch unique?

Kelly Moore (03:12):
Yeah, I mean I think that there's, everyone touched on it that we really service anyone who invest in alternative assets. I think that historically there's been a really large operational problem around alternative assets. So that includes collection of data, aggregation of data, standardizing all of that information in one place. There's a really long lag behind public markets where private markets reporting stance today. And so I think historically that's been the biggest problem that a lot of the platforms are solving for. And I think what we've uncovered with a lot of our client engagements and the firms that we work with is there's really more of a back to front problem of you absolutely need the operational information, you need the data, but then once you have that data, how can you improve the workflows, increase the client experience, make your actual ability to service clients better? And so I think that's where we really differentiate against other people in the space. And so thinking about once you have that data and that access, how do you make this scalable? How do you provide insights on what you're actually invested in? How do you create more streamlined workflows around managing capital calls and distributions? How do you create much broader transparency across a portfolio? And I think those are the elements that are really exciting and get firms excited. Beyond the data challenge, this is more around workflows, insights, and experience for the client.

Ryan Eisenman (04:39):
I was just going to say we really think of this not as a single stakeholder problem. It's not just about the operations and reporting teams. It is really important for those teams and not to minimize the work we do for those teams, but it's also how do we support advisors that need insights on how investors are performing. Clients want a first of its kind digital interface to see their investments and understand how they're doing, accountants who are logging in or who need a way to collect K ones auditors in need statements. And so really supporting all those different personas and in a multi-user platform where it can just be as simple as a permission to give someone access. But beyond the tech specs, we think we really differentiate because we care. We're in the office every day. We want this to be a long-term journey. We've turned down probably three acquisition offers at this point in our history and just trying to build something that's really important, really enduring and long-term for our clients that continues to solve real client problems.

Mark Wickersham (05:40):
Yeah, I think it's great. I mean for a long time this was a pervasive problem with no solution in the industry and now you're starting to see multiple providers and each has their own different take about how to solve that problem. But the good news for family offices that there are solutions to this kind of long-term pervasive problem, especially around that low value aggregation at the first mile of acquiring that data, converting it from unstructured to structured data. But how Kelly, when you're talking to clients and prospects, how has the expectation or the need shifted over time seeing how that core, basic data ag is at least a known quantity at this point, but have you seen a change in expectations? Are clients coming to you with different problems that they want you to solve?

Kelly Moore (06:36):
In some ways, yes. And in other ways it's stayed somewhat consistent. I think Arch was really built out of the family office use case, and so we understand that type of client need extremely well. We understand the very complex portfolio heavy allocation to alternative investments, a need for timely accurate information that can inform your ongoing investment strategy and decisions. And I think that's really helped us as we've moved into working with firms that service those types of clients is that they're ultimately thinking about the end client experience as well. And so I think that the core operational piece you're talking about, mark, is spot on, that there is a data challenge and people need something scalable and they need something that solves for that cumbersome process of collecting data, getting information so that they can actually service these clients. But there are bigger challenges. How do we stay competitive with the other firms in the industry?

(07:32):
How do we make sure that we are servicing our end clients in the best way? And I think because we were built out of the family offices that they served, we really understand that end client experience uniquely and extraordinarily well around this is beyond just data. People want information, they want transparency, and I think that's what shifted a little bit. I think some of our products like our look through analysis where you can see what portfolio companies you're actually invested in are investor layer summaries to understand what are your managers actually talking about. Those are built on giving more insights and portfolio intelligence that goes well beyond just a data and operational challenge. And I think that's shifted quite a bit over the last probably two or three years.

Mark Wickersham (08:15):
That makes sense. I mean beyond just acquiring the data that these investments have been very opaque, so to be able to get more transparency into the portfolio holdings even to having access to that data but then to just kind of manage it all, it certainly compounds itself very quickly. Before we really dig into it, Ryan always when I have a chance to talk to a founder, I always love that they hear their founder's story and really interesting to talk to you about what was that kind of unsolved problem that you saw in the industry. I think we've already been talking about it a little bit, but really why did you create Arch? What was the initial thesis that you had and then looking back on it now, where were you spot on and where did you have to pivot?

Ryan Eisenman (09:10):
All great things takes a village. So I had some early experiences at our digital capital firm and at an investment advisory firm where I saw some of these front and back office problems and then was trying to figure out the next thing to do in my own career. This was about eight years ago now, was lucky where I met an investor at a very random dinner in New York City and over a series of coffees essentially pitched in. This idea really resonated with him. He was like, yes, I have over a hundred K ones and fund investments and this is all really painful and I have add par, but add par is not up to date. And even if it was, I can't actually interact with the data and I need something that will tell me what I own and how those investments are doing in a way to not be dragged into the K one collection process.

(09:56):
And then this investor was also in talking to these two engineers, I really want to back them. They're really smart, they're interested in some similar areas. Maybe there's a version of the world where the three of you would become a team and if you became a team, I'd love to back the three of you as a team. And so we kind of had this very lucky, met Jason and Joel, we decided we had very different strengths, which made for a great founding team and had a couple of design clients. We could start to build this around a bit of initial capital from this investor. And so in 2018 he essentially put us into business. It's like, okay, we now have a company, we named it Arch, we have clients. We started collecting their K ones. We could really learn the pain points of our clients and of our future clients from the ground up and before we automated the vast majority of the work that we do, it was like me when we were a team of three emailing Sequoia Capital and KKR and Signer Perkins being like, Hey, we're looking for the 2017 K one and also we need to change the address of this investor and we need to get into this investor portal and we need to get out of this an industry party learning the fundamental building blocks of this industry we're in so that we could understand them super well, really understand what our clients need and then bring a lot of automation and great client experience into the industry.

Mark Wickersham (11:19):
Things really kind came together. You had this unique situation where you had this team came together, we're seven years in now where you're living it, you're breathing it, you're having to deal with it on a day-to-day basis, but where would the points around a lot of firms, it can be difficult to get your point, your size, congratulations, but we're at the hard points in terms of scaling a business.

Ryan Eisenman (11:49):
Well, yeah, we think we're just getting started from this vantage point, but when first started we were like, okay, great, so we'll build this company. We'll be at a millionaire in a year and we'll just be off to the races. And I think it just feels when you're just starting a company and you're super idealistic, it's like wow, we're just going to make so much progress this year. There's a maximum around how it's shocking how little progress happens in a day, but how much happens in a year? And so it's just like this persistent pushing and continually solving problems, really leaning in and getting told no, but learning an important lesson or getting told no, but getting a referral that just and then staying persistent with this mission has allowed us to get to a point. I think now we're really happy at what we've accomplished in seven years, but we're looking at the next seven and 17 and 27 years of what we can do from here.

(12:45):
We're still a very scrappy firm. We want to maintain, even though maybe technically we're not a startup anymore after raising about 25 million of capital growing team to over a hundred people, we want to maintain that startup culture and mindset around how we innovate and how we solve our client's problems because we know that's why people want to partner with us and want to work with us because we can move really quickly to solve new problems and to leverage gen AI in our solution and give people insight and help them with other problems that they're facing. And we also just care a lot about the client experience service. So we know that the next client will most likely be influenced by a current client, whether they're directly referred by a current client or they get a reference by a current client. So both from a pragmatic reason of having great client service helps us scale, but also from we really care about our clients who want them to be happy reason. Those are a couple of places we really invest this in an organization.

Mark Wickersham (13:44):
So it's often said that the private markets are broken, especially when it comes to family offices have struggled, but then I think there's the next wave where the RIAs or high-end RAs advisors are looking to allocate to private markets as well. Why are there so much friction when it comes to private markets, especially compared to public markets, and what are some of those key friction points, family office face when they're investing in the asset class and what can they do about it?

Kelly Moore (14:16):
It's funny, I think that two things I want to hit on that rider is just talking about around how over the last seven years we've evolved a lot. I think that the appetite for Altis evolved quite a bit as well. It's become a lot more prominent in a lot of clients portfolios, but the technology and the infrastructure to support that is not, and I think that's what's been really challenging for a lot of these firms is they start allocating to private investments and this then becomes a 7, 10, 15 year burden that you have to manage on behalf of your clients. And so I think that one is just access to the data. It's not available in a custodial account like your private investment or your public investments are. So you just don't have a single source of truth. You don't have a single place where you can access this information.

(15:01):
The reporting is a lot less frequent. You're getting maybe a monthly, maybe a quarterly update on these investments, and so there's just less actual activity on these types of investments, but you want to know where you stand and have a sense of the latest value and unwanted commitment and what your liquidity needs are going to be. And so I think part of it is that the market is catching up to the demand for faults and hopefully we're helping drive some of that infrastructural change and shift. I think the other component of this is that the private investors have been an ignored space. I don't know what your thought is on why that is, but I think there's been a lot of new players coming into the market over the last two or three years. All of a sudden, everyone has a lot more appetite to explore solutions here.

Ryan Eisenman (15:51):
Yeah, it's like institutions have been allocating to ALT for decades. You have Dave Swenson from Yale who was a big early advocate of even having 30, 40, 50% of your portfolio and alternative investments can really drive returns. And then firms like Cambridge Associates caught onto that and it had an early white paper around how 40% ALS is great for long-term returns if you don't need liquidity, if you're the type of family office or institution that's investing for decades and now that's starting to trickle downstream to more individuals, more multifamily offices and res and both there's demand and appetite, but asset managers also as they look to grow out, the net new flows in the industry are going to be predominantly driven by the wealth channel rather than institutions going from 40 to 42%. It's people that are at three to 5% going to eight to 10 to 20% alternatives.

(16:53):
We think that that's going to drive a lot of adoption in a place that doesn't have tools but expects really good tools. It expects really good interfaces because if you're an institution, you have been doing this for a long time, you have WELLOW processes, you're managing billions of dollars of capital, and it's okay to throw bodies at this problem and have people that will go into portals, pull information and put it into the systems that the investment teams or operations teams are using. But if you are a family office or an individual, we just have this perspective on that doesn't work for you, especially when you might not have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of investments where you didn't have those before. So it becomes a major crippling point for firms that are trying to grow in this space and serve more of that type of client, but also people just demand and need better client experiences. So that's a big guiding force for us is to build the experience that these clients need and deserve. It might not be getting otherwise.

Mark Wickersham (17:51):
I heard even family offices are under allocated to Alts by up to 20%. They're chock full of 'em. Certainly when you look at the wealth channel that some have no exposure to it or minimal exposure to 'em, the client comes with it. Have you seen any differences? I know there was hope back in the day with elpa and maybe CalPERS trying to for some sort of standard or greater access to data, but are GPS more willing to provide data? Have you seen a change on the way gps are offering information? Are GPS more open and receptive to the operational challenges that maybe LPs are facing?

Ryan Eisenman (18:35):
Yes, because as more gps look to bring in more high net worth wealth channel type of capital, they're thinking about, okay, those clients need a better experience around managing their investments and they also want to make it easier for people to buy investments. It is in some ways if you look at a pessimistic view of the industry, it's shocking that people do want to invest in those all of the pain points in Harper and you have to go through before you even buy all the subscription process and logging into this portal to get the documents to understand on page 97, this is where they talk about the fees and this living partner agreement, and then once you own the investment, you get 14 to 20 communications a year that you need to go back into the portal to get that communication to route the K one that comes late to your accountant to complete the capital content days. So a lot of work, a lot of

Mark Wickersham (19:23):
Burden. Oh yeah, by way I put all the important information in the footnotes too and then we'll get that into a PDF DF, right?

Ryan Eisenman (19:31):
Of course. And they're like, aren't great data feeds today, but it's like, okay, well the optimistic reason is like why do people invest in SA asset costs well's a higher return, you want 11% instead of 7% or something equivalent to that,

Mark Wickersham (19:44):
You're looking for

Ryan Eisenman (19:44):
Alpha, right?

(19:45):
Yeah, it's more interesting. It's a different correlation. And so there are a lot of reasons why alts are great for folks, and I think there's gps who are now thinking about, okay, how do I make it easier to buy, easier to understand, easier to manage your investments post trade? And so we're having a lot of conversations with folks now around other ways that we can help them access the ARC toolkit or solve some of these painful problems. So if it's something that you and listener over the podcast are actively thinking about, we'd love to discuss with you because we are also thinking out ways that we can create industry change. One last thing I'll say here is when Arch was initially founded, it was three people took us three years to get past a billion in assets. Who would listen to us if we went to a large asset manager and said, Hey, can you create a better standard or create something that makes our clients' lives easier? They'd be like, not on our roadmap, not something we're interested in today. We have some of the largest asset managers in the world proactively reaching out to us saying, Hey, we now see that you have dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of positions within our funds. How can we make this easier for you and then for our team and for the end lp, and that's the type of conversation we want to continue to drive.

Kelly Moore (21:01):
The only thing I'll add there is I think that there's been some adoption of standardization across some of the largest managers. I think what's challenging with ALT is it is quite a fragmented industry and there are a lot of smaller, more boutique managers that clients want to allocate capital towards because it's a unique investment opportunity, it's great diversification. They want portfolio that has a mix of some of the larger managers and maybe smaller ones. And so that has been a challenge as well, and that changing the entire industry is quite difficult when there is some concentration, but there's a lot of fragmentation as well.

Mark Wickersham (21:36):
I was talking to family the while ago, we're doing some research into this problem when described as this, especially as first mile data aggregation as cleaning bathrooms in the airport. Nobody wants to do it. Somebody's got to, and often it's the CFO that's doing it that it's a high valued employee that needs to be able to translate that information you see in the arc of the industry. In terms of automation and transparency around this particular asset class for family offices, are we first inning, third inning, sixth inning? Where on your experience, where's the adoption? Where are we in the adoption group?

Ryan Eisenman (22:21):
Yeah, I mean maybe I think too, I think that there's a lot of rent left to run. This industry is really not automated. You still have lots of clunky processes. There are some great solutions that come in trying to digitize subscription documents mostly from the GPS perspective. Take the sub doc, put it into a digital form, give it to the lp. Those are much, much better solutions than giving someone A PDF. That's great. But then manager A might use one, provider manager B is another provider. So we're still in this highly fragmented, highly siloed industry. We really believe in this best in class ecosystem of solutions that can talk to each other with the ability to provision data from one tool to the next. So if you're using Arch and then you want this data to go into your add par or your archway or go to your accountant, then you should be able to be like, great, I want to send data to this system, this person, this organization, and be able to create a lot of collaboration between different tools in the space.

Mark Wickersham (23:22):
I think it's important not to have the digital rails. This stuff doesn't live on an island and that it's important to be able to integrate into the broader tech stack, and I think it's a great example, arches of best and breed that you're focused really on this particular problem. Obviously AI has been a big enabler for this particular industry. Talk to me about AI being a driver of productivity and efficiency. How is AI changing the landscape within your guys internally and how is it changing it for family offices?

Ryan Eisenman (23:58):
Yeah, the biggest thing I think is just how it shapes the dialogue within the industry.

(24:03):
Now you have folks that maybe haven't made a change. They might be running on the same system they've been using for 10, 15, 20 years, whether it's an allocator family office, an institution, and they're like, holy cow, this world really is changing under our feet. There're a new tools, there's new technology, there's new methodologies, there's new ways to interact with this information and we don't want to get left behind. We were talking to an asset manager, this was about a month ago now, and they were like, we've looked at dozens of tools. Everyone's talking about AI and this is the first time when they saw demo March. We've actually seen AI in a platform in a way that's usable to the end client. So we're looking to be on the front in cutting edge of leveraging AI and helping our clients leverage ai. So you don't have to be an AI expert, you don't have to do your own development, but we can give you really simple, well designed tools that allow you to understand what's in a quarterly report or what's in a LPA or what's in any of these documents that have a lot of text, but you're really looking for the insight.

(25:07):
So what is the manager telling me or what do I need to know about this investment I'm about to make? That I think is a big part of our story, and it's something that wasn't available three to five years ago when we started the company with something that can be leveraged on top of the foundation of how we collect information and aggregate information today. And then it's just the display out or the usability of this information. So we think it has a big ability to push this industry along with a lot of other industries forward by introducing new tools, but especially changing the mindset around innovation and taking organizations that might be slower to purchase to realize that, okay, now's a great time to think about the new solutions and unlock this new buying wave.

Kelly Moore (25:49):
I mean, I totally agree. I think there's an element of the vertical integration of AI where there are some really specific nuances and complexities of the industry that we work in, and we can be experts in that. So our clients don't have to be, I think consumer adoption of AI has actually been quite strong At the beginning of this. We were talking about, we were at a conference earlier this week. I think every single panel talked about some way or some form.

Mark Wickersham (26:13):
Yeah, yeah. There's like 25 or 30 panels on AI at future process that

Kelly Moore (26:18):
Truly, I think every single panel, no matter what the topic was, had some underlying theme of ai. I think that it's sometimes difficult to use it in the most relevant or applicable way, and so what we're really taking on as a technology firm is thinking about how do we apply this to the most relevant use cases. I think what Ryan was talking about unstructured data, making it structured and pulling out insights is a great example. There's other ways that it can continue to create more efficiencies and increase our ability to provide more solutions to our clients, but I think there is an element of vertical integration that is important that we are a very nuanced part of the industry, and so it's hard to just slap AI in there and be figure out all my problems. I think you have to think about the actual integration of it into a system.

Mark Wickersham (27:07):
Do we see AI as being something that is going to be, that kind of gets family offices off the snide, this is going to cause the modernization of family office that people have been talking about forever, they see this 10 x or maybe inefficiency on technology or maybe fear of being left behind. Where do you see the industry and the impact AI is going to have?

Ryan Eisenman (27:33):
Yeah, it would definitely help, probably partially because of the tools and then partially because we were talking about earlier around just giving people the head space to look into new tools and evaluate new frameworks and really think about AI and think about modern tools. But I think that there's just this broader push. There are now way more family or used to be. Alternative investments are a bigger theme. You have this broader wealth transfer that people are talking about where family offices are being passed to younger and younger members who are a little bit more tech native. And so I think you're just naturally going to have interesting solutions come to market. So I think there's going to be more talk about this virtual family office style model, but then you also have the proliferation of multifamily offices sometimes called RIAs, sometimes called O CIOs that are also allowing families to essentially have a lot of the family office resources and know-how without having to staff it internally. And those are getting to be pretty sophisticated. Sometimes they have wealth planning internal, they have CIOs that are able to invest capital across pretty sophisticated alternative and non alternative investments. So the menu of options available just is much bigger than it used to be. The tools are greater than they used to be, so I think you're going to see a lot happen as how in this space evolving in the next 3, 5, 10 years.

Mark Wickersham (28:57):
Yeah, it's the golden age for family office technology. The good news is there's more options, but the bad news is there's more options, right?

Kelly Moore (29:05):
Yeah,

Mark Wickersham (29:06):
There's a bit of buyer confusion out there, and I think sometimes people get stuck about not even knowing what to do next. A little bit overwhelmed, but it is great to see the options out there. I do think the family office model is a winning model. The multifamily office model is a great model, but it also comes, you have all the complexity that a single family office has, but then you also have the need for scale. So it's even more important for firms like that deploy technology. What other tech trends are you seeing that are impacting the space beyond ai? 

Ryan Eisenman (29:45):
Good question. I think there's a lot of pain around things like capital calls. So as there's more capital calls and some of this is actually AI driven, there are now really good ways to impersonate people. Most the folks that have family offices, people that work in this industry have some kind of public profile, and so it's pretty easy to take someone's voice, take their likeness, create a video that looks like them, create a call that sounds like them. So I think we're just going to see fraud get more and more sophisticated. So we're starting to invest in some fraud detection tools for capital calls that can look at do these wir instructions match your prior wiring instructions? So that's the first thing that we've commercialized and brought to market. So looking at how do we move beyond saving people time, which we want to continue to save folks more and more time, but bringing solutions that fight fraud lead to insights, help people make better investment decisions because getting left behind doesn't just mean I'm less efficient or allocating capital less efficient. Getting left behind might mean that I'm now a target. And so we want to really help this industry mature and creating more secure systems and more secure ways to manage investments.

Kelly Moore (31:00):
I think there's also just a lot around workflows and integrated solutions. There's maybe two things driving this. One is there's a lot of merger and acquisition activity in the M-F-O-R-A space. Instead, as you bring together firms, you have to really think about workflows are impacting the ability to do business as a combined firm. I think that's been a theme we've been seeing of when firms combine or they buy another firm, integrating that into the existing systems and workflows is challenging. And so using technology to support those component parts is helpful. I also think for family offices, they tend to operate really lean and there's many different folks that need to be involved in different parts of the process. So thinking about workflows that involves over time if you bring on new technology of new workflows that need to be built. And so I think there's elements of integrated and workflow solutions that are important too.

Mark Wickersham (31:55):
Workflows, integrations, APIs, I think vendors are putting much more emphasis on their ecosystems that one plus one equals three. The best of breed is finally move beyond a science experiment, and it's really with the vendors coordinating with each other, it's a lot more possible for firms to be able to kind of piece together a best of breed tech stack. I think that's been helpful. I hope that family offices that they realize that there's sometimes a greater risk to not taking action. That the fact that Ryan, you point opening yourself up the fraud and don't let some event pause you to get into a buyer's motor, have to do that Under duress. The voice callback used to be a gold standard, but now with just two or three words, AI can get copy your voice or even replicated image. It's pretty scary. Given that the bad guys have access to AI too, the future of family. Well, so we've already been touching about this already in a number of different spots, but where do we see one year, three, five years out? What's the outlook on the industry?

Ryan Eisenman (33:06):
I think you're just going to have a lot more options available to people on how they manage assets. And so with options becomes, you can kind of create the system that works for each family. And so it's kind of back to like, do I build it in-house or create my own family office? Do I outsource the accounting piece? Do I outsource the investment piece? So a lot of people to really think about where do I strengths lie and where am I not strong in the being able to augment that with tech and services and other types of solutions. And it's interesting that the number of products that are now available, if you wanted to invest in KKR several years ago, you would've had to write a 5, 10, 20 $5 million check in order to have access to KKR. Now, all these large funds are making their funds available for 50, a hundred, $250,000 checks, maybe even smaller. And so it allows for this greater access to private markets and this greater level of diversification that we think is really healthy for the broader market. And we will probably see as there's more access, more exposure solutions for liquidity will follow and other solutions will follow that make it easier Hart to be a part of.

Kelly Moore (34:19):
I think the other thing that we've seen happen a little bit across some of the accounting firms and multifamily offices that we're working with now is just creating more of this access to family office services at a slightly smaller portfolio size. I think there's been a bit of demand from sophisticated investors that they don't sit into that family office bucket or their portfolio size is just slightly smaller, but still need access to some of those concierge technology solutions, other type of family office services. And so being able to offer that at a slightly lower portfolio size I think is another trend that I think is going to continue to evolve.

Mark Wickersham (34:55):
Yeah, I think that's a good one. I mean, bill Payment's a great example of that, right? That ly net worth clients that somebody is doing their bill payment for them somewhere. And if these service providers can incorporate that function within a family office services type of offering and be able to provide more holistic service and have a greater data set to be able to provide better reporting and advice to their clients, and you're seeing that versus trying to keep that at arm's length or having a personal bookkeeper do it. So I think there's a, I think we're just at the beginning of the golden age for family offices both on the single and the multifamily side. So it was great, nor what I like to do at the end of these podcasts is kind of wrap it up more on a personal note with three questions that have nothing to do with alternatives. The first question, I always find it stress. A lot of people have some sort of unrelated skill or hobby that people don't know about. Oh, I was in the Olympics as a canoe or whatever. What is the one thing that maybe somebody doesn't know about you in terms of what you do for a hobby or some unrelated skill that you may

Kelly Moore (36:09):
Have? Brian, were you secretly in the Olympics? I hope that's what your fun fact.

Ryan Eisenman (36:13):
I wish. What I'm one of my better outside of work athletic things is water skiing. Just incredibly passionate about slalom skiing. And it's something that every time I got an opportunity to, I'd always do it and try to get better so I can run a slalom course and it's something that I think is really, really fun.

Kelly Moore (36:37):
I think mine is way less cool, way less athletic, probably. I don't know if anyone knows this sparkle. When I was growing up, that was my passion project of Sparkle Quizlets. I would always go in, I'm very good at memorizing things and so the map of Europe filling out all the countries or memorizing certain data sets and then sparkling it, that kind of ties into puzzles as well. It's a less cool than through Ryan, but

Mark Wickersham (37:08):
Probably, Hey, Ryan wasn't in the Olympics.

Kelly Moore (37:10):
I secret talent. Yeah,

Mark Wickersham (37:12):
Mark Blake. There was

Kelly Moore (37:13):
A puzzle. Look by committee.

Mark Wickersham (37:14):
Yeah, there should be.

Ryan Eisenman (37:15):
Mark, what do you have? Do you have one?

Mark Wickersham (37:17):
When I was in college, some of my roommates were in the culinary program and I was trying to get a job as a dishwasher and my buddy, my roommate, Johnny's like, I told him, you could cook and put me on the line. So I ended up cooking professionally for a number three, four years and nowhere close to being a chef, but I worked on a line at a restaurant for a civilian. I can throw it down pretty good in the kitchen. So that's my secret skill favorite. I love New York City. You guys are in New York City. You live and breathe it every day. What's your favorite thing about New York City and what's your favorite location in New York City?

Ryan Eisenman (37:59):
I just love the variety of things here. You can do almost anything except for find nature, but you can take a train and find nature. So you actually can find nature in New York City and you just walk in a different direction and you stumble upon a new restaurant, a new location, a new shop that's been there potentially for 25 years. And it's always interesting people. I also think New York is actually one of the friendliest cities. This might be a contrarian take in the country, very actually easy I think to meet new people and make friends maybe because it's so harsh sometimes outside that people are very actually receptive to meeting strangers. My favorite place is this restaurant called Wind Sun or favorite new place, which is super interesting. I think it's Taiwanese food and a very casual, fun atmosphere in Brooklyn.

Kelly Moore (38:50):
They just opened East Village location.

Ryan Eisenman (38:52):
I have to run over there.

Kelly Moore (38:55):
I think kind of similar thing to Ryan, New York is a very transient city, so it's always changing. I think how dynamic of a city it is is fantastic. It always keeps you on your toes. I like to stole this from a friend, but can it get lost in your own city? Choose a neighborhood, go wander around, try a restaurant shop, explore the local neighborhood. I think that's a great way to learn more about New York and I've tried to adopt that into my weekend's life. But yeah, New York is I think best cities. I agree with Rod. I think it's people are kind to New York. They might not be friendly, but they're kind and open.

Mark Wickersham (39:35):
Well, Boston has the same rap, right? Where, and I've heard this analogy and I think at its heart, it's spot on, but maybe it's a bit of an exaggeration, is that people on the west coast are nice but not kind. And people from the northeast are kind but not nice meaning. And the example is if you're stuck and you had a flat tire and somebody from California would be like, oh dude, that's really too bad. Whereas somebody from Boston and New York would get the tire out and change it and make fun of you the whole time and be like, dude, how come you don't know how to change a tire? But at the same time, we get you to where you needed to be and we get you going. So I think it's an exaggeration, but I think there's some that holds to that. And I do think New York's one of the greatest cities on the planet and you could probably spend the rest of your life just discovering restaurants and neighborhoods and I love it. It always seems to be reinventing itself. It always seems to be different. Neighborhoods are changing all the time. So beyond that, what's your favorite travel experience or location beyond the city,

Ryan Eisenman (40:52):
Wherever the next wealth tech, FinTech, asset management

Mark Wickersham (40:57):
Futureproof.

Kelly Moore (41:04):
Not so bad. Not so bad. I think Ryan can hit the nail on the head and you can find almost everything in New York except for nature. When I travel, I like to go opposite end, right? I like to go somewhere that's very maybe more remote or nature focused and be in nature because we live in the city. I dunno if you've been to Iceland, that is one of my favorite trips I've ever taken. It's not that far from New York. All the east coasters out there, go to Iceland. It's very short and it's otherworldly. It's probably one of the best places I've ever was. Today.

Mark Wickersham (41:35):
I've been trying to talk to wife. What I wanted to do it as a stop over heading over to London and I got to get it on the list. I would say, well, I go anywhere once. It's a big world and you never know. Every place has some sort of value to it, but in terms of outdoors, out West is always big and grand. But I love Europe and my favorite part of Europe is Italy. Sebastian Italy's the best of Europe and lucky that both my daughters went to school over there for a semester abroad and had a chance to kind of visit a little bit and I can't wait to go back. So that'd be my location there, my happy spot. But I appreciate you guys taking the time today. This was really great. It was kind of fun having both of you on really insightful conversation and thank you for sharing.

Kelly Moore (42:29):
Thanks much for having us. Thanks, Mark.

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