By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ Insart
| Site: | www.portfoliopathway.com |
| Established: | 2007 |
| Value proposition: | Provider of a cloud-based platform that encompasses portfolio management, rebalancing, trade-order management, performance reporting, and fee billing. |
| The executive team: | Dave Miller, Chief Executive Officer Ryan Brucker, Chief Technology Officer Brian Lake, Vice President of Marketing Anthony Valente, Senior Vice President Victor L. Bonilla, Vice President of Business Development |
Portfolio Pathway, LLC is a cloud-based platform for financial advisors, asset managers and broker-dealers. It enables them to manage clients’ accounts using a wide range of tools that have been aggregated into one solution. Among some of the tools are portfolio reporting, rebalance and trading, composite reporting, and a billing system. Dave Miller, CEO at Portfolio Pathway, says they have built their own full suite of products and will continue adding features that their clients report they would like to see in the platform. The system currently has SMA and UMA capabilities, but will soon add a strategy bucket approach as well.
Dave: “The bucket approach is a little bit different than a UMA. For UMAs, everything has to be sleeve-based. The benefit, of course, allows for multiple strategies (even different managers) within one account. Additionally, we can provide composite reporting for the strategies while providing reporting for the advisor. The drawback is that you may have the same strategy sleeve twice – for two different registrations. A bucket approach provides for one strategy across a household. We offer UMA and will soon offer strategy buckets.”
Before that, Dave started the company on the premise of a multi-custodian operations platform. The custodians, however, were not ready for that because the integrations were not there at the time. This pushed him to change the strategy and build a portfolio management system.. Time passed, new features were launched, and over the last three years Portfolio Pathway has started to grow rapidly. At this point, they have more than 33 billion dollars on their platform, representing more than 800,000 accounts—despite their team only consisting of 25 people.
The key differentiators that represent the biggest strengths of the company include an intuitive, modern user interface, a rebalancing and trading system including third-party strategists within a UMA or SMA; a very robust billing system, composite reporting and the significant capacity to take on even multi-billion-dollar money managers.
For this interview, we were lucky enough to speak to Dave Miller (CEO), who started the FinTech company back in 2007, and Ryan Brucker (CTO), who rose through the ranks from a developer to a stakeholder of the company. Together they described the system in detail and shared some future plans for the platform.
Teamwork, organization, and structure
The team at Portfolio Pathway is divided into several departments:
- The marketing team, led by Brian Lake
- The data-management team, which handles most of the data operations
- The customer relations team, which provides quick feedback from clients and guides users through training for the new features
- The development team, which develops both front-end and back-end with business analysts
In the case of Portfolio Pathway, the data team is somewhat similar to DevOps—they are ensuring a continuous integration and delivery process. However, Ryan says that they are not using continuous integration fully because they do not release every cycle.
According to Ryan, the customer relations team communicates with clients on a regular basis to get feedback and help to identify potential new features. The feedback is used to get ideas and concepts that will be discussed by top-level executives; the most valuable insights will go into the backlog.