By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ INSART
Continuing our series of interviews with wealth-industry gurus, I traveled to Chicago to meet Bryson Pouw. Bryson created Blaze Portfolio to be a streamlined, electronic-trading platform with powerful rebalancing solutions, real-time trade management, and a focus on user experience.
Bryson Pouw
Founder and CEO of Blaze Portfolio
Bryson Pouw received his BS in finance from the University of Colorado Boulder. He started his career in a brokerage firm and eventually landed a senior consultant position in Advent Software, where he led software implementation projects for high-profile, financial-services clients. After more than 20 years in the finance industry, Bryson launched Blaze Portfolio—the most comprehensive and user-friendly trade-management platform we have seen to date.
Bryson shed light on the past and future of WealthTech and how the transfer of wealth will affect the industry in the coming years. He also shared his opinion on the advent of blockchain in wealth management and why the human element is still an essential aspect of an effective WealthTech solution.
Industry trends
Bryson points out a big trend—consolidation. As firms get larger and larger, they take a greater portion of the assets of wealth. Blaze Portfolio is in a good position to take advantage of this with their capabilities and order-management solutions. Another strong trend is moving away from bundled offerings, including accounting, CRM, and trading in a fixed package. Bryson feels that bundling works for commoditized products but not for technology that varies widely in capabilities.
At the end of the day, Bryson and his team are trying to get the most out of their interface whilst making it easy for investors and advisors to add their own value to the process. Blaze Portfolio’s client-driven approach will lead to other enhancements and features:
“There may be a trend towards more direct index investing where you don’t necessarily have to buy an ETF or a mutual fund and pay the management fee, where you may be able to invest directly in the S&P 500. Something like Wealthfront—basically does that. But soon you will be able to just do that directly while adding personal customizations and tax optimizations.”
Big data and blockchain tech trends
The financial industry is run on data and this data needs to be analyzed in a complete and structured way. To accomplish this, many firms look to big data and big data analytics because traditional data-processing software is wholly incapable of handling this type of data processing. Bryson informed me that Blaze Portfolio is currently using asynchronous data processing and that they are dealing with what he calls small-to-medium data. Of course, in the process of growth and expansion, Blaze Portfolio may need to accommodate big data processing:
“What I’m envisioning is, not necessarily looking at everything in an unstructured way, but providing better analytics for our customers and more predictive capabilities around some of the things that they’re already doing within their environment.”
Bryson expressed his feeling that there is a big opportunity for blockchain tech to make landfall in the industry, although this is dependent on the pace of integration and infrastructure changes on the part of big banks. There is value in this field in terms of security, speed, and accuracy, but full adoption will be many years down the road.