Blaze Portfolio: The Definition of Streamlined Electronic Trading

By Vasyl Soloshchuk/Insart

Blaze Portfolio has been blazing a trail in the FinTech community since 2010 with its proprietary Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that provides registered investment advisors, wealth managers, multi-family offices, digital advisors, and industry partners with flexible tax-optimized modeling, cash management, trade compliance, and real-time electronic trading. Blaze Portfolio’s flagship product, Atom Align, is an advanced model-rebalancing and trade-order-management solution for customers and partners, with features such as order creation, streamlined trade management, and electronic trading.

I met up with Bryson Pouw, founder and CEO of Blaze Portfolio, at their office in the heart of Chicago to learn what Blaze Portfolio has been doing for the past eight years, and how they’re going to change the face of financial management.

Bryson got his career in the investment industry off to a running start at a brokerage firm. After acquiring his brokerage license, he worked in the investment-management department for a bank that eventually merged with Wells Fargo. In 1999, he went to work for Advent Software, a major firm in the industry at the time. Upon departing Advent, he and a few ex-Advent employees started their own consulting firm, called Fascet, which catered to some of the largest firms, such as SEI, Allianz Global, and many others. The idea for starting Blaze Portfolio came about after one of Bryson’s clients asked him to build a fancy spreadsheet that did trading. Bryson did that, and much more. In 2010, the first version of Blaze Portfolio was launched; it was designed to handle both investment model rebalancing and order management and electronic trading.

Major industry trends

Bryson outlined a number of trends he sees in the current landscape of the FinTech industry. One trend is that companies are starting to look at rebalancing software as the central component of their technology stack. The central WealthTech component has historically been the CRM and more recently financial-planning tools, but the future advisor technology stack will be built around a rebalancing platform. Bryson identified the continuous monitoring of accounts, tax optimization, and the alignment to long term financial goals as ways to demonstrate value to clients and use rebalancing as the FinTech backbone—as key aspects of this trend.

The second trend is moving away from bundled software solutions requiring all-in-one accounting, CRM, and trading.

“Bundling services together may work if you are selling a commodity service like bundled phone and cable. Many FinTech providers are trying to do that now, where you bundle everything together, but that’s not necessarily the best solution. There are huge differences between products and there is a lot to be said about expertise in a certain area. It doesn’t make sense to bundle everything together in this space and be locked into a sub-par product.”

The last major trend on Bryson’s radar is the hybridization of the digital world with human advisors. He believes that in the future there will be a wide range of different solutions, from purely digital to purely manual. Blaze Portfolio happens to be in a niche with clients from different ends of the spectrum. Blaze Portfolio has multi-family office clients that are ultra-high-net-worth individuals who methodically analyze every account one by one. Apart from that segment, the company also has digital advisors that use the platform to process all of their transactions, and analyze those transactions in a very scalable way across thousands of accounts.

Why Blaze Portfolio is special

According to its monthly figures, Blaze Portfolio averages over $2.5 billion in electronic trading per month, with about 350,000 allocations a month, which corresponds to the number of accounts executing orders. Most of Blaze Portfolio’s clients are acquired through partners, custodians, and industry connections. Bryson and his team continuously work to engage new clients through their blog, content stream, and other web-based social activities.

The core of the platform is rebalancing and trading. Bryson explains that Blaze Portfolio also includes aspects of portfolio management. Advisors can monitor and view their holdings at any one point at time, intraday.

“So our focus is everything necessary to monitor portfolios on that daily basis for asset-allocation drifts. Create any orders that are necessary for either investment strategy changes or daily cash-management responsibilities. And also the order management, which [involves] connectivity to all the different custodians and brokers. We have real-time fix connectivity for electronic trading and allocations.”