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[A business operating environment being driven by a “compounding” rate of industry change, as we have today, necessitates both a wide-scale operational and fundamental strategy reappraisal. Increasingly, we are realizing that a transformation is needed in the traditional “way of doing business” into a more scalable, flexible, and ongoing dynamic approach to, not just survive rapid change, but be able to harness it successfully for competitive advantage.
For wealth management firms, on one level, this requires the rethinking and enabling of future-ready home office administration infrastructure characterized by centralized data management, digitized workflows, comprehensive activity tracking, and task automation, all the while reducing operational risks, manual inputs, redundancies, and costs.
On another level, the dizzying explosion of business solutions providers and new technologies addressing practice management and other industry challenges needs to be deliberately organized to a carefully chosen and curated array, not just of vendors, but strategic partnerships that can be readily put into motion and operationally connected.
To better explore these transformational needs for wealth management firms and what is actively being done to implement solutions in a cost-efficient manner, we reached out to Institute Founding member Brian Moran, CEO of FLX Networks – a FinTech and business services platform designed to revolutionize engagement between wealth and asset management firms. We asked him deep-dive questions on how they have been using technology to help reconfigure the wealth management industry landscape into a modern, strategically interconnected ecosystem that they call the FLX Wealth Management Experience powered by their FLX Wealth Management Suite of services.]
Hortz: How would you describe the value proposition for your FLX Wealth Management Suite?
Moran: The Wealth Management platform was built to address the core fragmentation challenges and inefficiencies in financial services communication among key industry players – Wealth Managers, Asset Managers, financial advisors, and key vendor partners. Multiple websites, emails, disconnected systems, expensive data subscriptions, underutilized technology, and massive time constraints all combine to create exorbitant industry inefficiencies and costs.
We offer a strategically designed, centralized hub with purpose-built industry connectivity specifically for wealth management firms that require regular communication, coordination, and connection to build strong partnerships with their asset manager and key vendor partners.
Our Network, and the Wealth Management Suite, is anchored with our dynamic Asset Management Relationship Portal. Through the portal, wealth management teams can digitize many of the daily activities they currently conduct via email, spreadsheets, and individual outreach. Given that wealth management firms have little incentive ROI to building this type of non-core solution internally, FLX’s portal provides them with a scalable solution that can eliminate administrative burden, streamline partner communications, and reduce risk through the use of an industry utility.
Hortz: Can you describe some of the components of your Wealth Management Suite and what exactly you are offering wealth management firms?
Moran: As members of our Network, wealth management firms can access our marketplace, which includes the following proprietary Exchanges:
FLX Investments Exchange – a one-stop experience to access asset manager firm overviews, investment expertise, product availability, marketing collateral, and key contacts.
FLX Intelligence Exchange – a hyper-efficient intelligence hub, anchored by a cutting-edge AI Assistant, which pulls together the industry’s most extensive library of written, video, and audio thought leadership and insights.
FLX Solutions Exchange – a curated business solutions marketplace allowing for on-demand and a la carte access to vetted professional services and leading-edge technology in a seamless, cost-effective manner.
Hortz: What are the specific benefits you designed into your platform for wealth management firms and asset managers?
Moran: These three Exchanges are combined and interconnected into one comprehensive, unified, digital destination, providing operational efficiency, content aggregation, AI-powered insights, and extremely valuable network effects for wealth and asset managers, including:
Wealth Managers benefits – The FLX Wealth Management Experience provides a single, streamlined access point to engage with hundreds of asset managers — eliminating the inefficiencies of managing disparate relationships.
It standardizes and simplifies operational due diligence processes, saving teams significant time by consolidating essential information into one easily accessible platform. Beyond efficiency, our Exchanges deliver actionable insights on industry and market trends, enabling smarter decision-making and improved oversight.
Importantly, it also offers a more cost-effective and scalable way to solve for key non-core technology and support needs — helping firms modernize without the burden of building or managing these capabilities in-house.
Asset Managers benefits – FLX’s Exchanges provide asset managers with streamlined, scalable access to wealth management firms — eliminating the need for fragmented, duplicative outreach efforts across multiple platforms.
By centralizing relationship and contact data in a single, client-maintained environment, we empower your entire distribution and marketing teams to operate more efficiently, with real-time access to the right decision-makers and insights.
In addition, FLX offers a powerful vertical for distributing marketing and thought leadership content. Asset managers can ensure their materials are discoverable, approved, and trackable — maximizing reach and engagement while minimizing cost and complexity.
Hortz: What specific features or capabilities of a FLX Membership have been most impactful for wealth managers in streamlining their operational processes?
Moran: We have legitimately digitized the work functions of wealth management firms that historically require a significant amount of personnel time chasing down and managing disparate workstreams, while increasing our members capacity to execute their roles more effectively.
Wealth managers can access one dedicated location to collect firm overviews and investment insights from asset managers across the industry, as well as information and product collateral for member mutual funds, ETFs, separately managed accounts (SMAs), interval funds, closed end funds, and private funds.
Additionally, they can access a leading-edge technology solution tied towards operational due diligence and the collections of either quarterly certifications and attestations or other important information that a wealth firm needs to have for an asset manager.
Hortz: How does the FLX Intelligence Exchange differentiate itself from other content aggregation platforms in the industry, and what unique value does it provide to wealth managers?
Moran: First, we built FLX to digitize the administrative workflows in this space. We believed that if we could harness a more effective work environment, our aggregated and comprehensive content hub would be an added benefit to the overall membership.
The FLX Intelligence Exchange provides wealth managers with one centralized portal for relevant industry news, economic outlooks, data, research, education, and thought leadership across written insights, videos, and podcasts. It was designed to provide important practical benefits, including the use of a technology called FLX Assist. This leading-edge tool empowers users to summarize massive amounts of data related to markets, companies, events, and products in seconds, while also providing a user-friendly way to create and send a personalized client newsletter in minutes.
It removes the need to visit multiple websites, do non-curated Google searches, or chase down vendor partners, and allows wealth managers to access, summarize, digest, and share information seamlessly with the click of a button.
Hortz: Can you provide more details on how the FLX Solutions Exchange was compiled to support key strategic firm needs?
Moran: Our goal was to thoughtfully and practically build into our Network a marketplace of key strategic resources regularly identified as a need by wealth management firms. Due to the tremendous innovation in technology, as well as the entrepreneurial spirit of this industry, we have seen many firms wind up with a disparate, unwieldy, and legacy mix of resources which are not efficiently deployed or even used in some cases.
The FLX Solutions Exchange, combined with our industry experience, effectively works to transform the overall business solutions marketplace into an easily digestible, cost-effective, and focused business-building framework for our members with negotiated discounts and seamless integration for better user experiences.
Hortz: How does FLX plan to continue innovating and evolving its Wealth Management Suite platform to address the changing needs and trends in the wealth management and asset management industry?
Moran: Where I see FLX going is fairly simple but powerful – We aim to be the purpose-built infrastructure partner that helps both asset and wealth managers simplify their businesses and focus on what they do best.
Frankly — and I know this might challenge conventional thinking — there are areas where these firms are spending time and capital that do not generate meaningful returns or scale beyond their own platforms: managing partner connectivity, wrangling non-core tech systems, duplicating data efforts, or building tools that already exist in better form elsewhere.
Our mission is to take on those burdens. We reduce noise, eliminate redundant work, and provide scalable, integrated solutions that help firms reallocate resources back to revenue-driving, differentiated activities. In doing so, we are always striving to continue helping create more sustainable, focused, and future industry utility!
This article was originally published here and is republished on Wealthtender with permission.
About the Author
Bill Hortz
Founder Institute for Innovation Development
To make Wealthtender free for readers, we earn money from advertisers, including financial professionals and firms that pay to be featured. This creates a conflict of interest when we favor their promotion over others. Read our editorial policy and terms of service to learn more. Wealthtender is not a client of these financial services providers.
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