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The accelerating rate of technology and business model innovation is both a blessing and a curse to growth-oriented financial services firms. The new opportunities to streamline operations, automate workflows, leverage data resources, personalize client engagement, build your brand, and reach a targeted audience can leapfrog a firm’s competitive positioning, but knowing how to choose and apply these new resources is a serious challenge fraught with complex decisions.
An in-depth understanding of these new approaches and tools, along with a strategic thinking mindset to best design and deploy your tech stack and other key resources, are required to capture that desired competitiveness and positioning. The growing complexity of this endeavor has also spawned the need to employ the power of networks, leverage the “shared economy”, and seek true strategic partners. Most firms would benefit by retaining a consultative resource and experienced business catalyst to propel them forward.
To better understand the changing strategic nature of the financial services industry, we reached out to Institute Founding members FLX Networks – a financial services technology platform and asset and wealth manager membership community – to talk to Mark Spina, President and Jay Ramey, Director of Solutions who, along with the entire FLX team, help guide prospects and clients to effectively harness FLX’s Solutions exchange .
The FLX Solutions exchange provides FLX members with a suite of curated business resources providing cost/time savings and strategic solutions ranging from multi-pronged marketing, video production, advisor data, product flow insights & analysis to advisor coaching, business/practice management, and an industry-specific FLX Assistant. We asked them questions to understand their unique perspectives and curation efforts on building a business solutions platform and network to support their asset manager, financial advisor, and wealth management firm clients on the changing business environment and how to deploy the new resources available.
Hortz: Welcome gentlemen! Can we start by each of you explaining your professional background and role at FLX Solutions?
Mark: Drawing upon multiple decades of leadership experience in this space, I have had P&L responsibility along with product, marketing, business intelligence, sales, and strategy. All of those functions are seeing a lot of change across the industry, or should be, and FLX is an agile platform that allows us to guide our members through their journey, delivering quantifiable value and positioning for growth.
Jay: I have been in alternative investment distribution for about 18 years and then shifted to specializing in marketing technology platforms, digital distribution, and consulting. I have been working with all of our client partners but specifically asset managers, financial advisors, and FinTech/WealthTech companies.
Hortz: There is an amazing amount of range and depth in your FLX Solutions exchange with 12 different categories of business support. What was the thinking behind creating the Solutions exchange?
Jay: In building our business development resources for our clients into a Solutions platform, we wanted to acknowledge all the different product journeys, unique firm challenges, and the diverse investment vehicle and strategy options that come across our desks for creative support. This includes all forms of mutual funds, ETF issuers, SMAs, and alternative products from a wide variety of emerging, growth-stage, and established firms that come to FLX Networks.
Each individual firm has different needs and they are all in a different stage of their business evolution. Some are very mature firms that know what they need and others are just beginning to determine or revamp their path and strategy. We need to be prepared to proactively consult and support our full range of clients in their unique needs and challenges with carefully curated and vetted best-of-breed resources that are readily available to be deployed as needed.
Mark: What I would add is that if you look at our leadership team, we have domain experts and experience ranging from working with boutiques to large organizations. We are aware of and have had access to a lot of industry resources, and we are bringing all of that knowledge and experience into FLX Solutions to essentially help guide asset managers and wealth management firms to business solutions that are appropriate for them at their specific product delivery stage or business needs. The vision is to offer one central location where clients can build on a modular and on demand basis; whatever they need as a firm.
Providing a turnkey solution for marketing, practice management, distribution, or holistic solutions for advisor distribution, we also work a la carte on different timely projects where we are partnering on implementation, evaluation, and adjustments needed over time. So it might be that we initially work on branding, updating collateral, doing webinars, or deploying specific services like video as they start to evolve their engagement strategies.
The idea is that asset managers and wealth advisors can outsource and essentially leverage the Solutions platform in a fractional way versus having to build out those resources internally. Or perhaps more important and prevalent is where a FLX Solution works alongside and supplements an in-house capability of our member firms. Scaling up or down quickly is really hard as firms need to source, hire, train and then retain talent. We routinely work alongside our partners enabling them to scale or pivot more quickly. The core goal behind FLX Solutions is that our clients can tap into different business resource areas and get help deploying them strategically as they need and as they grow.
Hortz: How do you go about consulting with your financial clients to help them determine how to implement their enhanced distribution approaches and strategies?
Jay: To fully support financial firms who come to us needing help, during our initial relationship discovery process, we take a deep dive look to see what infrastructure and processes they have in place for promoting themselves with their marketing, digital messaging, content positioning, and website, as well as what tech stack and CRM that they use. We have even built an assessment tool we call our Speedometer to get more information on where their state of readiness is in their distribution path. As business growth consultants, we want our clients to be aware of the many issues and the tools available for the distribution puzzle and in strategy development and execution.
Every FLX engagement starts with becoming a member of our Network, where they select the right membership and Solutions package to meet their needs, and of course, that can be adjusted over time as conditions and opportunities evolve.
Mark: We ask a lot of questions - How are you marketing? How are you educating advisors? What type of marketing collateral do you have - pitchbooks, fact sheets, videos, podcasts? What's successfully working for you? What is the goal of the company and what are your biggest growth opportunities over the next three to six months?
We tailor our recommendations towards the individual budgets and the personality of the firm – their stance on ROI, what they have already tried with results, what their realistic expectations are for success, and to see if we are even the right fit for them.
Hortz: Can you discuss the range of services you provide for marketing and distribution support?
Jay: I will start with our broad range of Marketing support from building websites, content strategies, social media, email campaigns, and video. I want to highlight that FLX Media builds incredible visual brands for asset managers or wealth management firms built by a 25-year Hollywood veteran and those are great evergreen pieces. Video can also be integrated into delivery of Quarterly updates, doing them in a more engaging, visual way versus just reading text.
In branding efforts, we help find and develop great human capital and thought leadership stories and spotlights on key firm leaders like Founders, CEOs, or Portfolio Managers that have an exceptional backstory that we can integrate on how they manage money, what they are doing outside the office, and pull that in just to make their firm story more dynamic and interesting. Then, combined with our SEO expertise and leveraging on multiple social media channels, we can build the visibility of that brand. For asset managers, FLX provides a solution that is engaging wealth management firms across research, relationship management, technology, advisor value-add, and senior leadership.
For email campaigns, we built a technology and infrastructure platform leveraging comprehensive financial advisor data for asset managers to deliver 6-part email campaigns to targeted communities of advisors with real-time transparency and reporting. One of the most powerful aspects of this is the intelligence that we have around the advisor community with our strategic partnership with Broadridge where we can get very granular data as to where investment flows are going, what types of products are being bought, and where they are having success in certain channels. Increasingly, we are guiding our clients to use that advanced advisor data with a more traditional outbound calling model in our FLX Schedulers solution. So, we really have a one stop shop for marketing support where we can do everything, or we can do it a la carte.
Mark: An area where we are seeing and projecting significant interest is in a Solution we call Digital Distribution Plus. Digital distribution is also a key component on our tech stack that we use for sales efficiencies on lead scoring and lead generation on who is engaging around content, websites, collateral, and potentially moving from a discovery phase to a buying phase. This is important intel for distribution teams for follow up. Being in a very digital world, you need to have a digital distribution strategy that supports the wholesaling and business development teams, and all facets of the marketing process as well. Digital Distribution Plus can be an end-to-end distribution process founded on digital principals and strategies, designed to overcome an array of challenges and to capitalize on the dynamics of our “digital first” world.
Through a year-round and omnichannel approach to content development and lead generation, FLX positions managers towards investors by nurturing their target audience through the marketing funnel, from awareness, to consideration, to decision. By converting contacts into qualified sales leads, your distribution team can focus their time where it really matters. Omni channel includes social, microsites, email, video, webinars, schedulers and more - all aimed at creating awareness of a firm or capability, get it more frequently considered by advisors and gatekeepers, and finally, help guide them through their respective decision process.
The J-curve of product distribution has never been deeper, wider, and so fraught with potential failure. We accept those realities and see our job as being a reliable guide, who through experience and a robust Solution set, shortens that J-curve and makes it more navigable.
Hortz: What other key areas of business support does your platform offer?
Jay: On the technology side, our proprietary tech stack acts as a hub for personalized research and content where we have aggregated from top research, asset management insights, and investment news for all channels into one place. Whether you are an asset manager, wealth management firm, or financial advisor, you can quickly compile information - whether it is doing quick research or wrapping up thoughts that would be insightful for your clients with links to articles and specific information sources.
Through our platform, we have created information funnels where we can have a financial advisor or an RIA firm or an asset manager create a personalized newsletter in 30 seconds - click of a button, here you go! And it can be really specific to whatever they do. It is just an efficient way for them to automate and get content out where it might have taken somebody hours to compile that before. Now it is just done very systematically.
Mark: Through acquisition and organic growth, we have built one of the largest practice management firms in the country which is now part of our Solutions platform as the FLX Business Accelerator. We authentically believe that we are “accelerating growth through practice management, coaching, and value-add programs.”
Besides advanced practice management training, you can leverage this group to either get keynote speaking opportunities at conferences or arrange round table discussions for advisors around best practices or to hear what other advisors are doing and share what's working and what's not working. There are about 30 different topics that FLX clients could pick from with this group and access support on a very on-demand way where it could just be one speaking engagement, or it could be a full year commitment where you could essentially have this be a part of your overall team and process.
Hortz: Can you share with us some of the most interesting applications you have developed for your clients from your platform of solutions?
Jay: There is an alternative investment manager that needed help with a rebrand, brand visibility, promotion, and messaging. We redesigned their website to a growth driven CMS to better tell their story and serve their clients. From our discovery meetings, they also decided to engage with our public relations team. We launched a national PR strategy to help our clients connect to their audience and communicate their investment authority. The result of the rebrand process is brand visibility, increased website traffic, and inbound inquiries to connect with their sales team.
Many managers also need help with placement on more wealth platforms and promotional strategies to engage the advisors on the platforms they are already on. We consult with them so they understand the challenges, the process to get on more platforms, and when placed, implement digital educational campaigns to support and nurture the advisors on each platform to want to learn more. We are increasingly being perceived as a “premier partner” as is evidenced by the strategic relationships we have formed with the largest national wealth management firms, and soon to be announced larger platforms!
Mark: On the shared client engagement side, we have worked with asset managers where we have strategic accounts (national accounts) working with home offices or where they completely outsourced their distribution to us and we represent them throughout the entire country.
Hortz: Is it fair to say that your FLX Solutions platform is in constant development?
Jay: The Solutions platform is always evolving and growing from the practical needs and goals we are uncovering together with our clients. This business solutions mindset and commitment makes the platform very appealing to growth-oriented financial firms looking to scale their brands and connectivity in the marketplace. They see value here in the ability to find what they need on a module and on demand basis.
Mark: We are continually finding areas of need and resources or tools that that can provide business solutions in as many key areas as possible. We want our range of support to be very broad so that we can essentially help client firms regardless of whether they are a new firm with three people all the way up to some of the largest asset managers in the world. They can find value on our platform.
Hortz: How do you see the financial services industry is evolving and how is your platform designed to support that evolution into the future?
Mark: Financial firms across the board want and need increased productivity. Saving time and money, becoming more focused and strategic – those realities are leading everyone to go towards tech and digital. FLX Networks was deliberately designed to be that centralized location where growth-oriented financial firms can efficiently access and strategically deploy modern technology and business approaches on a cost-efficient way either through an outsourced, fractional, or private label way.
Jay: One of the greatest challenges for financial services firms today is dealing with a business operating environment that is driven by an accelerating rate of change. We strongly believe that the most powerful way to deal with this complex business environment is to build a dedicated, team-oriented network – a resourceful network of firms, technologies, new approaches, and expert solutions providers – all driven by a cost-effective, “shared economy”, fractional methodology and the development of real strategic partnerships.
It is super challenging for a firm to have and maintain the business intelligence, the R&D, and the internal resources to handle this unique business dynamic of compounding rates of change. That is our perspective for the evolution of the industry and why we built our firm and called ourselves FLX Networks.