Earnings Call - ENVESTNET INC

Sorry, you can decide what you want to edit or not. You're the CEO of the company. You're allowed to scoop a little bit. We're going to talk to Lawrence Calpano today. He is the CEO and chairman of iCapital. And we can talk to him about a lot of things, but we're goingto focus today on technology. Most people like to describe technology as being disruptive. Technology can also be its most powerful when it's enabling. There seems to be a great rewiring of the financial system going on, and AI has a lot to do with it. Welcome to the latest episode of The Bridge by iCapital. I'm Shinali Basick. I am the Chief Investment Strategist at iCapitl. And today I get to interview Lawrence Calcano. He is the CEO and Chairman of iCapitol. first time on the show. I hope you like it. I'm sure I will. So there's a lot of cool things going on and I'm excited to pick your brain on it because admittedly I haven't even been able to dive deep with you on some of the newest things that we're working on. But I really want to start with how you think about technology. For the people who don't know you, you ran tech banking at Goldman through the 90s and so you've seen this type of an era before. Yep. And now we're in this moment where technology is accelerating arguably faster than it ever has before. What does it mean for the financial industry? What does mean for financial advisors to experience artificial intelligence today? Well, I think, first of all, it's great to be here, Chanel. I watch all your shows, so it's nice to actually be in the seat for a change. But anyway, I, I it's super exciting, you know, at the highest level. I mean, if you think about what we as people sort of, as we go through our lives, technology has this great promise of making the experience better at all the different things that we do. And I think in particular, as financial advisors impart advice and build relationships with clients, technology can play a massive role in really improving that experience and helping the advisor to deliver the best experience as it relates to how they communicate, how they think about investments, how they build portfolios, how They sort of use analysis to model portfolios and opportunities and so forth. I think technology is a massive asset. And I will say this, for as long as we've been building iCapital, people have been debating the human versus machine question. And to me, that's a false choice. I remember a decade ago, people were talking about robo-advisors and asking sort of the existential question for advisors, will robo advisors- Take your job. Take your job, right? And now they're asking that same question again. And what I continue to believe around this particular topic is the best advisors will understand there are parts of their relationships with clients that can be better delivered by leveraging technology. And then there are elements that the human being will deliver to their clients. And I think the best advisors will not be afraid of technology. There are several who are, but they will embrace it and understand it creates a better user experience? It's a really relevant question for us because we work with more than 180,000 financial professionals today. And so this is looming large. Is AI going to be the next financial advisor? But I think, as we're seeing, the role of a financial advisor is getting more complex. It is. I mean, if you think about the different systems that advisors use, you know, reporting systems, TAMPs, alt systems, you knows, they are getting almost bombarded with data, right? And so I think technology and AI in particular can help organize that data into sort of much more useful bits of information that the advisor can use in helping to advise their client. And I think that one very good example of that is the announcement that was just made with Anthropic, where, you know, they're delivering called for advisors. And there's a number of outstanding firms that are part of that consortium. We're obviously very proud to be one of them. But there are other great firms in there. And I think the way in which the infrastructure can help the advisor deliver the right information at the right time to best serve their client is very powerful. Well, why did we partner with Anthropic? We have always been focused on helping an advisor do the best job that we can. We're not a B2C company. We're B2B, and when we think of B, we think of financial advisors in service of their client, to their clients. And so I am very, very intrigued by what I was just saying, which is the ability of AI to deliver information, to sort through massive amounts of information and deliver the tools and data that an advisor needs to best serve the clients. And we felt when we look at BlackRock and Vanguard and InvestNet and some of the other great firms that are part of this, we absolutely add a part. We absolutely wanted to be part of the team that was going to be helping to change the experience for advisors. And as you know, we've had a long-term relationship with Anthropic. And to us, this was really just an extension of that relationship for the benefit of financial advisors. Right. It's interesting because you really encourage us all to talk about artificial intelligence, to talk about it with our teams, to use it. But you also are the first person to say, let's do this carefully. So what does that mean to you? I think there is incredible promise. There's incredible here and now, and there's incredible promise for how all of us as individuals and as teams can integrate AI into what we do every single day. But there are also real risks that cannot be ignored. You know, I look at, you know, the projections for when AI reaches general intelligence, and Musk had commented in five years, AI will be smarter than the totality of humanity, right? It may not take five years. You think it'd be sooner? I would take the under, Not the over. And you see that in the rate of change. Some of the things we've recently observed are very scary. When models break out of their sandboxes and find ways into the internet and find way to hack into other companies' websites, I think that is very, very scary, and managing and governing this is going to be essential, and that's not an easy task. If people are looking for regulations to play a role in how AI is governed, you've got to look at it through the lens of, okay, what's the right way to regulate this? But you also have to look through the lines of sort of geopolitics. And the reality is, and we've read this and we have seen it, countries all around the world are thinking about using AI as a means to get some advantage over other countries. And I do think that this is a very significant issue, and I think in many ways governments around the world have to actually step above national interest and think about what is the best thing for humanity. These are the incredibly powerful tools, but they also, left to their own devices, could become dangerous tools. So I do Think there needs to be a lot of global governance. This is not about what one country does or another country does. This is about how do countries around the world come together to create a paradigm that works so we can all benefit from the great advantages AI can bring without necessarily the fear that we've all seen. Yeah, there's so many dimensions, right? At the end of the day, when you think about the way things are progressing, a lot of tech leaders have said that there are parallels in financial services that could serve as good templates for how AI could be regulated or could be made safer for the progression of humanity, right? You have a lot of experience with this, having spent your career in financial services and technology. What are the parallels? Do you think that there's something to be learned from financial services to take to tech on how to regulate this industry? I think there are some, but I think it is a slightly different problem in a sense that when you think about financial regulations, generally speaking, those have been to protect investors, to make sure that investors have sufficient, adequate, and correct information in making decisions, that conflicts are disclosed and managed correctly so people have transparency. There's a lot of regulations that are about creating a framework for people to invest safely, transparently, successfully. But what's different here, I think, is the technology is so much broader, and it's much more autonomous in terms of what decisions it makes. By the way, directed decisions as an agent for an advisor or for someone else, and that push to its extreme is what creates the risk. So I think there are parallels But I do think more is needed because of how much more powerful – I remember during the internet bubble, 1.0, when all the companies were going public and people were predicting the growth in the internet, which turned out, by the way, as big as those projections were in the mid-90s, all of the reality ended up being even larger than what seemed like massive projections at the time. But there was still a different framework in terms of how we manage the internet versus today how we manage AI and what AI can manage on its own. Just like technology development takes imagination and creativity, so too will the regulations. And I don't think that people should say, well, this is what we did in the SNL crisis, you know, in the 80s, or this is what we Did when the internet melted down in 2000. This is a new set of issues and a new sort of challenges. So I think regulators have to be as intellectually curious and as creative in crafting solutions as the entrepreneurs who are building the technology. It's interesting because when it comes to technology certainly artificial intelligence is the topic of the day, but it's not the only technology. And I want to talk a little more about how we've approached technology here at iCapital because you recently announced a relationship that expanded with DTCC. Yes. Really interesting comments that they made to us as well. I'm going to quote Talia Klein, who's a DTTC head of wealth and investment solutions. She said, earlier this year, I argued that private markets had reached an inflection point. It has been losing value because of a problem so basic, it's embarrassing. That is the operational complexity is what she's citing. And that is what we exist to solve, right? So explain, what are we doing with DTCC and how are we fixing the problem here? Sure. So first of all, I want to go back to an important premise that relates to how we started the business and something we've been saying at iCapital since the very beginning, which is, you know, most people like to describe technology as being disruptive, right? We looked at it a little differently and we said, you know, technology can also be its most powerful when it's enabling. When we look at this ecosystem and we see so many important constituents and players in the industry, like custodians, like transfer agents, like administrators, you obviously have distribution platforms of advisors and you have GPs, et cetera, we are trying to create a paradigm for all of these firms to be successful. And so we're not trying to disrupt. Go back to the internet. Amazon started. Amazon is disrupting and ending the lives of bookstores and music stores and so forth. Totally different paradigm. We're trying to enable success. And I think part of what's really needed here is the industry has to partner and collaborate. And when you look at what's happening today, we still have too much of a fragmented infrastructure. Like the concept of end-to-end is a hard concept because there's lots of stopping points, right? And so what we believe, when you Look at DTCC and what they've done in liquid markets, it's incredible. They've built a great solution around AIP. And so we look at DTCC and we see an organization that has so successfully, by partnering with all the major players, created a much better ecosystem for all of those players to operate. We think partnering with them on the private market side, we can achieve the same goals and objectives. That doesn't mean that it's just us and DTTC. We together bring very complementary skills to the table, which I think will be really important for the industry. But it is also important for us to get the partnership and cooperation of so many others in the industry as well. But we believe this is huge. And I think that the biggest impediment, it used to be things like access. People couldn't get access. there were a number of challenges that we were built to help solve. Where we are in the journey is we've moved away from, I can't get access. Access is much more broadly, it's not universally available, but it's much more widely available. By the way, it probably shouldn't be universally available as well. We can talk about that. But where we are today is the impediment is around the infrastructure and technology and data connectivity. And we think together with DTCC, we can actually help create a much better opportunity for the industry to scale and reach their goals. It's interesting because of the nearly 90% of people who we've surveyed here at iCapital of financial advisors plan to maintain or increase allocations to private markets, but almost 60% cite technology as their biggest barrier. And so this really cuts directly to the problem we're trying to solve. It does. I'm going to make one other observation, too, in terms of the context of where we are in the industry. Right now, we still have a bit of a concentration problem, the old 80-20 rule. 80% of the volume is driven by 20% of advisors. right? What's happening is more and more advisors are entering the business with their clients. The evolution in product structuring, you know, 10 years ago, the predominant way in which people allocated alts or allocated to alts were through private funds, typically feeders that fed into master funds, right? Largely 3C7 funds, not to get technical, but they were funds for only qualified purchasers. The structure and the evolution and structure has enabled advisors now to offer products to all of their investors, which is really exciting, right? And so now more and more people can participate in the alts market. And so the infrastructure has to evolve. And as that continues, the next wave of advisors, to my 80-20 comment, the Next Wave of Advisors are going to be newer to the asset class. And typically, they're using model portfolios with their clients, right? So when they think about alts, how do they think about employing models or products that look like models? So they can create allocations for their clients that are easier for both to understand and to allocate to. So lots of changes, lots of new entrants into the market, and that gives rise to the need for new technology and new infrastructure. But it's interesting. Now I will follow up on that question that you posed is because access is increasing, should it to private markets? I think the answer is yes and no. I think probably the biggest impediment outside of technology is education. And so to this new group I've been describing or a newer group of advisors who haven't historically allocated at all or significantly, they and their clients need to be educated. And it reminds me of the old, I grew up in the New York area, and for people who grew up they might remember Cy Simms and the men's clothing store. And his big tagline was, an educated consumer is our best customer. And I think that's incredibly relevant here as well. People need to understand how these products work. And I think we've seen little bumps in the road where maybe they haven't, right? They didn't understand how the liquidity worked, they didn't understand other elements of the products. And I think that's really essential. And I think if people understand better how these products work, it puts them and their advisor in a better position to then decide to your question, is this a product that makes sense in my portfolio? Can I tolerate the relative illiquidity even of these registered funds? Can I tolerate that? Does it make sense to my portfolio, etc.? And so to me, education is the big unlock to either a yes or a no answer to that question. It's interesting because another fun statistic from the advisor survey that almost 60% of the people who responded cite liquidity and risk management, risk assessment challenges, and the educational component certainly feeds right back into that concern. Now, there are other things here that we've been investing in technology. We have partnerships, Anthropic and DTCCs are two that we'd mentioned. But we actually really invest in technology internally in a massive way. There's been about a billion dollars, more than a billion hours spent in the 14 years you've been running and building iCapital. The interesting thing to me is we now transact a billion dollars a day at iCapital. So for me, it just feels like there's a lot more where that came from in terms of the technology investment that's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's significant. I would tell you it took us close to 10 years to have $100 billion in assets, in platform assets and alts. It took us another two years to get to our next $100 million. And we'll close Q3 with $100 billion in subscriptions. Just in a quarter? Just in one quarter, $100 billion in subscriptions in Q3 across all of our products. The business is definitely scaling. That to me demonstrates the fact that there's a significant amount of interest in these products. But I do think we in the industry need to be very focused on making sure that people understand, look, you're doing this whole Atlas project, which is about consolidating- We're not going to tell anybody about that yet. Okay. All right. But a good teaser. There is such an opportunity to bring together the information in the industry in a way that isn't sort of a Trojan horse way to sell product. It's just about education, helping people understand and figuring out if these assets make sense for their portfolios. And I think it's a healthy process. And by the way, it's not just in the liquid portfolios or in the portfolios people have that they manage. It's also in their retirement portfolios. And we just made a big announcement with Great Gray around the inclusion in their target date funds of alts building blocks. And to me, there are different ways in which people will use products if they decide that these products are appropriate for them. Importantly, though, in the retirement context, it's essential that these products are professionally managed, just like they are in the defined contribution space, right? That's a big opportunity. And we're going to be building blocks of alternatives for the fund managers, the fiduciary fund managers to decide which components of alts, if any, they want to include in their portfolio. And some of the reporting structures might be different than a different type of fund out there. So there's a lot of, to that point, of operational complexity, different needs for different end clients at the end of the day. You know, it's interesting. Just quick note on Atlas, because I get to be a beneficiary of all the investment that you're making in artificial intelligence. And I think it's pretty cutting edge to be able to do research with AI the way we do it. And so, well, more where that came from. Another fun fact, though, about iCapital is not just how much you're spending on technology. It is the fact that we went from 1,700 people last year to closer to 3,000 as we close up 2026. And so we're not just investing in technology. We're investing a lot in the people along with that technology. Yeah. After the first question I was asking. Yeah. You know, look, all these businesses are people businesses. And I have this huge belief. It's funny. You know I do this 19th whole show. And I always sort of am always trying to understand the different cultures. We've had some incredible leaders. And I just believe that culture is like- Kenny Johnson, Mark Rowan. Mark Rowon, yeah. John Gray, Mike Arrigetti, you know, Jack Nicklaus, of course, Annika Sorensen. But I think it's really important to understand that the success first and foremost is a function of people. And we have this expression around here that success is about being humble and hungry, right? And to me, humility has got two very important components to it. One is that you've got to understand that the most important thing for us, or frankly any company, is that your clients are successful and that your success has to follow theirs. There's a humility and understanding. We're here to serve the clients. The second thing is that we've got operate as a team. And none of us are ever going to be able to carry the day. It's about lots of people with the same motivation to help our clients succeed working together to create success. To me, that's humility. And then I think we've got to be hungry. You know, what are we going to do next, right? You know you can't ever get lazy. You've got to be entrepreneurial. You've gotta keep close connection to your entrepreneurial spirit. That's huge. And then the second thing is you've got to have like this insatiable desire to execute. You know our partners are depending on us for a lot of really important client-oriented activities. They've got a rely on our execution. And so to me the combination of the attributes that make us humble and the attributes that make us hungry have to come together to create a culture that allows a company to thrive and continue to succeed. I'm going to steal another quick quote from you that you've told me before, which is the world owes us nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. I, you know, I think sometimes, you know, individuals, if they become successful and companies, if they become successful, think the world owes them the next win. You know, you've got to show up every day and win that day because you've out-hustled, you've put your client's interests first, you've worked well together, and that's how you win every single day. And I think for people who show up thinking, well, I'm supposed to win for whatever set of reasons, that's just kind of a DOA kind of mentality. So the last question I have for you is really about what I think is one of the more emerging technologies in this market, tokenization. We have a relationship with DLT. Yep. Where's that all going at the end of the day? What role is tokenization going to ultimately play in private markets in particular? We get this question a lot in the field. I think there's kind of two components of it. One is the distributed ledger, the use of the technologies. We have been rolling that out. We've rolled it out. We've raised a lot of funds on that on one of the major bank platforms. And DLT can play a really important role in reducing the NIGOs, the not-in-good-order orders that are in. And so I think there's a real role for the distributed ledger leveraging those technologies. We have a great relationship with Digital Asset, which runs the Canton platform. We're a small investor in Digital Aset. They've been terrific partners, and Yuval, who runs that, is phenomenally thoughtful and quite a great entrepreneur. And so we're excited about that. Tokenization is a little bit more complex as it relates to these assets. And part of the reason for that is if you think about the transaction, there's an element of the transaction which is a subscription process. an element of the transaction, which is the actual exchange of funds. And for a lot of the largest buyers of alternatives, they don't have digital wallet infrastructures that are yet in place, right? And so if you tokenize a fund and you have the subscription process on chain, but the cash flow part of the process off chain, it's cumbersome. And one could argue that the benefits of that aren't there because you still have a complex sort of situation. I think tokenization will happen. But I think it'll be most powerful when we can manage the full transaction on chain. I think then the real benefits will be there. And that will include if there's any liquidity components to the, whether it's a redemption opportunity or maybe a sale opportunity, if all of that is on chain, it makes that whole experience a lot better. So I think, and you'll hear tokenization is- It's got the hot word. Well, it's massively impacting many of the other more liquid markets. But in this context, there isn't necessarily the payment stream that would make the whole thing that much easier. But it'll happen. just takes time. And by the way, I think one of the most important things in all this, and this is another good example, is nothing ever happens on time. It's like everything takes... But you won everything yesterday. That's why. Wanting it and getting it are two very different things. Nothing happens with the speed that people forecast it. And I think tokenization will be a really important component of the market. And in this context, it's probably going to take several years. But you made a very important distinction that digital ledger technology, there are immediate impacts kind of that we're seeing. Yes, yes. But tokenization for all that everyone's talking about it is not actually where we're seen the immediate progress. There's not progress yet in private markets. And by the way, you know, digital ledGER technology is largely about better data connectivity. You know, APIs can help you achieve some of that as well. You know? The infrastructure, you know, has a long way to go. Back to the DTC conversation. But connecting the industry so data flows more seamlessly through, you know, a distribution platform, an administrator, a custodian, a GP, et cetera, you Know, that's really critical. And so different technologies will be used in different ways. But the idea is to create a framework where data can live end-to-end, where you don't have people reentering data in a duplicative manner such that you introduce the risk of errors. Creating a digital framework, I think, is a huge component of where these technologies can play a role. And then, as I said, when you add payments to it and you can bring that all together on chain, it's going to be very powerful. Lawrence, thank you so much for joining today. It was so interesting to pick your brain on really what's coming out to be kind of the great rewiring of the financial industry in a lot of ways. Yeah, well, great to be here. Thank you so much, Nell. I appreciate it. Thank you, Lawrence. That is Lawrence Calcano. He is the chairman and CEO of iCapital. And you've been watching The Bridge by iCapitel.