The Legends of WealthTech with Roger Paradiso

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this week’s special edition of WealthTech on Deck. Today’s session is the next in a series we are calling Legends of WealthTech. Over the past few months, we have been inviting people on our podcast who have a demonstrated track record of innovation and industry leadership. We find these conversations with people who have made a significant difference in the advisory business over the long haul to be enlightening and history lesson, and as well as guidance for the next generation of innovators and leaders. Today, we will talk to someone I’ve known and respected since we first met in the 1990s, dare I say that out loud. Our guest today is Roger Paradiso. Roger created the concept of multiple discipline accounts, commonly known as MDAs way back when, he’ll talk about that I’m sure. Unified managed accounts, you’ve probably heard of the UMA, he had a lot to do with it. In fact, I think he invented it. He’s been at the point of the spear in moving our industry from mutual funds to separately managed accounts to multiple discipline accounts to UMAs and beyond. He’s still at it. Roger is the head of product solutions at Franklin Templeton and executive chairman of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management. Roger has been acknowledged with the Money Management Institute’s highest honor, Advisory Solutions Pioneer Award winner in 2014. And in 2016, he was awarded the MMI All Star Achiever Award. He also served as chairman of the MMI board. So, Roger, I’ll let you fill in on the details of the work you’ve been engaged in over the years. So with that, let me welcome you to Wealthtech on Deck. Great to have you join us and talk about the important work you’ve done for so long.

Roger Paradiso: Thanks, Jack. I love being here. It’s great.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, it’s fun to talk about this stuff, especially since we lived it. You lived it for sure. So, Roger, let’s take a walk back in time. As I recall, the early 1990s were when separately managed accounts really took off in popularity, slow at first, but then it really shot out. Where were you then and what was your role in helping to drive that popularity? Also, if you’d talk about, to our audience, about how the things really took off in the advisory space back then, of course, now it’s the dominant part of our business, but give us a little history lesson.

Roger Paradiso: It’s been so great just to think about the evolution of the separately managed account business and just how far it’s come. Luckily, I joined it by mistake, but luckily just joined an area that was on the up and was able to really enjoy the evolution. I started in the business in in 1987, I actually joined out of an internship with my college. And so, started going for a semester working for a financial advisor at Shearson Lehman Brothers. And it just so happened to be that he worked on the same floor as the asset management division for Shearson Lehman Brothers. So I spent the semester there, and ended up being asked to come back full time. And so I ended up continuing part time until I finished my college education, but was lucky to have a job once I graduated. And so, went back and started working for a financial advisor for Shearson Lehman Brothers and started to learn a lot that way. And luckily, because we were on the same floor as the asset management division, they, soon after, asked me to join their division. And so I soon became part of Shearson Asset Management, which was the proprietary asset management division for Shearson Lehman Brothers.

Jack Sharry: Roger, if you would, talk a little bit about, because there’s a lot of names that include Shearson, and Hutton, and Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley, and on and on, maybe talk through a little bit about that evolution, just so for our younger audience who now know it as Morgan Stanley Asset Management or whatever, talk us through the different parts and where you were, and then also how you got started in the whole SMA thing.

Roger Paradiso: Sure. Maybe I’ll come back to that. I think I’ll squeeze that in, maybe…

Jack Sharry: Sure.

Roger Paradiso: As I’m going, I think it will hopefully make it a little clearer as we’re doing it. But for now, and it is kind of amazing, Jack, because when I think back over my 30 year career, you’re gonna hear a lot of these different names. I never changed firms, technically. I’ve been bought, sold, and traded along the way. But never actually left, I think, a firm. So we will take you through that. But I think…

Jack Sharry: That’s funny.

Roger Paradiso: It is amazing to think of it, how many different name brands and how many different business cards we went through. So as part of that was joining that asset management division, which was proprietary arm for asset management, which was great to me, that was where the coolest guys were, you know, the portfolio managers developing portfolios, and they had a separately managed account business, it was typically for higher net worth clients. But they had a business that was really for separately managed accounts. And they were running that business off of, you know, I remember at the time, one computer, which, you know, all the information was on the one hard drive of that computer. And that computer was hooked up to a dot matrix printer that sat in the office. And that would you know, if you remember, dot matrix printers, I mean, they would just be loud and noisy. And so you’d have this printer running all day long. While you’re, I was on this computer. And so the problem, what they, which they had was that because all this information was on one hard drive, all the information over time was incorrect. They were not getting good information in, and thus they had bad information going out. And they had to produce monthly statements that needed to be sent to clients, which were on that dot matrix printer. So they had asked me to help fix that problem. And so we set out to do that, which was just a tedious task. I mean, it was now literally taking statements for every single month, and reloading every single line item of dividends and interest and buys and sells to make sure that the information was ultimately accurate in that computer. I remember the system was called NIDS, NIDS back then. I don’t even remember what that stood for. But it was the NIDS system, NIDS software, do you remember the NIDS?

Jack Sharry: I don’t, but I remember you and I had a meeting when I first joined LifeYield, which is 15 years ago. And you were at Citi at the time, you’ll, I’m sure go through all the names, but Citi was then in charge of what you were doing. And it was you and Joel Brookman. And we came in with our crazy idea for LifeYield, multi-account management and all the rest of it. And you had a stack of papers on your desk that was probably three feet high. And you said, you and Brookman both said, said, you know, I love your idea, we are not going to get to it for five years. Because, because we’re gonna go through all this stuff. And there’s this stack of papers, I’m not sure it was the same system, but it was the same concept.

Roger Paradiso: That’s great, that’s funny. No, so that problem’s never seemed to stop. So it was great. You know, it was just we spent days and nights doing that for a long, long period of time. But eventually, we got the information right, we were, you know, back to breakeven in terms of being able to now produce correct statements and be able to send them out. And I remember going back to the portfolio managers at that time and saying the information is correct. But the next big thing is that we’re going to move this information off of the hard drive and onto the firm’s database. And we did that, and then I was able to say, we never have to worry about this again, because it’s just gonna feed in every single day. And we don’t have to put in information. And at that point, they thought I was a genius. It was like, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea about computers. But we got to that point. And I quickly became a junior PM, which was really in charge of their separately managed account business at that time. And I would be connected to a couple of their portfolio managers. So I was able to learn about stock selection. And…

Jack Sharry: What year is this?

Roger Paradiso: I started in ’87, which was right before the stock market crash, was the internship, so this was about 90, early 1990s, as we, as we were doing this. And so that’s how I got my start was, was kind of hands on fixing a computer system that I knew nothing about and ultimately being kind of christened a junior portfolio manager to work with some of the PMs and then run the separately managed account. And that’s when I started to work with the financial advisors, to talk to them about what we’re doing in the portfolios and also manage the portfolios.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. So that was early days of SMAs. I’ll remind our audience, people didn’t know how to spell SMA back then, this was like a whole new concept. Places like Shearson and Hutton and other places all started working on these things. They started to take off, it was a little slow at first, but they took off. Maybe fast forward a little bit after they’ve, now they’ve gained some traction. And you start playing around with this thing called a multiple discipline account. What was that? What did that look like? Because that’s a precursor to UMAs, which are so prevalent now. But why don’t you talk us through how that evolved?

Roger Paradiso: Yeah, that was kind of, again, a natural extension in terms of what was happening in the industry as well as what was happening at the firm we were working with because you’re right that the mergers started to happen. This is just, Sandy Weill was bringing together lots of different firms. And in every one of those cases, he was not buying them for the asset management division. They were being bought because of the advisors, the brokers that they were really interested in. So what would end up happening is is they would buy these different firms and inherit these brokers, they would follow them, seem to have its own little asset management division as part of it, and they would take these assets management divisions and kind of stick them into a corner where they would put all of these different teams of money managers. This is like going back I think, from the Shearson days. EF Hutton was one of the next purchases that happened. And that’s when, that was in 1988. And that’s when you know, I know recently you had Len Reinhart on and Jim Seuffert and they talked about the introduction of the consulting business. Well, that was how the consulting business came as part of this. Now I was on a different side of the business, I was on the proprietary asset management side, they were on the consulting side, but, but in 1990, you had that which came in Primerica then bought out Shearson and merged it with Smith Barney in 1993. Ultimately, you know, then there was Salomon Brothers in there, there were a bunch of smaller ones, Travelers ultimately, then ended up doing the merger with Citigroup, or Citi Corp at the time, in 1998. And that created, ultimately the bringing together all of these asset management divisions that became ultimately Citigroup asset management that I ended up working for.

Jack Sharry: Also, hence the pile of papers. Everybody had a different system, right? That didn’t, didn’t talk to the other systems, right?

Roger Paradiso: It was really interesting, because there wasn’t a focus on the asset management division. It was really different teams of people, and money managers, that all sat in, basically, on the same couple of floors, but in different corners. No one liked each other, because it was their view, their style.

Jack Sharry: Sure, they were better.

Roger Paradiso: No doubt. And, and we had different contracts. Each group had their own contract, we had different marketing material. And so we were all ultimately going to the same advisor, the Smith Barney advisor, but all of these different groups would come with their own contract. And, and the advisors were saying this doesn’t make sense. I don’t know who’s coming into my office, and what styles they have. And so there, there was a lot of dysfunction that happened in that which created an opportunity, that really was, and so that’s when we started to think about how can we do something that was different. And with that, joined, you know, the first thing that we came up with was, was working with the large cap growth manager, which was great, and you know, had good solid names in it, but also was working with a small and mid cap manager, who had you know, 15 high flying names, which was phenomenal portfolio over the long term was some of the best performance numbers out there. But the short term was just huge volatility. And a lot of advisors and clients because it was an SMA, and because they can see the individual names, not all of them were going to work. And so it was just really hard cosmetically for clients to understand and to stomach that. And so the idea was why don’t we bring these two portfolios together, the stability of a larger cap growth portfolio, and the great performance, but volatility of that smaller/mid cap, brought them three together and called it an all cap growth portfolio. And that became a third SMA strategy that we started to offer by bringing simply two money managers together, the idea of an MDA or multiple discipline account, for the first time kind of joining together.

Jack Sharry: If you would, add the part here about how money started pouring in with these, these ideas. In other words, the fuel behind this, this assets really started to crescendo, right?

Roger Paradiso: No doubt. I think you know, is that evolved, because now we have all of these different investment teams, although not talking to each other, but different investment styles that were out there. And now we had this kind of was creating the centralized area of now bringing together these money managers, and now being able to, through technology start to run them as new portfolios. That’s where we said, we can be actually, this could be our advantage, our biggest disadvantage can turn into our biggest advantage. And we started to create this idea of one marketing material that talked about all of the managers that we had, one contract that could bring it together. And now I was able to start to work with each of these teams, which was really difficult because I was coming from one of the teams, and I was looked at as an outsider. I had to convince these teams to say, why don’t you deliver your portfolio to me. And instead of you having to do that within your own group, I’ll actually be able to implement that for you, and bring it together with some of the other money managers. And we can actually create something that’s more powerful than any one single manager here could do. And a few of them did, a lot of them didn’t. But a few of them did give me their portfolio and ultimately met with a team out in Seattle, a financial advisor team out in Seattle, that they had a local money manager that was closing down. And they had said, Roger, if you can create these types of portfolios for us with these managers that you have, we’ll move our entire book of business over to you and so I was able to get those managers, bring them together into a single account now, and which was different than kind of the way it was traditionally done, and be able to manage that for them effectively, and that advisor team ended up moving their entire book of business over to us. And that started to catch on, because people were starting to realize that there’s something unique here. And I think that you can think about creativity and evolutions and inventions. This was nothing new, it was just simply taking a age old process and making it simpler, because when you think about this now coming together, you had a traditional version, the consulting version, where you would go out and hire third party money managers, you would bring those third party money managers and say, an advisor was now responsible for choosing, okay, what’s going to be the allocation for my client, and then now I have to choose the money managers to do that. And then I have to set up separate accounts for each one of those money managers. So now I have three or four different accounts with three different money managers in it. Great concept, right? Makes total sense, in terms of doing, but over time, it started to break down a bit. Because now all of a sudden, it was the responsibility of the advisor to determine if the client needed money, or if they were going to add money, where am I going to move that money, they had to tell their assistant physically to move the money from one account to another account. And it was just a tremendous amount of work, which names with the money managers by it wasn’t thoughtfully done, it was just done, you know, across the entire portfolio of it. And so there was this, this complexity. Conceptually, it was exactly right, doing the right things. But from an operational and implementation standard, it just was very difficult. And so the idea of now having all of these money managers in one place, delivering now a model into a centralized place, we started to be able to make it happen in a single account, we then had to build the technology to break out the investment styles so that you can see them individually, but in a single account. Now we could think about the values of now we can look at overlap analysis of the different companies in the different portfolios. We can now work with the managers, and which names would they like to add to or take out in case they wanted to raise money. And so we started to be able to now add value into integrating good investment intelligence into the separately managed account on behalf of the advisor and the client to help make better decisions. And we were ultimately able to show we were actually creating alpha, we were able to show, you know, if you hired each of these managers individually, and you rebalanced them just say every quarter, what would have happened, or if you never rebalanced them, or if you did it our way, by us now picking and choosing to do this. And we were able to show additional performance by adding the intelligence into the decision making and creating a simpler process. And so it started to catch on. And because we had the money managers in house, they became rockstars. Because they were out in the, to the advisors talking about it and if there was a market downturn, they would be the first one on the all calls that people could listen to. We’d travel around the country, we would bring them out with us to talk about it. We didn’t… let’s talk about the simplified process, ease of use, and the additional performance, and all of a sudden, it just started to catch on like wildfire. It was the funnest time of my career. I mean, we had people working all night, like we had operations, we had technology, we had portfolio managers, we were all in it together. And people working all night long, opening up accounts manually, literally all night long. So that when we came in in the morning, we were able to, you know, invest the next batch of accounts that were coming in.

Jack Sharry: So for our audience who I’m sure you’re catching on to what Roger is talking about, basically, the creativity and the ideas that he’s talking about were well ahead of the operational wherewithal to pull it off.

Roger Paradiso: For sure.

Jack Sharry: Just, this is a good idea. Let’s go do it. And then people be sold a lot of and then we had to figure out how to reconcile accounts and get them on statements and make sure that they were accurate or close enough. Talk a little bit, Roger, if you would, about how you went from SMA, to MDA, to unified managed account. There was an evolution there, you’ve described a bit of it, but how did that, what’s the rough timeframe? And, and also, I’m kind of curious if you recall any of the numbers because my recollection is the money just started flowing in around all this kind of stuff.

Roger Paradiso: Yeah, I remember when we talked about the benefits of the MDA, I think, in 2005, we ended up, that’s when things started to change because we were kind of in this environment where we were on the same team with the financial advisors in the same firm, even though separate from consulting group, there was you know, in a way almost competitive. There was the consulting group, third party money manager way and then there was proprietary MDA and single style way of doing it that way. And in 2005, Citi ended up selling the asset management business, which was Citigroup Asset Management to Legg Mason. If you remember, they did, they did an exchange. This was a time in 2005, when the industry and the regulators were saying there was a conflict of interest to have an asset management company embedded in to where you had advisors, because they were selling proprietary money management. And this was a wave at the time. And so Citi ended up selling the asset management business to Legg Mason and in turn, got the advisors from Legg Mason to join their firm, and there was a swap of it. And so it was interesting. So we were, I was part of that sale, it was another one of those times that I got traded. And so it was interesting, but we were now at arm’s length, because we were a different firm than the advisors that we worked with over all the years. We had built up phenomenal relationships, I still talk to many of the advisors from those days. And so when we got to Legg, we ended up saying it was a better idea for us to spin ourselves out as our own company instead of being embedded into any one of the asset management arms, we were our standalone, a Legg Mason Private Portfolio Group was our brand. And we were 100% owned, but we were our own company at that time, and acting on our own so that we could work with other money managers as well and be a neutral party. And this is where we started to really become a profitable business because we were charging, this is like, this is the creation almost of model delivery, in terms of now people delivering models to us, us now implementing and executing. And because we were a separate company actually started to charge a fee for that work that we were doing. And so at the time, I think when we were sold, we were somewhere around close to $100 million, which in today’s standards, you know, not that big, but back then was a big number. And also becoming an extremely profitable business, because of the fees that we were able to charge. And this was, this was coming from the money managers to us to be able to manage that. And so we spun out, became our own company, was a standalone and quickly, very interestingly, because we had such a great reputation at Smith Barney, Citi came back in and asked to repurchase the Legg Mason Private Portfolio Group, so that they could bring it back to Smith Barney, and now be able to offer it to their advisors. And so we did that, which was fun, you know, really interesting time for me, because now I was taking my kind of energies and understandings from portfolio management and technology to now being able to think about how do you build a company, how do you structure a company, and then how do you sell a company. And I learned a lot during that process. And so in 2008, we were sold back to technically Citi, but was there for to be included in Smith Barney in their consulting group. So kind of full circle here. And that was literally the last deal in 2008 that Citi did before everything started to blow up at that time. And then in 2009, Morgan Stanley came in and purchased Smith Barney. So within months of being acquired, I was now part of Morgan Stanley, because they had just acquired Smith Barney, which was, you know, another interesting twist in the career.

Jack Sharry: So talk a little bit about, if you would, you get to Morgan Stanley. I guess they still call it Morgan Stanley Consulting Group, is that what they…?

Roger Paradiso: I don’t even know anymore. It’s Morgan Stanley, I guess.

Jack Sharry: So it’s their advisory business, which I think is the largest still, right.

Roger Paradiso: Yeah.

Jack Sharry: Probably was then, I should check, but pretty sure it still is. So talk about the, how UMAs came about, I’m assuming they came about there. And then also, I want to make sure we get to talk about what you’re doing now. Because you’re, you haven’t stopped doing what you do. So I want to talk about that. So talk a little bit about UMAs and then, with what you’re doing now. Still with the same company as you were, Legg Mason was purchased by Franklin Templeton. But anyway, we’ll get to that.

Roger Paradiso: Yeah. So, so as we became part of Morgan Stanley, and the consulting group, because it had been such a game changer in the industry from Smith Barney really became the focus in terms of the way that, that Morgan Stanley was going to build out their advisory business and, and now part of that was this, this overlay function that we had built and created and brought back into the firm. And so they asked me there to focus on that integration of the UMA business. And so this was moving from now only proprietary, which I would consider to be what MDA is, to the next evolution of: And what year was that?

Roger Paradiso: In 2009, is when Morgan purchased Smith Barney. And so this was basically right after that, 2010 and onward. And so this is where we started to really be able to charge third party money managers, it was a new way for a large institution to be able to get better economics, and also better service, because now you could do overlay of third party money managers, but it was, it was not easy. Just getting firms to agree to deliver their models to you of which ultimately you had control over. It was not an easy feat to get done. But we ended up, obviously, able to do it. And the industry has now become commonplace with it, because of the true benefits that when you do have it all into one house, you can make much better decisions and be much more fluid to be able to actively manage the accounts. And so building out the UMA at Morgan Stanley also took on the discretionary businesses there. And this was a great time too because it was now we had the ability to work with our research department and that dotted line into us in terms of now doing research on managers, we were able to work with the top of the house in terms of asset allocation advice, and now start to create asset allocation models for the advisory business, had a team that would be the manager selector and do the analysis on what managers to hire. And then you had the PPG group, which was the implementation arm of all of this. And so you could really create a really complex solution from asset allocation manager, selection manager research, into actual portfolios and then effectively manage them. And that was running the discretionary business there. So had a great time helping build that out and taking that to the next level. And so that’s where I think where UMA came to be. And quickly after, not… quickly, spent years there, in 2016 left there to rejoin Legg Mason, so kind of again, full circle, rejoining Legg Mason, and they asked me to head up a group there that thought about what’s the future of asset management distribution? What does that look like? How could we use technology to help drive that? And so to kind of position there is what we called head of alternative distribution, and started to, using the capital at the firm, make investments in FinTech companies around the globe, and start to use that in ways of pushing forward FinTech and how it can be incorporated into bigger companies. And as we know, then, in 2020, Franklin Templeton came in and bought out Legg Mason and Jenny Johnson, as the CEO of Franklin Templeton had a huge interest in technologies and was already you know, going down a road of how does she think about this? And so I’ve been able to help support the evolution of the way Franklin Templeton now is thinking about using technologies, through acquisitions, through deals, through partnerships, or through building ways that we can continue to progress with the asset management and… looks like in the future. Sure.

Jack Sharry: So I think you may be aware of this, Roger, I know a bunch of folks are at Franklin Templeton, but I wrote an article last December, Who Will Be the Future Amazon of Financial Advice and I identified four firms that I thought would fit that bill. One was Morgan Stanley. Another was Edward Jones. Another was Empower. And of course, the other was Franklin Templeton. And a lot, just to focus on Franklin Templeton, what I’ve been so impressed with Jenny and the team at Franklin Templeton, you guys have, are just super smart in terms of what you’re acquiring in terms of technological capabilities, product capabilities. And I know this stuff is not easy. But you’re also putting it together in terms of how that all can be part of a value proposition that really is, in my view among asset managers is second to none. That all said, why don’t you talk about what you’re doing now, because I think what you’re working on right now is a perfect example of super smart strategy meets experienced and smart execution. So why don’t you talk about O’Shaughnessy, and Canvas, and some of the other stuff you’re doing?

Roger Paradiso: Yeah, sure. I think, so after the Franklin acquisition of Legg, Franklin had quickly became one of the largest, separately managed account managers in the industry through that acquisition, and their challenge and the talents they put out to us really was, it’s great that were one of the largest, and in typical Jenny fashion it was, but that’s not good enough. How do we think about what it’s going to be? How do we position ourselves as the future of where this industry is going and help push that so that we’re not just a player, but we are ultimately helping lead that industry. And so that was the challenge that was put out to us. Much of that I think was built around the concept of which people are talking a lot more about out now, personalization, customization, and ultimately curation of information was the driving force. And so we weren’t thinking about things in terms of a product or a solution, it was much more based around, what does this industry start to look like? And how can we make sure that we are positioning ourselves to be in the best position to help drive that going forward? And so, as part of that, we made a purchase of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management in January of 2022, of which now I become the, became the executive chairman and helping run that business. And to me, this is kind of where the new frontier is going. It’s about, I think, kind of cool to think about the evolution of the UMA and the MDA, and what we did there. And I think that was a great improvement in terms of where we were. I think where we are today is very different from, from there, you know, UMA is extremely relevant in the industry. But that was solving problems for the improvements on what we talked about as the consulting way of hiring four different managers and four different accounts and creating an efficiency. We solved that, right. The industry solved that now. And we’ve moved on. But the clients aren’t really interested in that, in my eyes. They’re interested in kind of like the way that they’re doing everything else in their life. This is about me as the customer, and what are you doing for me? And so that idea of personalization, and customization, and O’Shaughnessy does that. It allows an advisor to build a portfolio, whether it’s on their own asset allocations or the firm’s allocations or around individual clients’ allocations, and then start to personalize and customize that to that individual client around restriction management, whether it’s they work for a company, they don’t want to own it, because they have a big position, to the SMG types of requirements around their beliefs that are there, but they’re now choosing that at a much more granular level. And you can actually now start to show performance and attribution, based on those decisions. Taxes, becoming a much bigger part of the equation, how do you customize the taxes that are around this? And then starting to talk about, well, how do you transition from legacy accounts into this? And the whole idea of, of bringing it all together. And so to me, we’re shifting from a period of hiring managers and bringing them to clients, and telling them how those managers are doing and updating them on that. I think clients are losing interest in that. That’s not where, what’s exciting them. They want to hear well, what, what did you build for me, and that I became part of those decisions. And now show me an attribution report on each one of those decisions. And let’s talk about how they did. And so I think that’s the direction we’re heading when it comes to giving the tools. And Canvas can do this, give the tools in the hands of the advisors, and allow them to be able to make the decisions on behalf of their client to make them closer with their client and delivering ultimately what the client wants, and then being able to report back to that. And so it’s got the ability to include both passive and active management styles. So it’s not just direct indexing, it’s what we call custom indexing, of combining both active and passive, and then building in these personalizations, and then ultimately creating an index for that client based off of what’s important to them, which could be very different from someone else in their family, or another client. This is where, you know, what you’re doing, Jack, comes into play, because now all of a sudden, asset location becomes much more important in these types of scenarios to be able to help solve the problems, both taxable and tax deferred money that clients have as well as family money.

Jack Sharry: Sure. You and I talked a bit about this, but maybe this gets us to where you see the world going, because everything you’ve described is, I hate the expression but in your case, it’s actually true, it’s hyper personalized for that individual, to have a custom index is a whole new concept that I’ve only recently started hearing about. So there’s that. But then investors have different account types, different tax treatments, different tax issues. So it seems, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you think along the same lines, that tax is becoming increasingly important across the full household portfolio to improve outcome in terms of accumulation, asset… namely, asset location and income generation. So talk a little bit about where you see the world going. It’s going to be at least in my view, it’s going to be taking place over the coming 2, 3, 5 years. This is kind of where the world’s headed, but please fill us in on your, your point of view.

Roger Paradiso: Yeah, no, I think it’s all about solutions, right? It’s all about how do you create solutions and then, like it’s been done in the past, simplifying that process again, these are things that advisors have been working on with their clients in different ways, but it’s clunky. They got to go to different places to find different information to get different ways of doing it. And it’s not simplified. I almost think about where we’re headed here is, is a way to help interpret that and create solutions that become not only independent, but become blended together into a single solution so that it makes sense to the client. And so whether that’s different registrations that are going on within a household, making the best decisions across the entire household, and that’s where you guys come into play in so much of this, but also different types of solutions. We recently purchased an options trading team to become part of Franklin Templeton, because I think options as a risk reducer is going to become a larger participant in solving problems for certain clients. And then how do you figure out, how do you integrate that into that single solution for the advisor and client, thinking about things like, you know, we made a small investment in a, in a crypto company because to me, it was interesting because clients were going on and opening up, existing clients within the advisors were going up and opening up a new account with a new custodian, a crypto custodian, and giving all their information, and it’s the first time clients maybe have ever done that to an advisor. And so we made a small investment in a crypto TAMP provider, of which we’re able to launch and load up some of our crypto portfolios from Franklin Templeton onto that platform as a way of helping advisors. So to me, it’s taking the most difficult problems that advisors are facing, and helping them simplify and solve those problems to put them in their best position. And I think that’s the way we’re just trying to continue to go about these types of solutions.

Jack Sharry: Well, Roger, I’ve been, we’ve known each other, dare I say for 30 or more years, no surprise that you’re, you’re crushing it again, with all the cool new stuff. And not only that, but money tends to follow you wherever you go, the money starts to pour in and you’re, you’re having great success with O’Shaughnessy and, and with Canvas, and congratulations on that. But as we look to, to, we’ve gone a little bit over but I figure it was worth the going a little bit over to, we had a lot of ground to cover, you had a lot of ground to cover. So, thank you for this wonderful conversation. As we look to wrap up, what are three key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience… lessons learned over 30 plus years of innovation?

Roger Paradiso: Oh, change is always gonna happen. That’s what I’ve learned. And just, if you don’t flow with it, and you know, if you make the most out of every kind of change or conflict that comes up, you’re going to be best suited, don’t resist it, it’s going to happen. Go with the flow. And in each of those, there’s, there’s actually opportunities that I’ve learned. And if you can capitalize on those opportunities, you’re going to help propel your, your career. And so to me, it’s about lead… you lead with passion. Passion is what it’s all about. I mean, you don’t do things, you don’t make decisions, you don’t go into jobs, because of money or prestige or title, you’re going because you have a passion for what it is and ultimately that outshines everything. And so I’ve always loved to live with that. I always say people over all else. If you don’t have great, smartest people around you, I’ve seen people, managers, you know, hire people that probably maybe was good for them, but not necessarily good for the outcome. If you hire the smartest, brightest people around you, in every job function, you’re going to continue to win. And you just continue to support everyone because it’s all about the people. And then, keep it simple but complex. You know, it’s like, again, it’s simple, but the reality is underneath, it’s pretty damn complex. It’s, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s lots of you know, you can’t just do it in a garage. It takes years and lots of mistakes and lots of time and money to build. But getting the best solution, investment solution with technology is the best thing. But clients shouldn’t have to feel that. Advisors shouldn’t have to feel that. It’s happening under the hood. So I always say keep it simple, but complex.

Jack Sharry: Yep. I’m with you. So this has been great. Really have enjoyed the conversation. Now, my favorite question we do in our podcasts, what do you do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about, that people might find interesting or surprising?

Roger Paradiso: Oh, maybe… surprising. I’m an introvert at home. I am not a social pariah. You know, if people see me at work, and they think I’m talking and know lots of people. I go home, I’m a total introvert. And so I love to garden. I have my big garden and I just love gardening. I love to read, I’m constantly reading. And I do love to exercise. I do yoga all the time. And I like to play hockey in the winters. And so I’m, I’m a, I’m a homebody. Love to spend time with my family, and just diddle around.

Jack Sharry: All things that I find interesting and surprising, but very cool. Very cool. So, thanks. So, Roger, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for living up to the Legends moniker. For our audience, if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we’re doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. Roger, thanks again. It’s been a real pleasure.

Roger Paradiso: Jack, thanks so much. Enjoyed it.