Merging Vision with Scale: How SEI Is Reshaping WealthTech from the Inside Out with Perry Moutzouros and Mathew Dellorso

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. We love to shake things up on our WealthTech on Deck podcast as we pursue interesting stories across the wealthtech universe. And this week’s edition is another podcast first for us. As our listeners know, SEI recently acquired LifeYield. In fact, it was about six months ago. I love where we’ve landed. Our company is now called SEI LifeYield. And we’re finding the combination is great for our clients, our prospective clients, our business, for SEI, and for the marketplace. More on that in a little bit. Along the way, I’ve been meeting some very talented folks across the 5,000 or so associates at SEI. Today we’re going to focus on a couple of my new colleagues who joined SEI like I did through acquisition. I’ll let them tell their story about how and why they joined SEI and what their experience has been. I’ll weigh in as well. In both cases, and much like LifeYield, these companies were small, nimble, ahead of the curve, and not big enough to make as much of a difference as any of us wanted to. So please join me in welcoming Perry Moutzouros, who is the technical co-founder of Oranj, and Mat Dellorso, founder of Altigo, to our WealthTech on Deck podcast. We’ll hear their origin stories, what they’ve built, where they were able to get to on their own, where they find themselves now, and where they see things headed. So Perry and Mat, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.

Mat Dellorso: Thanks having us, Jack.

Perry Moutzouros: Thank you, Jack.

Jack Sharry: So Perry, among the three of our companies, you were the first up. Please tell us about Oranj. Please tell us about your business before SEI and now, and how did you get started? What did you do? What do you do now? Who for? All that. So fill us in.

Perry Moutzouros: Sure.  So again, thank you for having us, Jack. The origin story for Oranj is actually a pretty interesting one. My co-founder, David Lyon, was a pretty successful RIA. We’re looking at, it’s probably 2014, 2015. And like most business owners, he felt at the time the software that was available to independent RIAs was lacking. It was missing a lot of some of the bells and whistles we had seen growing in the retail space. And I was lucky enough to join him right when we were launching the MVP. He had approached me years before with an idea and like in typical startup fashion, we kind of gripped it and ripped it. I was, previously at Oranj, I was actually spending a lot of time running the EMS development group for, a software group out in Boston. And I felt it was a good time for us to kind of launch the product. And our goal was to be an all in one. I think it’s a little bit more accurate to say most in one because we did almost everything. We left out financial planning at the time and we were just a cloud-based solution for independent RIAs. We felt that our platform was a lot more intuitive to use than what was currently available. We felt that advisors needed a way to communicate and collaborate a lot better with households. And we started off very simply delivering an advisor portal that was fully featured. And then it grew into an investor portal that was really intuitive to use for end users. The collaboration between those two pieces of software was wonderful. It was actually tightly integrated, allowing advisors to actually have full purview over held away as well as held assets. The platform was multi broker, multi custody. And then eventually we grew up and started adding a lot of advanced features like trading and rebalancing. And then most famously, we had a model marketplace at the time, which I know was really popular to launch. And we backed that model marketplace with a small little asset management tool that allowed them to do some analytics across the products that they were offering. So we felt that we had a really nice, powerful suite and it was really popular at the time. And like you said, you end up running into the typical problems running a business. And we were thankful that there was a lot of interest in investing in Oranj and eventually acquiring it. And that’s how we ended up meeting with SEI and landing with them.

Jack Sharry: Great, we’ll get into what you’re doing at SEI in a little bit, but I know you’ve made a big difference in terms of the user experience, both at the client level and at the advisor level. We’ll get into some more detail there. So Mat, tell us about Altigo. It’s an alternative investment shop. You’re the next firm to join SEI. How’d you get started? Tell us about your evolution and where you find yourselves today.

Mat Dellorso: Yeah, so for me, my entrepreneurial journey really started in college. I had a co-founder whose father, during the Great Recession in 2008, wanted to diversify his own portfolio. So stocks and bonds were being challenged at the time, and he had a warehouse financial advisor that couldn’t really offer him many alternatives. So he turned to his son at the University of Richmond with me to kind of act as outsource analysts to find alternative investment opportunities out there. So we sourced, you know… real estate, private credit, and some venture investments for him and other high net worth individuals. And they did pretty well coming out of the Great Recession. We wanted to do that discovery and that transaction of actually purchasing alternative investment, all digitally, all online, as those folks were remote. We actually pitched this idea in our student business plan competition and our teachers told us, you know, we’re probably intermediating securities rules and regulations and it never work. So we took that as a challenge and actually founded a broker dealer in 2009. And that broker dealer was entirely focused on online private placements and just alternative investments. We quickly realized after doing hundreds of millions of transactions with a bunch of different groups that the process of doing an alternative investment, whether it was discovery, diligence, or actually purchasing it, was incredibly manual and inefficient. It was really kind of the last piece of financial services or investment products that was still done check and app at the time. So we launched technology that essentially acted as an investment button so that anybody, you know, walking off the street could purchase an alternative investment online. About 2017, 2018, we brought on our own advisors to our own broker dealer. We’re doing much of this transactions through financial intermediaries. And we realized we needed to augment the technology to not be directly retail focused, but to be used by financial advisors. So we launched Altigo inside of this larger broker dealer company called WealthForge. Altigo was an acronym. It stood for Alternative Investments in Good Order. It meant to act as a marketplace and a subscription automation platform for advisors, subscribing their client to a broad range of alternative investments, whether it be real estate, private equity, private credit, even some esoteric things like energy and litigation finance. We grew the technology over the years, but really COVID in 2020 with the need for remote work and the need for e-signature really made the platform take off. We grew to over 250 wealth managers using the technology. So, RIA and broker dealer firms, including our own, some small private banks. And then also we grew to about 300 different fund managers using the technology. So, all in, we had completed about $5 billion of alts transactions. We reduced errors, we reduced cycle time. It provided a great user experience to the market. And SEI kind of approached us originally for business development, SEI being a very large private credit fund administrator, having a very large TAMP, saw the growth of alternative investments, wanted a technology platform to unite or bridge their clients to work with each other. And so our technology was a great fit to kind of start the marketplace and provide that transaction processing for groups to do business more easily in alternative investments.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. It’s fun to hear the story. I’ve been hearing the pieces, but it’s starting to seam together, if you will. And so I’ll weigh in as well as the third company that’s been acquired by SEI over the past few years. As many of you know, LifeYield is a company that focuses on coordinating multiple accounts in a tax-efficient way. We started 16 years ago. We were the first company in fact to develop the ability to manage multiple accounts across a household portfolio in a tax-efficient way while considering risk. We don’t do the risk piece, but we work with those that do, whether that’s a firm or an asset manager or what have you. The typical client we see owns multiple accounts and holdings across multiple firms and advisors. And the asset location is for most, nonexistent. They’re just wherever it is, is where it is. fact, often their asset allocation is nonexistent because it’s all over the place. It’s where they bought whatever they bought, whenever they bought it, but little rhyme or reason to it. As you pull all this together, this is now often referred to as a Unified Managed Household or UMH. We’ll talk some more about that in a little bit. So as I’m coming to understand more about SEI, where it’s been and where it’s going, it looks to me that we’re all part of what I consider to be a pretty thoughtful, ahead of the curve strategy. So Perry, you’ve been here the longest among the three of us. In fact, I think you had a hand in our being integrated into SEI and may continue to do so, fill us in on that. You’re part of the effort to streamline the tech that is used by financial advisors, their firms, and investors who tap into SEI. So talk about the role you and your team play as part of the long-term strategy of SEI.

Perry Moutzouros: Sure. Thanks, Jack. So after acquisition, what ended up happening for us is we started to expand the role of the front office within SEI. SEI was an established, well-respected custodian and fund administrator. And one of the things that they felt that they needed to grow was the technology around the front office. And that’s why Oranj was a good acquisition for them. So today we’re known as the SEI Connect platform and I’m currently a managing director reporting into the office of the CTO. I’m responsible for pretty much the entire front office here at SEI. And yes, I am very familiar with both of your firms because I also participate with the M&A team doing a lot of the discovery and due diligence for any of the technology investments the firm is doing. So I was happy to meet both you and Mat in the early days as SEI continued its goal of acquiring really important pieces to that overall strategy. Again, today it’s a wonderful software engineering group that is starting to expand across a lot of the divisions inside of SEI. And our goal is to provide really intuitive, easy to use software within the front office. There’s a number of software platforms that have claimed to do this. And we felt, and one of the main reasons why we joined SEI was, at the time, we needed to have a really strong custodian that could help us go up market and also expand further into some of the workflows that larger firms were providing to their customers. And as a smaller startup, we were wonderful, super innovative, but to be able to expand at the rate that we needed to, we needed to join an organization that had the reputation for work supporting those larger institutions and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing the past couple of years.

Jack Sharry: Right. It’s interesting to hear these stories. They so resonate with our experience. We’ll talk some more about that a little bit. Mat, you’re up next here. So you’re not part of SEI Access… you are SEI Access, you and the team. That’s the alternative investment platform that was recently put out by SEI. In fact, SEI Access stands on the shoulders of Altigo, your original company, as well as some other pre-existing administrative and operational support for alternatives that goes way back. So, fill us in on the evolution of where you find yourselves today, how you connect into SEI, and in fact, there’s a little bit coming, I think, down the road between what you do and what we do, but more on that later. But talk a little bit about where you are, where you’re going.

Mat Dellorso: Yeah, so we, after acquisition of Altigo by SEI, we rebranded the platform to SEI Access. We felt like Altigo is a really good acronym that stands for Alternative Investments in Good Order, which really focused on the transaction processing element, the actual purchase of the alternative investment. But Access was broader because the mission at SEI is really making alts more ubiquitous. We believe that alts in client portfolios can create good outcomes, they can create differentiation and be a good source of business for advisors, keep their best clients, keep them sticky. So Access was meant to, we want to provide access to alternative investments for the wealth management community. And we want to provide access to wealth managers, to the fund management companies out there. So we’ve rebranded the company as SEI Access or the division as SEI Access. And one of the first things we did was we integrated into the front office. We integrated into the Oranj and Connect technology, the SEI advisor front office. That was to give the financial advisors that are our clients access to the alternative investment products on our shelf and on our menu, all within single sign on, all kind of right at their fingertips. The world of alternative investments is very opaque and it’s hard to find certain products, whether they produce yield or help with growth or provide tax advantage, we create a nice marketplace that helps advisors find what they’re looking for to help clients, whether it’s for a specific client need or whether it’s for kind an allocation across their book to enhance their portfolios. So we’ve integrated into the front office. The other thing we’ve done is we’ve really launched this marketplace to help fund managers with distribution. So with Altigo, we were really focused on connecting known parties to do the transaction online. Now we’re interested in also helping folks expand their networks and distribution. SEI works with about 200 broker dealers, over 100 banks, and almost 7-8,000 advisors, individual RIAs. And so we’re connecting those advisors to institutional fund managers that have come down and offered retail alternative investment offerings to high net worth clients. So we’ve recently launched the Marketplace. I’m in charge of business development and growing that Marketplace. And we’re working to integrate the Access platform, not just into the advisor front end, but also into the broker dealer system and the banking system and on the backend as well.

Jack Sharry: So to complete the triad of what Perry and team are doing and what Mat and his team are doing, all of our firms are now being fully integrated into SEI. Perry and his team are all about streamlining the user experience and making it far more simple and intuitive, frankly. Mat and the SEI Access team are tying together the backbone of SEI, namely the technology and operations and connecting that to the servicing and distribution of alternatives, as you just heard. And then there are those of us at SEI LifeYield. We are in the process of being fully integrated in the SEI ecosystem with our tax smart multi-account optimization capabilities. SEI LifeYield will be available to the 10,000 or so independent advisors and RIAs who work with SEI. Our capabilities will be available to the SEI banking channel. And we’re continuing to expand our enterprise channel where we serve some of the largest wealth, asset management, and insurance companies with our multi-account retirement income capabilities. So Perry and Mat, that’s how we all tie together. Kind of interesting as I’ve gotten to know the story better. And Mat and I were just at a conference the other day talking about all this and I think at least my experience chatting with people during the breaks they’re like, wow you guys are really up to some really interesting things, and that is connecting that back office servicing operational technological wherewithal that they’ve built over the past 57 years and really making it available in the various channels where they can, whether it’s alternatives, whether it’s investment management, whether whatever it might be to really connect the dots and pulling it all together to make for a better experience so Perry and Mat. That’s the view from each of us. It’s two questions. What are you guys working on now and excited about? Where do see things headed? Perry, why don’t you kick it off?

Perry Moutzouros: So what we’re working on now, the stuff that I can talk about, kind of Mat already alluded to it. We have a wonderful marketplace that is continuing to grow. Our first step was to make sure that we provided that access and it’s named aptly from the original core Altigo platform. And you’re going to see us continue to expand that for all the financial products that are currently being offered by SEI across all the business units. So that’s the first thing I would say that we’re most excited about. The second thing is the continuation of bringing the three of our platforms together and helping SEI kind of leapfrog some of the other platforms that are still a little bit disjointed. When we all started, I don’t think the industry has really moved fast enough in this direction, but a unified front office that makes it a lot easier to your point, Jack, for people to engage and work with SEI is probably one of the biggest goals that we have. So I’d say those two things are the two most important things that we’re focused on, I’d say, in the coming months.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, the other thing I don’t want to step over, I want to underscore it because I think it’s, as I hear and I’m no techie that what you’ve done a really good job with and for SEI is to really simplify things, to take the complex and make it pretty simple.

Perry Moutzouros: Yeah, we, so it’s common, right? You run into an organization like SEI has been, they’ve been wildly successful over the years. And that growth sometimes takes priority over looking inward and simplifying a lot of the workflows that an advisor might need. And the business starts to grow at a rate that you might not be able to keep up with. It happens even to large organizations like SEI. I think a lot of the startup founders that have joined the organization have solved those problems in our respective universes. And we’re bringing a lot of that knowledge back in-house to SEI and providing that knowledge when it comes to more modern technology solutions, things that are what we call a little bit more sustainable, building platforms that are a little bit more intuitive, not only for the end users, but also a little bit more intuitive for SEI to be able to expand as we diversify the offering. And so we have taken a lot of the middle office processes and added a ton more automation. There’s some new thinking that we’ve learned from both LifeYield and from Altigo that fit very nicely into the unified front office. And that’s ultimately where the organization has us all working together. I think to be really successful, we’re going to need all three of the teams to continue to work and collaborate when it comes to that delivery. And it’s going to benefit all of our banking clients as well as our advisors.

Jack Sharry: Terrific. Mat?

Mat Dellorso: Yeah, so I can share two things that we’re working on now and where I think we’re headed in the next six to 12 months. So two of the things we’re working on now is with the acquisition of Altigo by SEI and the launch of our marketplace, we’re still working on, I’d call it, true straight through processing of alternative investment subscriptions. So there’s at least five parties really in any alternative investment transaction. There’s the advisor to the client. That’s two. There’s the platform, which might be a broker dealer firm. It might be our technology. And then there’s the custodian, the fund manager, and the fund admin. And all those parties are different. They use different tech stacks. And there’s many of them across the marketplace. So we’re doing those integrations into front office systems like ours at SEI, into custodians like ours at SEI, but also Schwab and Fidelity, into fund manager systems and advisory systems, and then into the fund admin, obviously, which SEI is also one. So if you can truly connect all of those parties through technology and by sending data, then you can have in good order transactions. They can happen in minutes or hours. And you can update systems in near real time. And that’s really important for growing alternative investments, marking them to market, managing them after the transaction, but also getting clients into the funds. So we’re perfecting the straight-through processing across the marketplace. Two is we’re growing the quality and the scale of managers and wealth managers on our platform. So there’s been a great recent trend of institutional managers that are offering retail alternative investments. This trend has probably got broadly proliferated with Blackstone and BREIT. We’ve also got great clients like Cantor Fitzgerald, who’s been offering retail alternatives for a while. And folks like BlackRock and KKR and Hamilton Lane are now offering retail alternative investments through the wealth management channel, through our platform and our technology. And that’s exciting for clients and wealth managers because now they can access these typically larger institutional kind of reserved or only type of funds now for high net worth clients that they serve. So we’re growing the connectivity and we’re growing the quality of participants on our marketplace. Where I think things are going, Jack, over the next six to 12 months, and this kind of brings all of us back into play again too, there’s been growth in terms of alternative investments and how do private markets sit next to or complement public market portfolios. And where we’re excited to go is over the next six to 12 months, really build public and private portfolios that include alternative investments in financial models and model marketplaces. So I think you’ll see the proliferation of alternative investments in these model marketplaces over the next six to 12 months. And I’m excited for SEI to be a leader in that.

Jack Sharry: One of the things that’s fascinating is we all get to know one another. And I met these gentlemen less than, well, not even six months ago. So that’s how quickly things have evolved in terms of what’s happening. Because as I was reaching out to some of our clients, Morgan Stanley happens to be one of those clients. And the person I was speaking with at their investment management unit, the head of sales, told me that SEI works with some 81,000 Morgan Stanley client accounts. And I said, what? I had no idea. And that’s where I first heard it was actually from a client. And of course, Morgan Stanley is our largest client. I’m assuming that it’s SEI… on the alts front, one of their largest clients. But there’s lots of opportunity that can ensue from that kind of overlap in terms of what we do. And as Mat just described, putting alts in portfolios right now, there’s a lot of that going on around UMAs, Unified Managed Accounts. Frankly, we know of no others that can do it at a household level and that’s, stay tuned for that. That’s in the offing down the road. It’s not happening immediately, but something we clearly see as a part of our future. And then more broadly with what LifeYield is doing, SEI LifeYield is doing is that we’re developing as we speak, and it’ll be out next year, is an ability to provide a UMH, Unified Managed Household as a service. This stuff is complicated as you no doubt can figure out, anyone who’s spent any time on a UMA knows it’s complex. Now make that at a household level so it’s not just sleeves but accounts and different tax treatments and all that goes with that. And frankly, most firms, if not all firms, have a challenge of how to operate horizontally. So how do you, most firms are really set up to operate vertically with P&Ls and all that sort of stuff. There’s a cooperation and collaboration is something that our industry has not been very good at. It’s structurally not been set up to be successful there. But we’re very much working toward how do we make the ability to manage multiple accounts in a household very personalized for an individual investor or family so they can not only manage them from an asset allocation and risk standpoint, but also from a tax standpoint, and particularly as you bring in alts to the equation, there are certain ways that that can be managed to enhance the tax outcomes from incorporating that into a portfolio, not to mention the alpha capabilities and all the rest. So lots of interesting stuff happening in our world. We’re working on it. You’ll be hearing more over time, but really interesting stuff happening as our firms and many more already at SEI. And who knows, maybe there’s more coming. But the idea is that we’re really looking to manage at a household level, really provide great value for the client, the advisor, and the firms we work with. So gentlemen, one last question. Anything that we’ve missed, anything you want to make sure our audience knows about in terms of what we’re doing, either together or separately, but fill us in anything that our audience might benefit from hearing about.

Mat Dellorso: I’d say if I had a magic wand to help with alt proliferation, it would really be around advisor education. When I started in the business in 2009, like I said, alts were very opaque and honestly a little bit of a dirty word. There was fraud, there wasn’t the ability to do due diligence online. Things have improved drastically in 15 years. Fee incentives, alignment, performance, transparency has greatly improved in the alts industry. Yet most advisors still don’t participate in alts. In alts, it’s really only about half of advisors, so 50%, participate in alts. And that’s really misleading too, because there’s lots of advisors who do alts well. And then there’s some advisors who maybe only do a few alts. So 50% is really the average. But most advisors don’t do alts in a systematic, programmatic way. It’s really based on a client request or client demand. And it’s tough for advisors to keep up with the latest trends around AI and the world of alternative investments is so big and broad that it’s hard to be an expert in everything. So taking the first step to learn about real estate and private equity and private credit and hedge funds and structured products and energy can be daunting, but it can also be rewarding and worthwhile. So we’re trying to do more around advisor education around alternative investments. And there’s many great organizations out there. So if you can get educated about alternative investments, if you are an advisor, I think it can help make your business and your book more resilient and provide great outcomes for your clients.

Jack Sharry: Great. Perry?

Perry Moutzouros: So I’m going to dovetail with what Mat said. And I think I’m kind of, as being the technologist on the panel here, I can’t leave the pod without talking about a little bit of AI. And in our view, we’re looking at AI as the continuation of the initial mission that companies like LifeYield, Altigo, Oranj had, which is to help advisors increase their business and also to help communicate and collaborate better with their clients. We have an opinion that AI is the great bridge that solves the education problem that Mat’s talking about. We see a world where we have a little bit of a managed, automation at the control of an advisor to allow them to get better and faster about introducing these products to their clients. I think Mat breaks a wonderful point here that there is a lot of information out there and alternative investments specifically can be very daunting. You don’t have to do it alone. And we believe that the enterprise custody platform and the fund management platform that SEI has been providing for years is by far the best and most trusted source within your technology network. And we have a responsibility to expand that. And we’re looking at expanding it using a lot of the agent workflows that a lot of folks have been talking about most recently. It’s really cutting edge and bleeding edge technology, but we feel that we’re responsible to be able to bring that to market and allow advisors and banking clients access to this in a safe and reasonable way that helps them again, figure out that mission and vision when it comes to communicating, collaborating effectively and increasing their book of business.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, just to add to our commentary here, one of the things I’ve been quite impressed with as we settled into SEI, and I can’t believe it’s only been six months, but we are fully settled in, lots of work underway, a lot of work coming. All good. One of the things that I’m enjoying seeing take place, I’ve always been a big proponent of this, it’s very hard to do. In fact, I can’t point to others that have really figured this out, but how to operate at an enterprise level. It’s really an emphasis from Ryan Hicke on down, Ryan being the CEO of SEI, is how do we work across the various capabilities that SEI already has in place, that it has recently acquired, or acquired over the past few years? And how do we put it together to improve outcomes, again, for all. For the investor, the advisor, and the firm. So, lots of exciting stuff. Stay tuned. You’ll be hearing more. But as we look to call it a day for this podcast, and by the way, Perry, thank you for bringing up AI. This would not qualify as a podcast if we didn’t talk about AI. So thank you for bringing that up. But as we look to wind down for today’s discussion, my favorite conversation or discussion or question to be asked at this point is, what do you do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about that people might find to be interesting or surprising? So Mat, you want to kick it off?

Mat Dellorso: Sure, yeah, you know, I at one point I had to redo my LinkedIn profile. So I thought about this and I think for me, I’m an avid golfer and I say I’m a traveler of the tropics. So I like to go where it’s warm and I like green grass and to hit a white golf ball into a hole in that green grass. So I really enjoy golf. I’ve played golf since I was four years old and my dad put a four iron in my hand and I’ve always really enjoyed, you know, traveling to clear blue waters and the tropics. So, if I had a magic wand as well, I’d be there right now.

Jack Sharry: Great, great, thanks. Perry?

Perry Moutzouros: So I’ve got two boys that are very athletic and much to my detriment as I get older. So I spend a lot of time as a volleyball coach, believe it or not. I played volleyball when I was younger and I’ve got two boys that have been indoctrinated in the family backyard barbecue fun that we have. So I actually spend a lot of time doing training of my son and his friends and being yelled at by teenagers and then yelling back at them and running around and feeling the pain in my knees as I watch these young gentlemen start growing and becoming pretty, I mean, way more athletic than I could have ever hoped. I spent my life in front of a computer writing code, building software systems. My children have decided that we’re gonna go outdoors, we’re gonna play. And they’re dragging me along with them.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. Well, I’ll throw mine in. I’ve been a guest on my own podcast a few times as I share my perspective on various topics. So I’ve done this a few different ways. I haven’t, not so much new as I haven’t accentuated this in past commentary around this question. So I’m the proud grandfather of three kids, two girls and a boy and I was watching a video on our family thread, a text thread, watching my eight month old granddaughter starting to crawl. So that for me is, that says it all. That’s what it’s all about. So gentlemen, thanks so much. This has been a great conversation. Really have enjoyed it. Learned a bunch even, which I find frankly with every conversation around the colleagues I’m getting to meet at SEI. For our audience, if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we do here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All of our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content from many folks around the industry. Perry and Mat, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure. Really enjoyed it.

Perry Moutzouros: Thank you, Jack.