The Ten to Watch in 2024

Change is inevitable, and we think the people on this list, in different ways and to different degrees, reflect that when it comes to the business of financial advice.

Hopefully many of the names on this list are new to you. If we are right, you’ll become more familiar with them over the next few years. Each bear watching in that they are at the forefront of trends and changes that will touch every advisor in the coming years.

Beyond that, we have no guidelines in our selection process. Ours is not an age-bound list. Some of these individuals are seasoned industry veterans tilling new ground; some are barely out of school. It is not based on social media activity, self-promotion, marketing strategies or popularity. We freely admit it’s subjective, based on editorial coverage and conversations.

In no specific order, we present the Ten to Watch in 2024:

As a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Navy, Julie Cane served from the Philippines to San Diego, shuttling dignitaries and leading combat search and rescue training events. But Cane knew she couldn’t be a pilot forever and eventually accepted an honorable discharge, opting to, “fly a desk in the business world [rather] than fly a desk in the Navy.” She joined SEI , completed her MBA at UCLA and was later recruited by Wells Fargo Private Bank .

But Cane stayed in touch with friends in the Armed Forces. They collectively worried about the direction of the world. She also eyed the rise in popularity of impact investing and ESG, and she didn’t understand why ETFs like those managed by MSCI and FTSE continued allocating to assets in authoritarian countries. Inspired by this dissonance, Cane formed Democracy Investments with several partners and serves as the firm’s CEO.

Learn more about Julie Cane.

The traditional mutual fund wholesaler used to walk into an advisor’s office with a pack of golf balls, a factsheet and a high 晨星 rating. No more. In fact, just 9% of advisors say they want to meet with wholesalers at all, according to a recent survey from VettaFi . Yet, the asset management industry still spends $50 billion a year to get in front of advisors and convince them to invest, according to FLX Networks.

The problem is even more acute for asset managers from racial or ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in the industry. They manage just a sliver—1.4%—of U.S.-based invested assets, according to The Knight Foundation, and generally have fewer resources and employees to scale up a distribution strategy.

That’s what motivated Devon Drew to launch DFD Partners last year. The platform made access to diverse asset managers easier for advisors. Now Drew is expanding the mission, developing technology to better match advisors and managers across a broader set of criteria, needs and preferences.

Learn more about Devon Drew.

Olivia Eisinger was first introduced to the financial services industry while studying psychology and playing basketball for her alma mater 美国纽约大学 . Looking to subsidize her education, a friend pointed her toward financial services. After graduating in 2011, Eisinger took a job with TD Ameritrade to help research high-performing RIAs. Following a brief stint with an insurance provider in 2014, she returned to TD as vice president of technology consulting and eventually moved into relationship management and institutional sales.

In the fall of 2020, Eisinger joined Apex Fintech Solutions , known for providing custody and clearing for the early wave of robo advisors, such as Betterment . By the time she arrived as a sales director, Apex had begun broadening its reach and making its custodial services directly available to RIAs, competing with industry behemoths Charles Schwab , 富达 and BNY Pershing . Part of the job is making sure Apex works well with other tech firms an advisor may use to embed its custodial operations and “straight-through” processing into their platforms.

Learn more about Olivia Eisinger.

Iraklis Kourtidis , CEO and co-founder of Rowboat Advisors, Inc. , is used to standing out. For one thing, he was born in Greece. Kourtidis first arrived in America at the age of 18 on a scholarship to 美国哈佛大学 . Even among his peers at the school from overseas, he was an exception.

Building Rowboat Advisors was a bootstrapped effort with Kourtidis working on code for about 18 months before his co-founder, Stephen Anderson, PhD , joined. And about 90% of the code, according to Kourtidis, was written by himself, much of it while in self-isolation aboard his old 38-foot sailing catamaran docked in Redwood City, Calif.

Learn more about Iraklis Kourtidis.

When he was 11 years old, Ritik Malhotra started a small business developing turnkey web applications. Before he turned 19, he worked project-based engineering jobs with 英特尔 and Twitter . And by the time he was able to legally drink, he had launched his first full-scale technology start-up.

After he sold his cloud-based data storage system to Box in 2014, Malhotra found he had more money than he knew what to do with—and needed advice. The search for a financial advisor formed his first impressions of the industry. He says he “fell in love” with it but found the technology advisors used surprisingly lackluster.?

Between then and now, Malhotra, 31, created and sold another company—a blockchain-based financial ledger for multi-party digital transactions now known at Brex Cash—before putting his talents to work building Savvy Wealth with co-founder and CTO Muller Zhang , and creating an ‘all-in-one’ wealth management platform for its affiliated registered investment advisory firm Savvy Advisors.

Learn more about Ritik Malhotra.

Carrie Nelson ’s journey into the touchy-feely field of behavioral finance and advisor client relationships began in the most unlikely of places—the cold, “kind of creepy” (her words) world of hard data and analytics.

Nelson founded Atlas Point with the goal of creating an AI-powered platform to help advisors integrate behavioral data while supporting human relationships and bringing clients and advisors closer together. The goal is to recognize the value of emotional intelligence and marry that with AI.

She began by—wait for it—gathering data. Interviewing a wide range of advisors across the country, both in terms of location and AUM, Nelson found the same problems kept cropping up over and over, one of which was a difficulty by advisors in comprehending and implementing behavioral finance into their practices.

Learn more about Carrie Nelson.

While working in private practice as an estate planning attorney, Anne Rhodes , over the course of many interactions with financial advisors, came to understand how unapproachable her world could be for those in the financial services space.

It’s a problem Rhodes now has a chance to solve, as the chief legal officer at Wealth.com , an estate planning platform specializing in assisting advisors, which she joined in 2021.

With the introduction of its new AI-assisted service “Ester” earlier this year, Wealth.com stands at the center of several hot-button discussions roiling the advisory space, including how advisors can stay relevant in their clients’ lives as they mull their estate planning needs. Wealth.com wants to “demystify” the estate planning process for advisors, according to Rhodes.

Learn more about Anne Rhodes.

A recent story in 纽约时报 pointed out that wealthy countries around the world are struggling to provide health and long-term care for their rapidly aging populations. It’s a problem that Caribou Financial, Inc. founder and CEO Christine Simone knows all too well.?

“Only 17% of advisors report feeling very confident in discussing healthcare with their clients,” Simone said, citing survey data from Nationwide . And that is where Caribou’s cloud-based healthcare planning software for financial advisors—called HealthPlanner—comes in. Advisors to date have lacked a good resource for making healthcare coverage decisions, she said, including the major financial planning software providers eMoney Advisor , Envestnet | MoneyGuide and others.

Learn more about Christine Simone.

Brian Thorp , founder and CEO of Wealthtender , said the best piece of advice he ever received boiled down to, “Measure twice, cut once.” Carefully assessing opportunities and challenges on the horizon has served Thorp well as he worked toward the success of his online matching and reviews platform for advisors.?

After more than two decades in the corporate world, Thorp said he was bitten by the “entrepreneurial bug.” This desire coincided with what he, correctly, viewed as an emerging opening in the market. Thorp said to develop Wealthtender , he looked to review platforms for other professions, including doctors and lawyers, and saw the development of relevant articles paired with these reviews as key to connecting prospects with advisors. Wealthtender features an online publishing platform for articles and syndication partnerships with websites including MSN.

Learn more about Brian Thorp.

Alternative investments and private markets are an increasingly important way for RIAs to invest for their clients. But for many RIAs, it’s a daunting area. Ryan V. thinks his firm, Opto Investments , has the right approach to make it easier for them. Opto uses in-house investment specialists to assess private market opportunities and technology developers that help RIAs handle the “very large workflow” associated with them, including the screening, the documentation and reporting and the capital call management.

Opto invests its own capital in the deals it selects and doesn’t receive compensation from the fund managers, according to VanGorder. It also offers advisors a “holistic, whole portfolio” approach, with exclusive access to “differentiated opportunities that help them build smarter private markets portfolios.” Opto’s technology infrastructure is designed to help improve advisors’ workflow efficiency and cut out busy tasks having to do with the often cumbersome and time-consuming process that comes with private investments.

Learn more about Ryan VanGorder.

A lot of people in the industry know Stephanie Bogan ; she’s a sought-after business and practice management coach and speaker. Before starting Limitless Advisor, her current coaching firm, she founded a consulting firm at the age of 24 and sold it in a seven-figure deal to a Fortune 200 company. She then joined Joe Duran’s executive team at United Capital, which was eventually acquired by 高盛 .

But less known is her personal journey. In this highly listened to episode of The Healthy Advisor podcast from earlier this year, host Diana Britton speaks with Stephanie Bogan on finding her path to happiness, well-being and healing in her own life.

Listen to this episode or one of our other top podcast episodes from 2023!