Episode: Dan Eyre, co-founder of Blockchange, the world’s first digital turnkey asset management platform for financial advisory firms, family offices, hedge funds, outsourced CIOs, and private banks.
Insight: Twenty-five years ago, many people thought that giving your credit card number to that new online book seller was crazy. Online banking and investing sounded even crazier. But just as ecommerce and finance platforms developed their stability, security, and ease of use, a new generation of tools is making it much easier for financial advisors to buy, sell, and manage digital assets for clients. Understanding how these platforms work and what they offer could open up a valuable new service lane for part of your client base.
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3 Quotes from Dan Eyre:
1. We’re focused entirely on digital assets and there’s three different ways that organizations can interact with our platform. The first is advisors coming directly to us and using our platform to construct model portfolios and deploy their clients into those model portfolios. We handle the account opening process with our partner Gemini who’s our qualified custodian. The second avenue is the separately managed account route where a specialized RIA is managing the assets on behalf of other advisors. The last approach is a little bit of a mix in that it’s the managed accounts format where the firm would onboard, but you work with a partner in sort of the outsource CIO approach and they also do model delivery into those environments so that those advisors don’t need to do portfolio construction.
2. Digital assets are a tool for firms to send a message during the largest generational wealth transfer in history that we’re not going to try to woo Millennials and Gen Zers with wood-paneled boardrooms and gala events. That is just not something that younger generations are interested in. But what they are interested in is that their advisor is more up to date on technology and better understands technology and where the future is going than they do. And so I think that right now it’s a tool to send that message to the market, which is going to be great from an AUM gathering perspective.
3. Bitcoin is probably the most secure database in the world for transferring value. But when you look at things like Ethereum, the kind of usage that that has today, it has real staying power. I mean, talk about network effects. Talk about a sticky ecosystem.
