Smart investing is often based on a solid knowledge of past trends and educated guesses about the future. Professional financial advisors, therefore, must keep abreast of the influences on the marketplace, in addition to having a thorough understanding of what has come before.
In order to assist professional advisors and investment managers, Rep., an online journal of wealth management written explicitly for advisors, takes a stand each year on who they believe will be the ten most influential personalities in the worlds of economics, finance and investing.
Last summer Rep. published their take on who will “change the world” of financial advisors in 2014. As they worded it in their intro to their article The Ten to Watch in 2014, “given our daily interactions with the most plugged-in individuals in the advisor world—we know a thing or two about where the wealth management industry is headed, and who will blaze the trail.”
Out of the “Ten to Watch” we introduce you to the three we believe to be the most worthwhile to “watch.”
Deborah Fuhr is a partner and co-founder of ETFGI, based in London. She is one of the world’s top ETF analysts, enabling her to create the independent consulting and research firm of ETFGI. Fuhr earned her wings after three years as the global head of ETF research at a leading provider of ETFs. Previously she did eleven years at Morgan Stanley, where she ran investment strategies.
“We’re still in the early innings in terms of [industry] growth. More people are moving to passive strategies and more people are aware of the impact of costs on their returns. There is still a huge need to be educated with independent, unbiased information on these products,” Fuhr said.
Joe Lonsdale is an up-and-coming star at the age of only 30. He is the co-founder of Addepar Technologies, and has led his company to the head of the class of wealth management in the technology sector. One advantage for Lonsdale is that he lives in Silicon Valley, not on Wall Street. He went to Stanford to study computer engineering, and did a stint as an intern at PayPal.
Lonsdale found his niche when he and his partner Jason Mirra saw a need to organize data in the financial services sector.
“Virtually all of my friends with family offices had complained to me about how bad the software was in this industry and the problems this caused,” Lonsdale wrote in a post on Quora. “Many RIAs, family offices, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, SWFs and others managing trillions of dollars of wealth all have a specific set of issues around aggregation, reporting, billing, liquidity management, document management, all while dealing with difficult issues like multi-currency, partnership accounting, etc…”
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