Mako Fintech with Kevin Victor | E235

Cracking the code on digital onboarding.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Kevin Victor - Vice President of Sales & Partnerships at Mako Financial Technologies. It is essentially SASS for wealth workflow automation. The company deals with digital onboarding, KYC refresh, any type of workflow activity that a wealth advisor would want to accomplish with their investor, and on the back end as well how they complete administrative activities and compliance.

Episode Highlights

  • 0.50: Mako Financial Technologies is a company that has created a platform for onboarding clients to investment accounts. 

  • 02.00: Kevin says that in 2018 it seemed very difficult to have strong remote operations and that in itself was a challenge. More importantly it has always been a headache that private equity firms, VC firms, alternative investment firms, or anyone who ultimately leverages this agreement to complete investor onboarding are an absolute nightmare. 

  • 03.58: The really large financial institutions and the and big dealers have the ability to invest significant dollars and dedicate years in project management to build out solutions that they think are going to support their advisors.

  • 04.30: Kevin talks about the unique type of workflow arrangement. How do you go from your firm's internal documents to the wide variety of account opening forms while going between a household to just let alone individual investor documents, non-Reg, TFSA, RSP?

  • 06.05: Jason recalls the first time he downloaded a Robo advisor. He went through the entire process in less than 5 minutes, including funding the account. At first, he was amazed and impressed and then he got immediately angry because he had thought about the existence. He wondered what it would look like in his side of it.

  • 08.01: Most advisors have discretion over how they manage money. If you are dealing with major bank, Jason can pretty much guarantee you that if he goes to 12 different advisors at random, they all have different portfolios and how they match. 

  • 08.59: Kevin talks about custom configuration. He says that there is a significant overlap between these custodian forms that the workflows and mappings. 

  • 09.50: Different firms have different offerings or more focused offerings, and we are simply going to configure and supply that for you, says Kevin.

  • 11.05: Kevin talks about digitizing investment selection, digitizing unique firm documents, digitizing standard custodian forms, or any other third party after relying upon to execute client's operations with the capacity to do so. Let's analyze it for the client and give them solutions that make sense.

  • 14.26: Mako Financial Technologies have the ability of doing three things, collecting data and the data is up to grabs. Populating forms that everybody wants to populate and creating the workflows, says Jason. 

  • 15.39: If you already have all the data, if everything is live and up to date, send out in bulk. Put it in the investors head and have it tracked. Send your KYC refreshment bulk send 30 at a time, some 50 at a time. It shouldn't have to be almost one to one basis. Then you could, check it off, and it is easy for you to go back and verify to your regulator, to the OSD, or the AMF whomever, and then let them know that you have good process, good controls, good infrastructure to manage both your regulatory requirements and doing right by your investors. 

  • 20.57: God forbid you are at the 9th inning as an advisor, and you identified a mistake by the custodian. You just have to simply resend the fix, or all interact within the platform, and the client is still going to receive that same white label experience, says Kevin.

  • 21.34: You don't have to start from the beginning, so the burden and efficiency are the burden is being resolved. The efficiencies that are being gained by the advisor, same experience for the investor, the turnaround time is important as well if we are reducing the burden of, operational deficiencies, human errors now go up things that are now being corrected on the advisor's behalf. They are going to be able to execute and open up the client's account much faster. They are going to be able to complete that transfer in much faster. 

  • 21.56: Kevin says that the hope and intent of the firm are that every single stakeholder that lives within this workflow and experience is receiving significant enhancement in both experience, security, execution and turnaround time. 

  • 23.05: Jason says that it is not a high-value proposition to client intimacy into better service them, those people's hours are better spent elsewhere.

  • 24.42: One thing that Kevin would like to change in the industry is more openness to changing to processes.

  • 27.49: Kevin used to work at a large bank, he has dealt with a few other financial institutions. He says that Canadian wealth is art, quite archaic and slow.

  • 28.44: The industry needs to stop patting itself on the back for adopting 15–20-year-old technology, says Jason.

3 Key Points

  1. Kevin talks about the genesis of the company and where did the idea of launching it come from?

  2. Kevin shares how Mako Financial has created something that adapts to handle high variability; the firm and accounts for a 10/10,000 fund codes that exist in this country and all the ETF. He talks about how his company deals this large degree of complexity. 

  3. Jason and Kevin talk about advisor and firm complexity issue and also about the complexity in dealing with different custodians.

Tweetable Quotes

  • "Digitizing was easier for Robo advisors, because they were a homogeneous uniform group." - Jason

  • "We always start off with a very extensive business process review let everyone be on the same page and align on what type of offering can give you what you are trying to validate. What you are trying to execute, what do we want to bake in in terms of your compliance aspect that we want to automate from the get-go? How do we meet your fintrac requirements?" - Kevin 

  • "We build multi custodial documents we develop transferrin requirements prepare a huge number of all the different funding codes. It should be static and easy to make an advisor life easy to execute." - Kevin 

  • "When the advisor puts in front of their investor, they have the opportunity to interact and update the documentation on their own and have the right recordings and regulatory compliance that goes along with it." - Kevin

  • "For relationships where you don't have full integration, we also have other options." - Kevin 

  • "We are playing very friendly with the ecosystem. We want to work with everyone because at the end of the day we want our end-user, that client, that wealth manager that Project Manager, whoever they are, we want them to be comfortable integrating with whoever they use exit their operations." - Kevin 

  • "If I am an investor and I am paying management fees and I am looking for that advice from the advisor, I would want 90% or 99% of my time to be dedicated to learning about my reality." - Kevin

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech