ndex systems with Laurent Bensemana | E211

Portfolio management and cleansed data for the financial industry.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Laurent Bensemana, President of Ndex Systems. Ndex systems is a portfolio management software providing clean or scrubbed data for the industry. Ndex is a custodial-based company established in 1999. Laurent’s original objective was to build the ideal assistant for the financial industry. They never saw a distinction between money managers for retail brokers, discounters, product manufacturers.

Episode Highlights:

  • 1.34: For many years, we were considered to be the discount platform of the market, but in the last five years, the market has come to appreciate that Ndex is just not expensive and gives you top-shelf offerings, says Laurent

  • 3.11: To expand our coverage, we have to ingest data from any source because clients don’t have all of their wealth with one firm, says Laurent.

  • 5.45: The client wants to pay for advice, but they don’t want to pay for the data entry. So we started offering that to the accounting industry to help them quickly reconcile and normalize the data to feed it into their accounting systems, says Laurent.

  • 11.17 Laurent is a believer in collaboration. He says that if you do a better reporting tool, it’s only suitable that you should have a presence in the market that serves people who are satisfied by your tool. 

  • 13.15: If you want to have the best in class for everything, it’s not going to be one product. It’s going to be something that integrates the best in class, says Jason

  • 17.25 The value that gets built off a platform is greater than the value of the cost of the platform itself.

  • 19.00: Ndex gives a firm commitment and puts it on paper that your data is your data. Laurent explains that they are not here to sell data to any other group. What they do with a user’s data is they feed the application to capitalize on the Ndex tools and provide the data to whomever the user instructs them to.

  • 23.22: The financial industry, as the independent, believes in the human contact of the financial sector and how important it is in the comfort it brings to the investor. 

  • 26.52: Laurent says that they are not looking to compete with another technology platform. They are open and want to work with their competing technology platforms to alleviate their arduous tasks and focus on things that are much more interesting and unique to their offering. 

  • 27.17: The more data we are able to ingest and do statistical and data analysis, the more we can give tools back to our clients to get stronger and more apt at meeting their clients’ expectations, says Laurent.

3 Key Points

  1. Ndex has become a data bridge no matter where the data resides or what format it resides in. We can ingest the data, reconcile it, normalize it, and put it out to use either Ndex or peripheral tools that are best in their particular market segment, acclaims Laurent.

  2. Easily 50% of what we do, whether development or business orientation, is our colleague’s and clients’ feedback, says Laurent.

  3. The financial industry’s competition is not the financial firm next door. The financial industry competition is with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “We built the platform whereby the Ndex database is the hub by which all the spokes of the application speak to each other. We are continuously enhancing the value add of each module, but at the same time, never hindering the client with having to make two modules speak to each other.” – Laurent

  • “One of the greatest compliments we get from the custody industry is that they tell us clients who deal with Ndex seldomly call them for data issues because we clean up their data. However, we understand that their task is also complicated and demanding.” – Laurent

  • “Plaid and other data aggregators have figured out how to tie into different bank accounts worldwide, cleanse that data and give someone a standard data format.” – Jason

  • “In Ndex, we compare which advisor generates what type of revenue versus their time compared to other advisers. In addition, which advisors are doing well compared to other advisers, and what is a variation or distinction in their management style.” - Laurent

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech