A Scalable Approach To The RIA Market, With Joe Ujobai

The alternatives industry has historically had plenty of “friction” in its user experience for investors. This friction has made it challenging for many wealth managers who want to access the broader universe of alternatives.

Joe Ujobai, CEO at AIX, joins the show to discuss his company’s “fintech-forward” approach to building an alts platform, and how this approach can help unlock scalability in reaching the RIA channel.

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Episode Highlights

Background on AIX, and the company’s origin as a “spinoff” from FS investments.
How AIX’s focus on technology allows it to offer a competitive price structure for its clients.
Why smaller private equity funds and alts sponsors may be attracted to AIX’s unique platform.
Details on how AIX is reaching the RIA market, and why a “mass customization” approach appeals to investment advisors.
Joe’s prediction on future growth in the alts industry (and where the growth will come from).

Today’s Guest: Joe Ujobai, AIX

About The Alternative Investment Podcast

The Alternative Investment Podcast is a leading voice in the alternatives industry, covering private equity, venture capital, and real estate. Host Andy Hagans interviews asset managers, family offices, and industry thought leaders, as they discuss the most effective strategies to grow generational wealth.

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Show Transcript

Andy: Welcome to the “Alternative Investment Podcast.” I am your host, Andy Hagans, and today we’re talking about a Fintech forward approach to building an alternative investment platform. And joining me is Joe Ujobai of AIX. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe: Thanks, Andy. Great to be here.

Andy: And I just wanna start off, could you give us a little bit of background on AIX, the story behind the company, and your product?

Joe: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, we’re a Fintech-forward company. Our focus really is solely on removing the friction and making it easier for investors to buy, own, and ultimately, seller tender alternatives. We were incubated inside a large retail investment sponsor, FS investments. If you rewind the clock to about 2015, ’16, they had something like 85,000 trades in one year. And those trades were heavily manually processed. Lots of paperwork, lots of NIGOs, or not-in-good-order types of trades. And they felt there had to be a better way. So, FS went out and looked at the market, to see that if there was any software that currently existed that could solve those problems. And the ultimate conclusion was that it didn’t exist or certainly didn’t exist in scale. So, they spun up a project to build out a platform, initially around subscriptions, but ultimately, recover really sort of the full life cycle of an alternative. About three years ago, I joined the team to really spin us off and to create a commercial enterprise in the alternative investment space.

Andy: So, I’m sorry, did you say 2016, they were still pushing papers to process these to access these transactions.

Joe: Absolutely. Yes. And at the time, actually, happened to be a board member of multiple FS alternative investment products. And having spent most of my career in financial services technology, spent most of my career at SEI, that has done a lot of automation and bank trust departments, as well as with registered investment advisors. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to process alternative investment trade because the technology really didn’t exist. So, ultimately, it’s our goal to try to make trading alternatives as easy as trading a mutual fund.

Andy: Well, let’s zoom out. So, outside of AIX, so I understand, you know, you all are removing friction with a lot of these transactions with your clients and the sponsors that you work with, but in the whole industry, like, what round do you think or what inning, let’s use baseball. We’ll stick with baseball. I’m always mixing my analogies, but using the baseball analogy, what inning are we with automation and using technology to process all these transactions?

Joe: So, I’m from Philadelphia, so using baseball as an analogy is a little bit of a sore subject for us. The stadium that the Phillies played is really literally over my right shoulder here behind me, but I think we’re in the second inning.

Andy: Wow. That’s the second inning.

Joe: There’s still a lot of work to be done. I think that the technology is there, so probably from a technology standpoint, we might be in the fifth or sixth inning. But when it comes to technology, the game never ends. I think from an adoption standpoint, we’re still probably in the second inning.

Andy: Well, first of all, I have to say as a Tigers fan, I’d be happy if we just made it to the World Series anytime, you know, in the next year. Philly’s had a great run. But back to alternative investments, what is prohibiting then user adoption of the technology? So, the technologies in the fifth or sixth inning, but the user adoption’s in the second, I mean, what’s the hold-up?

Joe: Yeah. You know, I think wealth managers are busy. You know, markets have been, certainly since COVID up and down, more recently down than up. And there’s a real focus on servicing their clients. When you think that the average the average retail investor or individual investor probably has less than 5%, if any, exposure to alternatives? I think a lot of wealth managers have been largely focused on the other 95% of their business. So, that’s, I think number one. I think that operations departments and a lot of these firms are sort of set in their ways and tend to not want to take any risk and make any change. But we’re seeing that change. I think in 2022, this year, you know, we’ve started to see some fairly substantial increase in adoption. There are a handful of us out there where positioned as firms that look to facilitate an easier solution. So, there are a lot of messages being sort of delivered in the market. So, I think a lot of firms are basically trying to figure out what’s the best solution for them. But adoption is definitely increasing.

Andy: So, when you say you’ve seen a tick-up an adoption this past year, is that more on the sponsor side from the funds? Or are you referring more to wealth managers and more RIAs using the product?

Joe: You know, when I came here three years ago, I thought it would be the wealth managers that led the way. And really it’s the investment sponsors that are leading the way. Ultimately, they often get stuck with the NIGOs or the mistakes in the paperwork that delay investment into their products. So, what we’ve seen is more rapid adoption from the part of the sponsors. They like to obviously raise more assets, they like to do it more smoothly in a more seamless strength way, but they’re working closely with their top wealth managers, with the firms that are sort of the top distributors of their product and bringing them along, and I think in an increasingly faster fashion.

Andy: Got it. Okay. So, the adoption, that’s being led from the sponsor side. I mean, that makes sense, right? I look at it like, with any new technology, any platform, any software, the juice has to be worth the squeeze, right? It’s gonna take… There’s a learning curve in learning to even use any kind of software, learning how to use any kind of platform. So, as you mentioned, if ultimately only 5% of retail assets are in alternatives, you know, then a lot of wealth managers, there’s just not gonna be a lot of activity there that would really necessitate committing to a platform. But I think that’s changing so rapidly now. I mean, especially in the past 12 months, maybe in the next 12 months, there’s so much retail adoption of alternatives.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and we’ve always talked about the 60/40 portfolio. And I’ve been at a number of industry conferences in the last six months, where everyone’s really rallying around the concept of a 50%, 30%, 20% portfolio, 50% equity, 30% fixed, and 20% Alts. Now, some firms are there already, particularly sort of firms that service higher net worth individuals and families but others are really looking to get there. And so when it all of a sudden becomes 20% of your portfolio or your client’s portfolios, and it’s the one that they’re looking the closest at, because it’s probably the asset class that they don’t know as well, the need for automation, whether it’s easy to subscribe or once you’re in the fund for 5, 7, 10 years to really understand performance, to understand the underlying characteristics of the portfolio, you know, technology’s gonna play a much more important role.

Andy: Right, right. You know, I’ve talked with a couple different platforms on the show, and I think one recurring theme is just the reduction of friction, right? There’s historically been so much friction in this marketplace that you’ve already alluded to. So, I wanna ask about AIX specifically. Where do you feel that your company has removed the most friction? And then zooming out industry-wide, where do you think, you know, the most friction remains? Like, what’s next?

Joe: Okay. So, unlike some of the others that you’ve spoken with, really our focus is, as a technology provider, what we don’t do is we don’t do due diligence on funds, we don’t do sort of portfolio structuring of a product. We’re not a feeder fund administrator. Our take was that there was friction really across the entire cycle of the ownership of an alternative investment and that we should really focus on using technology to solve that problem. So, we started with subscription and, you know, subscription is largely difficult because just this sheer volume of paperwork. There’s a lot of regulatory oversight in the alternative investment space. And say, if an advisor is based in Ohio and the client is in Indiana and the investment sponsor is in Florida, there might be three states, as well as sort of federal regulators having an opinion on, who can subscribe and become a shareholder of these types of products. So, I think most of us in the industry really tried to solve the subscription process first. And we’ve tried to do it in a very native digital way. And so instead of just automating or digitizing a PDF, what really have is a workflow-based tool that gathers data from the advisor and from the advisor’s client, and then populates forms, or actually, more importantly, to sends the information automatically, the data automatically to the custodian or the transfer agency and really gets the forms and the paperwork out of the process.

Andy: So, would you mention the different jurisdictions, different states, is there legal logic that’s built into that workflow on your process on your platform?

Joe: Yes, exactly. And so some states are more sort of robust in their oversight. And so what we’ve been able to do is basically take all 50 states inside the workflow, put together logic and workflow, that says, “If you’re in Ohio, you’ve gotta sign off on these clauses. Where if you’re in Pennsylvania, you might not have to do that.” So, everybody got started in this subscription space. And there’s some good solutions out there. They’re not all sort of data digital like ours, some of them are just PDF fillers. But what we quickly realized, you know, sort of our first handful of clients taught us that the subscription process or the owners and fraught with errors is sort of a short life part of the lifetime of the ownership.

Andy: Well, it’s like getting married and you get through the honeymoon and saying, “All right, now the hard part’s all done.” Right?

Joe: Exactly. Exactly. So, what we did was we really looked at the full life cycle. And so there’s actually some stuff that comes before subscription. So, the marketing things, like taking the advisor’s relationship management database and entering the clients into that, keeping track of the clients or prospects of the advisor who may have been shown the opportunity of the fund, through the PPMs or through any of the other marketing materials, so housing, all of that. So, there would be sort of the pre-trade activity and then the trade activity, which a lot of us has gotten fairly good at. But really what we’re now focused on building and really delivering to clients is post-trade. So, what’s the true performance of my fund, particularly if I pay out fairly hefty dividends or interest over the course of the ownership of the fund, right?

A client might see the net asset value and say, “This point hasn’t done very well.” They forget that they’ve been getting substantial dividends or interest payments quarterly over the last couple of years. What happens if I want to move my fund from one trust to another trust, I want to change the beneficiary, a lot of activity happens over the ownership of during the ownership of the fund. And so where subscription got has gotten much easier. The rest of that process, post trade process was generally pretty, pretty manual. So what we’ve done is really take what we’ve built, the workflows that we’ve built, and we’re really a workflow, data and forms company. And so we can solve that management or that ongoing administration, while the end investor is still invested over the course of 3, 5, 10 years, or whatever it is, and automate all those processes to to make the client experience to the end investor and also to the adviser fully digital and and much easier to ultimately implement.

Andy: Understood. So it’s, it’s more than a HelloSign or DocuSign.

Joe: Yes. Yeah.

Andy: There’s so much context that is very important in all of these transactions. And, you know, we’ve talked about advisors kind of in our conversation so far, but I want to talk specifically about RA’s because, you know, when I talk with larger asset managers, and also platforms, really, every single company in the Alternative Investment space, they’re trying to reach the RA market, right? It’s a growing market. But it’s so fractured. And I think almost everyone agrees that it’s hard to penetrate that market, really reach and because of that. So I want to ask you, you know, how is your company succeeded in reaching the RA market? Do you feel like you have any unique edge that’s that’s given you inroads into the RA market?

Joe: Absolutely. And I completely agree with you that really, the advisor or the RA market is really, I think what people are most interested is a sponsor, investment sponsors are most interested in trying to capture. Again, if you look at the frequent data, they expect there to be about a $10 trillion growth in Alternative Investments over the next five or so years. Historically, most of the growth and alternatives have been with institutional or high net worth clients, largely distributed the high net worth party distributed through the wire houses, you know, the New York centric wire houses. But everybody’s now very interested in the adviser space. I think advisors are really also very interested in entering the old space. They I think are they’ve got, obviously, outcomes matter to their clients. They have fiduciary responsibility provide the best possible portfolio, and there are a lot of them out there. So they’re trying to differentiate themselves amongst each other. I get a lot of conferences, industry conferences, and I think you and I probably talked at least in the past, where there were maybe be a handful of advisors, a group of 1000 people to DISA, and this year DISA conference was probably about half RIAs or 40% RIA.

Andy: Wow.

Joe: So RAs are really looking to incorporate alternatives into their portfolios. But they’re not necessarily looking for some of the funds that have done well, in the institutional, or in the high net worth space. And so they might look at some of those products, because they’re gotten so big, some of the real estate investment trusts the REITs, are now raising billions of dollars a year. So advisors come back and say those funds are really becoming really more like index funds, because they’re so big, and they have so much capital to deploy. And so what we’re finding is we begin to talk to advisors. And we’ve really just started marketing to registered investment advisors over the last probably year, year and a half, is that they’re really looking for probably a couple of things. One is access to interesting products. Advisors are always looking to justify the 100 basis points, the 150 basis points fees that they’re selling. And their clients don’t think that bringing a very large, the largest real estate investment trust, or their largest BDC, Business Development Corporation, is really worth the fee that they’re charging. So they’re looking to find more unique, smaller products that they may not have access to or others may not have access to. So product administration is one thing we hear our product access, I’m sorry, is one thing we hear.

Manual administration, very worried about that. So advisors have very much over the last 20 years, implemented client portfolios, using mutual funds, or using some sort of collective vehicles. And those there’s very little administration required of those, it doesn’t make they’re not many errors made in that enrolling their clients into those kinds of products. Well, we also hear from advisors are the fees that are offered by the current Alternative Investment products that are in place are too high to pay, 25 or 50 basis points, to get access to a feeder fund to the feeder fund administrator, it’s too much money to charge their clients, some are trying to pass that charge on to their clients. And others are basically saying, “I’m eating it.” Other RA’s are saying “I’m eating it from from their fees.” Which they certainly don’t want to do. And then we also hear this full lifecycle thing is that don’t just help us get through the nice honeymoon, make sure you can service us. So what we’ve tried to do is take those four sort of challenges of the RIA space, and software them all.

So we are focusing, we certainly offer a lot of the very large well known brand name Alternative Investments on our on our platform, but we’re constantly searching for smaller, more boutique, more harder to find Alternative Investment managers. Now the good news is that because alternatives are so popular, now, there’s more and more of those firms popping up. But then you have to be able to administer them in a cost effective way used to be, you know, the fund had to be several million dollars to make it to be to be cost effective for the manager, and for the advisor. With technology, we can bring that number down substantially that size of fund down substantially. We really, I think, solved the manual administration process by making it almost as easy to invest. We don’t add feeder fund fees, our clients to invest directly into retail funds. And there’ll be some pressure on those retail fund fees that are out there already. But there isn’t sort of an extra layer of feeder fund fees. And again, we’ve talked a lot about full lifecycle. So we think we’ve built something pretty specific to the to the alternative for alternative investments in the registered investment advisor space.

Andy: Let’s talk about scalability and accessibility with those more boutique funds that you mentioned. And honestly this is a major issue in the alts industry is that as you mentioned, there are these 800 pound gorillas in the space with these, you know giant REITs, giant BDCs, giant products and they may be very good products but they’re, you know, are also a lot of boutique private equity firms, boutique offerings, private placement offerings, and a lot of the sponsors and offerings you know. It’s tough to make the economics work to get them onto various platforms to get them distribution. Do you think it’s really just a matter of bringing the cost down and bringing efficiency so that you know it’s it doesn’t take so much capital that kind of that minimum threshold to make the economics work goes down?

Joe: I’ve spent most of my career in financial services technology. So what I would say to your question is, technology can go a long way in making somewhat smaller funds, profitable for everybody that’s involved in the creative, the manufacturing and the distribution of those fun products, or those investment products. So to use technology, to do the administration of the fund, to use technology to deliver the subscription and maintenance of the fund, it goes a long way. There are a lot of smaller funds out there, they are largely managed on spreadsheets, and those spreadsheets, obviously, our technology, but it’s not sort of a straight through process. You know, it takes a lot to get a client to invest, and then ultimately for the data to go to the custodian or if there’s a transfer agent involved. So you have a lot of sort of old legacy platforms out there that were technically or were realistically built for, were more listed equity type of solutions. And firms have tried to take those and turn them into alternative investment platforms or Alternative Investment administrative tools, it hasn’t doesn’t work very well, without sort of liquidity, without the same way of calculating performance, it just doesn’t work very well.

And so you’re taking a legacy technology platform that, again, has been used to trading equities or mutual funds, and trying to add in the nuances of alternatives. And that’s, I think, one of the greatest reasons, these things haven’t been haven’t been very economical. Now, I’m not saying that we can do a lot of $10 million funds, I don’t think the numbers come down to that. I think that number is probably in the 50 to a couple 100 million space that we can really add value there. And to your point, there are a lot of these bigger brand name funds are really terrific. And they’ve done a great job of opening the market, to individual investors. But what we’re seeing is advisors are saying, you know, I know of firm who ran a really great institutional pool of money, and in the alternative space, and now I want, that firm wants to make it retail. And what we’re really good at is going in and helping that sponsor, or investment sponsor or asset manager, come up with a retail solution, not only helping them sort of from a technology administration standpoint, but helping them price it. And frankly, then making it available to the wider network of wealth managers that we are that we’re developing.

Andy: Understood. Do you think with these, with the smaller offerings…do you think there’s more of a need for due diligence to be built in the platform? I mean, obviously, you’ve stated your platform doesn’t really do the due diligence, I guess, how does that problem? Or how does that challenge get solved from the adviser side?

Joe: No, absolutely. So again, there are even a couple of different flavors of advisors, some of them want to do the due diligence themselves. So they don’t want to offer 2030 alternative products, they want to offer 357 alternative products, and they feel that some of their core value, they could do the due diligence. Others are looking to outsource due diligence or buy the due diligence. And so although we haven’t created a due diligence capability, we have created digital access or API’s or ways for due diligence providers, or ways for actually wealth managers to access due diligence, through our through our technology. And so we’re pretty agnostic. As to the due diligence provider, I find that most investment sponsors actually work with multiple due diligence providers. And then the wealth manager who actually decides to distribute the product might have their own due diligence provider. And so our takeaway is you really have to be agnostic, because people will, that both sponsors and wealth managers will look for multiple sources of due diligence for the product.

Andy: Even if you provide that due diligence, you’re gonna have advisors say, “That’s nice. I don’t care. I want my own due diligence, or I want this other third party.”

Joe: Exactly. There’s sort of one, there’s more multiple sources of input. When it comes to due diligence, I have found very few firms that rely on one due diligence provider.

Andy: Understood, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting in the private equity world, obviously, we’ve had crypto and FTX in the news this week, and how many just giant institutional type investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a firm where seems like almost no due diligence was done. So I think it’s a topic that hopefully is top of mind for retail investors, you know, and advisors both.

Joe: Yeah, it was our take that there’s a lot of really great due diligence providers in the Alternative Investment space. We’ve got big firms, like Mercer, who’ve been around forever, there’s more boutique firms that have sprung up over the last 10 years or so. And so our plan is to help facilitate access to that information. I’d love to actually author that information.

Andy: It almost seems to me like the private equity space, private equity real estate, specifically. You know, people aren’t quite as trusting, it’s almost better position, I suppose to be to be wary and to do good due diligence, then then perhaps, you know, some of these publicly traded companies or venture capital firms.

Joe: We’re not, we’re not an investment company. We’re a technology company. So we really tried to stick to what we do well, and they sort of expand our capabilities with inside of using technology to, to help grow this Alternative Investment industry.

Andy: So let’s zoom out. So you know, in the alts industry, we know where the growth has come from, at least I think broadly. And we had institutional investors allocating more to alts, really, for the past several decades, family offices allocating more to alts. But really, they’ve, you know, they’ve pretty much met their portfolio allocation this term, in the institutional, and now we have retail investors who are allocating increased amounts to alts is that where all of the future growth comes from is just the retail market.

Joe: You know, I think the institutional and the higher net worth markets are going to certainly grow. To your point, there is a lot of assets already been allocated from those two investor segments. But those segments are also growing. So there’s certainly more to be done there. So Alternative Investment sponsors are focusing on building product that is specific, because they recognize maybe the flows are not going to be the same in the institutional and the higher net worth. So they’re focused on retail, as you mentioned, they’re over allocated and some of the higher net worth spaces. And the retail channels are, as I said, are under allocated, 5% or less. I think it also makes sense in the retail or the individual market, because sort of the traditional investments have really entered a very volatile cycle. We all know this, I’m sure everybody listening to this knows that. And so advisors are really looking for ways to either add, you know, more growth, more return, or lower volatility, and also really good at doing that.

Advisors are increasingly focused on the fiduciary obligation that they have to their clients. There’s definitely a lot more pressure from regulators on making sure that advisors are providing the right kind of advice to the right clients. And we’ve talked about this 5030-20 allocation. Nobody’s well, some firms are there, but very few firms are there now, RA’s are there now. But I think they’re all looking how to get there. And I think because of some of our some of our friends in the industry, are really removing the barriers. So whether it’s technology, or it’s better due diligence, or it’s helping the sponsors create products that are accessible into the individual investor market, the barriers to entry have really begun to come down a little bit. So I do think, I was talking the other day and said well of this $10 trillion, how much do you think is going to go to retail, and they don’t feel like they have the data yet to, to sort of talk about that they’ve got some ideas. And I wouldn’t say it’s 50%. But I say, you know, my central, which is close to 50%.

Andy: Interesting. So, obviously alts had an incredible run over the past 5-10 years, we’re seeing the volume slowed down a little bit, you know, DST activity inflows into two different, you know, segments of the alt universe. So do you think next year is likely to be a bump in the road? You know, on that trajectory?

Joe: Yeah, what we’ve been working on for the last couple of months, 2023 planning and, and for us, because we’re relatively new and our market share is pretty low. We certainly see growth, and we see certainly to see growth as a company, even if it’s a down market. But to answer your question, it’s really hard to predict those things. I’d probably retire if I could predict that, instead of still working here and running a fun startup company. It could be a little bit longer, you know, we’ll see what happens with interest rates, we’ll see what happens with real estate, you know, a lot of these assets are in depth investing in real estate. You know, maybe it’s a little less investment and in commercial, industrial, real estate and more and retail real estate where there seems to be no stop. And well, there seems to be a real shortage of housing. And so, but I tell you, I think again, if I use sort of conferences as indicators, when I talk to, you know, sort of in a couple of days time, a lot of advisors, wealth managers. There really is a, I think, an interest in understanding how alts would help them deliver a better, more accurate, more tailored portfolio to their clients.

Andy: And, you know, that’s a tailwind that I think is going to drive growth for years to come, regardless whether 2023 is a bump in the road, or not. So what’s next for AIX? I mean, obviously, you talked about your approach. And as you know, a company with smaller market share, you’re growing pretty quickly it sounds like, but did you have any, you know, strategic priorities or growth plans that you’d like to share?

Joe: So a lot of those are around sort of scales. And again, I think as we work, you asked the question earlier about RA’s, and what is it that we can do to help our EAS embrace alternatives for their end clients, and part of that is trying to create the ability for, say, the technology to be customizable, for configurable really, for an advisor. So our wealth manager, for example, we have some wealth managers that primarily only sell alternatives. And we have others that haven’t sold any alternatives. But when it gets to 5, 10, 20%, or so, to be able to take the technology, and really configure it, so that it becomes really a part of the suite of technology platforms. So that if a client signs on to their technology, so the platform that they use for the entire client’s portfolio, how do you make sure that the alt technology is really incorporated into that technology, and that it makes it really a seamless client experience.

So we’ve been focused a lot on that is what I call sort of mass customization. But to allow an advisor to determine how they’d like to present alts, how they’d like to make them available to their clients, how they’d like to incorporate them into their client portfolios. You know, they’re the TAMP, a turnkey asset management programs, that a lot of firms like SEI and Orion, and Invest Net, and many others have built, you know, there are a number of really great camp providers out there, they had been really taxing key to the growth of the RA space over the last 10,15, 20 years. But none of them have really actively incorporated alternative investments into a turnkey asset management program, mostly because of the less liquidity situation of an alternative. So we are working with some of those firms to really explore how would you put alternatives into those portfolios, and provide the same high level of transparency and customer service to your clients that you’re doing today with more traditional asset types.

So sort of understanding how to incorporate alternatives into these managed portfolios, or turnkey asset management programs, is something that we’re spending a lot of time and effort on. And talking to a lot of people in the industry about. I think that’s probably one of the ways to do it, is to package off into the greater portfolio construct that meets ultimately, the investor needs of the client over short to medium to long term to long term time horizon. So we’re really focused on that. I don’t think anybody’s done that in a scalable way yet. And so that’s something we think is key to the industry. And I know that some of my friends out there are doing the same thing. But I think that will be important to the RIA space, is how do you incorporate this asset class into the overall advice and portfolio that you offer to your clients? How do you take the asset allocation that had largely been implemented with traditional products? And include alternatives to create a better outcomes?

Andy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, thinking about the, RIA role that you know, the job description, and how many hours are there in work week, right, you know, 40, or maybe 60, but not not a million, right? So there’s limited time, you know, to deal with asset allocation, to deal with due diligence. And so a lot of these, you know, sort of unnecessary friction points, you know, like, they obviously, the friction points exist for a reason, but ultimately, they don’t need to exist, right? So it’s great for the industry that, you know, companies like AIX and others are continuing to work on that next frontier of friction.

Joe: Yeah, there are a lot of different types of registered investment advisors out there, but you can broadly put them into two categories to do it yourself. First, we want to pick the investment products, and we want we have a solution or we want to have a solution that’s helpful for those firms. But also there are other registered investment advisors that want to outsource those things. And so and use managed portfolio. So we also want to be able to support those investment advisors. I’m not suggesting that we become an investment manager and offer asset allocation strategies, but we would be the underlying technology that really breaks through the hurdles that have been present to date and provide inputting asset and putting alternatives into a managed account portfolios.

Andy: That makes sense. Well, Joe, this has been really enlightening. I appreciate getting that, you know, I love talking to platforms and service providers, because on the show, obviously, I talk with a lot of asset managers and sponsors, which I love doing that, you know, talking about specific strategies. But talking with you, I’m getting the almost want to say a more objective perspective, a more neutral or agnostic, I think was your term. So I really appreciate you sharing your insights. And that being said, where can our viewers and listeners go to learn more about AIX?

Joe: Absolutely, you can go to our website, which is aixplatform.com. And you can click through on there too, if you would like to contact us to get more information, to see a demonstration. And for us to put together sort of what we’d call a discovery session to determine how we could work together to help grow the Alternative Investment industry and help RA’s and advisors create better portfolios for their end clients and their investors.

Andy: Absolutely, and I’ll be sure to link that on our show notes, which as a reminder are always available altsdb.com/podcast. Joe, thanks again for coming on the show today.

Joe: Andy, thank you for your time and thank you for your support of the Alternative Investment Industry.

Andy: Absolutely. My pleasure. Take care.