Vise, an automated asset management platform that helps advisors build and manage personalized portfolios for their clients, announced this week that it has hired Ross Znavor as president.
He is not new to Vise, having served as an executive advisor with the company for over a year. Znavor spent over two decades at BlackRock, perhaps of most interest to advisors are the years he spent as part of the team that built and developed the Aladdin Wealth Technology platform. He most recently served as Chief Client Officer for Latin America and also worked in Blackrock's portfolio management, institutional business and retirement groups and was well.
In his new role, Ross will help lead the company’s strategic initiatives and oversee operational execution and go-to-market strategy.
Vise co-founder and CEO Samir Vasavada said that Znavor’s rare mix of experience—as someone who could plumb the depths of startup problem-solving and as someone who has held leadership roles and helped close major deals at the world’s largest asset manager—made him the perfect fit for his new role.
“Ross spent almost a year as an executive advisor, and we wanted to really get to know him ahead of time and build trust with the team, and it was a bit of a different recruiting process than you typically find at a startup,” said Vasavada, referring to the outright top executive hires many startups make, many of which do not pan out.
“On the personal side of things, to join (CIO) Runik (Mehrotra) and Samir and take all the experience I’ve had—from being an advisor at Merrill Lynch and then all the years at BlackRock and as a member of the founding team building Aladdin,” said Znavor. “When I left BlackRock, I really had the opportunity to look back and think: ‘Where did I have the most fun?’ Building the Aladdin wealth-tech business."
Over the last few months, Vise has expanded its platform capabilities to support the needs of RIA aggregators in addition to its established core market of standalone RIA firms. Central to those platform capabilities is the ease with which Vise claims its technology can ingest an RIA aggregator’s investment models, which include both advisor and home office strategies, and, in turn, provide a unified workflow for them and help them centralize investment management operations.
“And it is working,” said Znavor of the aggregator strategy.
According to Vise, platform assets—which the company said include both its managed assets for RIAs and assets on the Vise for aggregators platform—have grown to more than $3.5 billion, a 350% increase in assets year over year.
“Existing clients have been growing significantly, more than market growth, but the breakout growth has been from aggregators,” Vasavada said.
According to Vise’s latest Form ADV, filed in mid-September, its managed assets for individual RIA firms stand at a little over $1 billion (assets in the aggregator platform are not under Vise’s management and do not have to be reported there).
While he and Znavor said they could not yet name which aggregators were using Vise, their first announcement was imminent in the next few weeks.
“What I can say is that we have signed multiple of the largest RIA aggregators, several hundred billion in total assets,” said Vasavada.
In September, Vise announced that Andrew Waisburd, PhD, former head of Invesco’s global indexing business and global head of portfolio management, had joined the company as co-chief investment officer alongside Travis Fairchild, previously a partner and portfolio manager at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management.
Vise also announced that Larry Raffone, the current chairman and former CEO of Edelman Financial Engines, had joined Vise as an executive advisor focusing on distribution and partnerships. At the same time, Chip Roame, the founder of Tiburon Strategic Advisors and the former chairman of Envestnet, signed on to serve as a strategic advisor.
Asked about the company’s headcount, especially given the growth, Vasavada responded that it stood at more than 40 (there are pending hires). Almost all report to Vise’s New York office daily, with only a handful, “three to four,” operating remotely on a regular basis.
He said that this was one of the hard lessons the company learned when the staff reached more than 100: “It was hard to operate remotely at that size.”
Vise was founded in 2016 by Vasavada and Mehrotra and has raised a total of $128 million over multiple rounds from investors. The most recent was its 2021 Series C of $65 million, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital.
The firm has experienced ups and downs in recent years. In mid-2022, it rolled out major enhancements to its artificial intelligence-powered platform, including its tax and cash management features, and later that year, it cut half of its staff.
“The good news is that we have been able to focus on those people we have left, and because we were able to downsize effectively, we held onto cash, and that gives us time to grow,” said Vasavada.
