How SEI is setting new standards for UMH.

Intro: You’re listening to WealthTech on Deck, a podcast about the future of wealth management technology brought to you by LifeYield. Here's your host, Jack Sharry.

[00:00:19] Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the first recording of our 2025 WealthTech on Deck podcast season. For those paying close attention, we’ve already had a few podcasts in 2025 by the time this airs that we recorded at the end of last year. In another month or so, we will celebrate four years of producing weekly podcasts that highlight the best and brightest thinking and doing in advisory, fintech, and wealthtech. That's 183 podcasts. 23,000 listeners. 51,000 downloads. We thank you as our guests and we thank you as our listeners for… who have been on and who continue to listen. Great support around the industry. We most appreciate it.

Of course, the most enjoyable part of the podcast for me is the privilege of speaking with really smart, thoughtful industry leaders who are devising and executing strategies as they seek to disrupt and innovate and make a real positive impact for investors, advisors, and firms. For this kickoff recording, I'm very pleased to have a conversation with someone I've known and admired for decades. The big change is we are now on the same team. Our guest today is Michael Lane. Michael has done some extraordinary things at innovative firms like Dimensional Fund Advisors and BlackRock. I'll let him fill you in on in his career journey in a moment.

Michael recently joined forces with SEI, our company collectively, and as our listeners know, I did too. Unbeknownst to either of us at the time, Michael joined SEI back in September, and of course, SEI acquired LifeYield in this past December. Back in September at LifeYield, we were deep in conversations with SEI when the news hit that Michael would join SEI as EVP and head of asset management. My first thought was, wow, what a get. This is great. As you'll soon hear, Michael knows a thing or two about how to run a business. I've admired Michael's accomplishments and have considered him one of the top executives in the asset and wealth management space for a long time. So for today's discussion, Michael and I are gonna talk about his career journey, why he made this move now, why SEI, and what he sees as opportunities in the future for the industry and with SEI. Michael, welcome to Wealth Tech on Deck. It's great to be having this conversation with you.

[00:02:19] Michael Lane: Thank you Jack. It's great to be here. And with that introduction, I will definitely make sure that there is a mandatory listening of this at my house.

[00:02:25] Jack Sharry: Okay, good, good. So let's start with a little bit about your background and career journey. How'd you get started? How did things evolve over time, including your most recent work at BlackRock? Fill us in.

[00:02:35] Michael Lane: Sure. So if we go back to right out of college, when I started working the day, let's see, I graduated on a Saturday and started work on a Monday and I started in the financial services business. Now, I didn't really understand exactly what I was going to be doing when I started in the financial services business back in 1989, but the goal at that time for me was, I needed to break into an industry, I needed a job. I had a difficult upbringing in terms of financial upbringing and had to pay my way through school. So I needed a job, I needed to get to work, I needed to make money. And so I started as a financial advisor. I use that word loosely when I talk about the, you know, what I was doing in 1989 as a financial advisor. I was 21 years old, starting in the business and giving, more or less collecting information and having other people help me give advice to clients, I would say would be the way to couch that, because I really didn't know much about the business, but that's a really good way to learn quickly is to be an advisor right out of school because you have to learn so many different aspects of our industry. 

So I started that way and then over time, I transitioned from being an advisor to the sort of corporate side where I was the one working with financial advisors instead of being the advisor. And so that was a path that I took starting in around 1994 when I joined what was called Providian at the time, and later became Aegon after an acquisition. And then we acquired Transamerica. And so I, my job at that point, my career path was to lead organizations for product development and the distribution side and working in partnership with financial advisors.

And interestingly, you know, I started working with the RIA community in ‘94 when I joined Aegon because we had created the first annuity product together with an advisory firm, actually, Mercer Global Advisors, which is a one of the largest now in that space. And we had created a product together that would have no commissions, no surrender charges, super low cost, and that was very innovative back in 94 in that space. And so that's when I really sort of started learning the business. And if you look back, that was an annuity product that had a couple of fund managers in it, which has come full circle. Two of those three first fund managers that we had in that that product were dimensional fund advisors and SEI. Which is actually quite amazing when you think about it because my career obviously took a path down 14 years with Dimensional and then six years with BlackRock. And here I am now at SEI. So pretty amazing when you look back in 94, two of the three fund managers ended up being places that I have called home.

[00:05:12] Jack Sharry: As big an industry as we're in, it’s a small industry as well in terms of, as you leave one door, you walk in another, you see some old friends. So, seems to be how it all works, right?

Michael Lane: It is.

Jack Sharry: So, I know I had this question and I'm sure many others did as well when the announcement was made you were leaving BlackRock, obviously the world's largest asset manager, and you decided to make the move to SEI. I should also note, not only the world's largest asset manager, but as I understand it, you oversaw the biggest part of BlackRock in terms of revenues. Please correct me if I'm off there. The big question, why'd you make the move?

[00:05:44] Michael Lane: Yeah. So it's never easy to move from one firm to another. It's, it is much easier to stay the course and to continue down a path that you're on. But when you see big macro trends taking place, like we're seeing, and we can spend a lot of time on this, and it's not going to be a surprise to anybody in the industry that has been involved.

There's this massive consolidation that has been taking place in the RIA business. You look back when I started working with RIAs in 1994, there were a handful and the largest was maybe a hundred million under management. And today you look across that business, particularly in the advisor community, although you see consolidation of offices in the wirehouse space, in the independent wealth management business, the LPLs of the world. You see these very large sort of super OSJs that are being developed. And so there's this consolidation taking place in multiple spaces within the industry, including banking. And in the RIA space, particularly, you look at what is happening there, where now you look back 94, the largest being a hundred million.

Today, you have RIA firms like Focus and Cerity Partners and Corient and Mercer and others that range in size from a billion to 400 billion of assets under management. And so with that consolidation that's taken place in that space, what was becoming very clear is there was this continued desire to do more with fewer. And so as you look around the marketplace, there are very few providers that exist out there of solutions to work in partnership with the advisor community that can do as many things as an SEI can do. And again, when they say do more with fewer, it isn't always just do more with somebody that has more investment products. And it is do more with technology, do more with professional services, do more with lots of different aspects of what advisors need in order to provide a, a more robust offering and solution set to a clients at a lower price. And that's what I would say the, the old sort of bundling services together. If there's a way to do that where you can do more with fewer and look at the partnership holistically, there should be ways to be able to deliver a better outcome at a lower price then for the advisors. And so that was the driving force. I absolutely adore BlackRock. I love the people I had the opportunity to work with there for a little over six years. Tremendous experience working there. Tremendous people. I was having dinner not too long ago with a former associate of BlackRock as well, who's leading a very large asset manager now. And, you know, we were remembering how important of a, of a piece of our, you know, our history and our career being at BlackRock is.

But when I think about the future of where the business is going, having custody, having wealth tech, having alts and alts platforms, having the ability to administer assets, having all of those things, and also to have the investment portfolios, that was very attractive when an outreach came in from SEI to have a discussion.

[00:08:51] Jack Sharry: So one of the things that I'm curious about as you're thinking about where you've now find yourself at SEI. I had the same question when I first looked up. Interesting. There's a lot of cool stuff. They're kind of quiet. Who are they? Where do they sit, what do they do? And I frankly didn't know anyone. I didn't know the people. And they were a client, by the way. I didn't happen to work on that particular situation, but just was a quiet company. With Ryan Hicke becoming CEO a couple years ago, they've gotten a lot louder, and I think they're going to get louder still. So talk about that as you, I'm sure you did, had your own version of that education of yourself around what it is and where it's going and so forth. Talk about that transition as you dug in, what you learned, and ultimately, it moved you to move. So talk a little bit about that whole process as you investigated.

[00:09:36] Michael Lane: You're a hundred percent right. I mean, one of the biggest mysteries I'd say of SEI is just the fact that so few people know what we do. When I speak to people that are very ingrained in our business and have tremendous experiences in our business, and I bring up SEI, you know, you kind of get that, you know, I even do it when I say it, you know, sort of the tilting of the head, like a dog looking at you, a little confused, you know. And trying to figure out like, so what do you guys do anyway? You know, I was even receiving messages from a friend who was trying to figure it out. Like, okay, so you do this but you don't do, you know? And so that's one of the biggest challenges I'd say for people on the outside who are excited about the, like you said, sort of this more awareness, becoming aware, you know, people are becoming more aware of where SEI is and what they do. But they only typically know one of like nine or ten different pieces of what the company is actually about. And that's one of the big challenges is it was really difficult to find information about who the firm is.

Part of that is because it was a firm of independent firms, basically running independent of one another, very entrepreneurial focused, and there was very little cross pollination of information across, even within the firm, let alone nothing really on the outside. That to me, some people would maybe be a little nervous about that and shy away from it. I look at that as incredible opportunity because there's an ecosystem that exists that everybody is clamoring for a more integrated technology stack. Well, that exists actually. Just people don't know it actually exists.

There are so many different pieces of that ecosystem that are being tied together, if not already tied together, that can more easily be fused than various companies who actually have no relationship together. And that's one of the challenges I'd say for advisors, is trying to find ways to fuse all these different component pieces that are so important to run a business. And that's what I saw when I, when I dug deeply into SEI that there were these component pieces that had been tied together, but there were still pieces that hadn't been, how do we bring that together?

LifeYield will be a great example of that, of another component piece that'll be incredibly helpful at delivering a better experience for clients. So that's what got me excited, but it's also one of the biggest challenges. It's going to take some time. It's not like overnight you can go out and tell people who you are and what you do. In fact, working on a deck that actually could tell people what we do, you know, I've been here three and a half, four months now, and I've been working on that for two and a half months of, you know, the time here of getting that together. And I think we almost have it, but it, it is amazing. Every time you think you're done, you realize there's like two more businesses that I didn't even know we owned, you know, that you have to bring in again. So I think that's one of our biggest opportunities. One of our challenges for sure, but also one of the biggest opportunities.

[00:12:56] Jack Sharry: Yeah, so it's been fascinating because we too had a similar experience. Those of us that came over from the, the LifeYield side, we just see tremendous opportunity, all these different businesses and unlike a lot of wirehouses and other big asset managers, you talk about silos is I don't think of SEI as siloed so much as they just had these different businesses doing their thing really strong in their, in their particular area, but not cross-pollinating like they might no issue other than they were just busy doing their work, doing a good job. One of the things I see as I understand it and look forward to hearing more about is moving from that at SEI, moving from that more inward focus to a more outward focus. I've heard Ryan Hicke talk about that. We've had him on the podcast. It's really about telling the story, about making some noise, about letting people know what the capabilities are. That's well underway. A lot more to go for sure. Talk a little bit about that. You're putting together a strategy and plan. It's in, in formulation as I understand it, but share, if you will, to a degree, what does that look like as you start to connect dots across the SEI enterprise and make it available more, more fully to the asset management and wealth management marketplace.

[00:14:03] Michael Lane: Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at an example, I won't use names, but if you look at an, the example of in an area of the marketplace, let's say fund managers, that you might think of historically, as fund managers, we've been having very interesting summits with many different partners. Many of my former colleagues at BlackRock who are, you know, involved in leadership roles at different firms now where we are getting together to talk about "how do we work together?" Well, part of that is actually they have to understand what we do and who we are and all the capabilities so that we can then define two or three projects that we can work on together.

And so we're doing that with multiple different relationships in the alternative and private market space as well as in the public space. And now the goal will be to do that as well in markets that we've actually not served, which is the larger RIAs, the home offices is some of the most sort of relevant, from a scaled perspective of the advisor businesses and actually sitting down with them and learning about where those firms directionally are going. What are the pain points of those firms? Having them understand, not a full show and tell of everything we do, but you know, an understanding of who we are, what we deliver, where's our real core businesses and, and our strengths, and then finding ways that we can work on a few projects together. That's at a really high level, one of the things that we need to be doing with the external world.

When you say stop looking internally and look externally, well, part of that is actually sitting in the room with senior executives of each firm and finding ways that we can actually partner together that are, that are differentiated and unique. And then the internal aspect of that, so that's like stop looking internal, look more external. But when you do look internally, even today we had a meeting between our banking business and our advisory business, and it is so remarkable how all of these things are converging even within the banking space and the typical traditional financial advisor space. There's such convergence taking place and so, you sit in a room with the people that never had sat in the room really with the advisor side of the business, and you listen to where they're going and the opportunities that exist. And it's all overlapping with everything we're talking about on the advisor side of the business too.

But then you go one step further and you sit in the room with our OCIO business and our advisor business and one of the big macro trends that we're seeing right now is a number of firms are out buying OCIO businesses. And they're buying those for multiple reasons. I have theories on why they're buying those. Part of it is more expertise in the private market space and a lot of that business in the OCIO space, the allocations include private markets, and so there's a lot of due diligence that's been done, and so that's helpful in terms of expanding into the private market space. But it's also a business that is difficult. Some of these small OCIO plans are difficult to administer for larger OCIO businesses, so you need better representation around the country that could be more local to serve some of those. And so by coming together, you get a better service model for the client and, and you also get some real value adds in terms of the OCIO capabilities within those firms.

Well, we're one of the largest OCIO providers in the country. We have a very unique system that we use for our OCIO business, very goals based approach, and you don't have to necessarily go buy an OCIO, you could actually tap into ours if you're a financial advisor. But there's never been a conversation between the groups to do that.

And so now we're having those conversations. There's been ideas about maybe they could help serve some of those, but how do we actually use the talent and the technology and the capabilities and bring that OCIO mindset to help a financial advisor firm who has a very sophisticated CIO department align some of the things that they're in need of, that they would like to explore, that they would like to deepen their capabilities with something we already have.

And so bringing these things together, that gets me like, quite frankly, super excited about the talent that exists within SEI that has quite frankly, never cross pollinated into other areas of need in the industry.

[00:18:09] Jack Sharry: So a related, different but related, kind of opportunity is the whole concept of multi-account management, unified managed household. And what has struck me, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is that SEI’s background around being a back office operator, I think it's the largest back office operator for mutual fund industry as industries, as the asset management business moves away from old style mutual funds to other things, they need someone to still process that business and SEI is the leader. So it knows how to process at scale large volumes. And it also has an asset management business, which is quite strong that you lead and can be played out in a variety of ways, as you've just described.

But ultimately what I see down the road—I'd love to get your thoughts on this—is that this all comes together as how do you connect the dots, hence the multi account, the UMH. That's where you bring in issues of tax and risk, and how do you coordinate that across multiple accounts and portfolios. So it seems like a real opportunity.

And given the back office wherewithal, the technological legacy and capabilities at SEI, it seems like sort of ripe to really serve the industry and also this outward looking how do you work with different asset managers, wealth managers, RIA is, et cetera. Talk a little bit about that, how that comes together because that seems like ultimately where I think SEI really leads the industry and has the opportunity, I should say, to lead the industry because all this is in formulation. This is in development as we speak.

[00:19:34] Michael Lane: Yeah, it, well, it's interesting. The pieces have been desirable for many, many years. I, I used to do talks on asset location back in the nineties. Nobody could do it, you know, systematically. It was at best on an Excel spreadsheet. But, you know, it was one of those things that everybody was talking about is how do I hold certain assets in certain tax vehicle… tax protected vehicles and other assets where there's no tax protection, but there's, you know, much more tax efficiency. Like, how do I look, not just at each individual account as a separate standalone allocation, but how do I look at the allocation overall and have a tax overlay, tax management, a systematic approach to asset location, and do it all across whatever the vehicle is, whether it's an ETF mutual fund, individual security. A car, you know, whether you're a car guy like I am, you know, whatever the asset is that you own, how… it would be wonderful if I could look at all of these things as a portfolio and then find a way to efficiently trade these things across all of them.

That has been what everybody has been searching for, and if you look at what I think is happening in our industry, is you also have this sort of bifurcation that's starting to happen where you, you use beta, you know, index funds, very low cost and expensive exposures to certain parts of the market, and you combine that with private markets. Which is where a lot of people are starting to take more and more of their active risk is going into the private market space versus the publicly traded active mutual funds. We just, the numbers are very glaring as to what's happening there.

And that is also a space that is a little challenging because it requires some interesting technology to enable you to move between these vehicles, some of which have liquidity constraints.

And so as the market continues to go down this path of looking for unified households, looking for asset location, looking for tax overlay, looking for ways of creating alpha from things other than active management in public markets, but looking for tax as a beta source… as an alpha source, and looking at private markets as an alpha source. I think that is all coming to a head right now.

That is quite frankly why when I did get here and I saw that we were talking to LifeYield, I got excited about it because I was working on a project in my previous firm for a client that was doing exactly that. They wanted to be able to use a certain type of investment product for all qualified money, a certain type of investment product solution set for all non-qualified money. They wanted to be able to systematically take anybody that would had more than a certain amount of money and do an asset allocation for that, and a certain amount of money for a certain allocation for anybody that had less than a certain amount of money to, to put in that. And do all of that for the same price.

Regardless of what you went into, regardless of whether you’re using ETFs, individual securities, whatever it may be, other than the private market space, that you would, the client would have the same price then for those things. And to do that, you need technology. That is not something you're going to do on the back of an envelope. And quite frankly, when we went out and looked around at all the different technology resources that existed out there, it just didn't exist. So that's why I was super excited when I got here and started digging into LifeYield.

[00:22:40] Jack Sharry: Yeah. Yeah. Lots of exciting stuff coming. So much we could keep talking about, but we do try to keep our discussions to a half an hour. I think we're going to exceed that, which is perfectly fine. So we've covered a lot of ground in terms of stuff you're looking at, opportunities that you've come to know and understand at SEI, how do you bring it all together? It seems like one of the challenges… you're, you're, it's an embarrassment of riches, if you will, in terms of the capabilities that exist and are being now connected and tied together and really creating opportunity where you can, you know, we haven't talked about distribution, but all of this leads to if you start to connect these dots, you should be growing your net new assets. That's the experience we've had at Morgan Stanley. They're the fastest growing in net new assets because they have pulled so much together. They have a lot more to go. Everyone does, but they happen to be the leader. How do you see it coming together over the next few years as you have so many opportunities and so much that you could prioritize? How do you pull it together?

[00:23:34] Michael Lane: Yeah. No, it's a, you would, it's a great question. And you would love, if you went to my home right now in Austin, Texas, you would laugh because if you walk into one of the rooms, I have probably 130 sticky notes of different colors on a, a floor to ceiling window that I got, you know, bored during the holidays at one point and I was like, gosh, you know, I just, I'd done everything I could do, you know, that I needed to do around the house and my kids are older. And so I was like, okay, I got to start figuring this out. So I started making this sort of a matrix of red, yellow, green with various colors to define different things, and that is the challenge, and what became very clear is when you put it up on the wall, there's so much. It is, the challenge is when you have so many, to your point, riches available to you. You have to be super careful that you don't chase everything.

[00:24:25] Jack Sharry: Yes, yes.

[00:24:25] Michael Lane: The outcome from that process, which then was put into an Excel spreadsheet, was that we are going to have to prioritize the things that require us to do as little development. There's, so there's going to be a short, intermediate, and long term. Like immediately sort of, you know, we have all of these capabilities that are already part of an ecosystem, so where can we take that, that we haven't taken that? And that's going to be sort of step one is.

If you look at the advisor space, that is the space that has, I'd say the most immediate opportunity, advisor and banking space, to take this ecosystem that includes a full turnkey solution set. It's for, it may not be for every client, it may not be for every advisor, but there are going to be, I think for a lot of these, particularly these very significant firms out there, if they could outsource, use a shared service that is a completely intertwined ecosystem that would lower the risk, trading, all of the different things that are like challenging for certain types of clients, and they could offload that.

Like I think that we could be very interesting in that space for some of the most significant RIAs in the country. And so we've never talked to them about it. We've never brought this idea out. And so that'll be probably our first new business that we will be creating is how do we take this ecosystem into the, the largest of the advisory firms.

And then the big question mark will be long term, when you look at this matrix of like 15 different things we could deliver and serve an advisor with, you know, all these different capabilities, all these different segments of potential clients. We are going to have to prioritize what we need to build, what we need to develop and, and to come up with a different mindset. I'd say the mindset that we have to be really careful not to have is, “we can't do that because...” Like when you, you hear that a lot, well, “we can't do that because…”, “we can't do that because…”, and that drives me crazy. What I like is sort of the, the mindset of, “we could if…” So it's the half glass empty, half glass full kind of thing. Well, we could do that if, and then it starts the creative juices flowing of like, so what would we have to do to be successful at better serving that segment of the financial advisor community or that segment of the institutional community?

Like, that's what gets me super excited is how we start thinking about the what ifs, documenting those what ifs, figuring out what we can actually do over the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months, and then bringing that story out into the marketplace that's easy to digest, consume, understand. Like that's what's going to be my focus for the next two, three years.

[00:26:56] Jack Sharry: Very excited, Michael. Very excited. So glad to be on this journey with you and thanks for this conversation. We can keep going, but we will limit it for now. We will definitely have you back. There's a lot more we could cover. Any key takeaways you'd like to leave our audience before we say farewell for now?

[00:27:13] Michael Lane: The only thing I'd say is every person I talk to when I say what you know, define SEI for me, they all define it differently and it's always small. I would encourage anybody who has not ever been to the SEI campus in Oaks, Pennsylvania. If you ever want to see the scale of what SEI is, it's quite amazing. You've been there, you've seen it.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, it’s stunning. Stunning.

Michael Lane: Remarkable. I'm, I'm in our Idea Center today doing this podcast in the Idea Farm, and there is, I would love to bring more clients into the Oaks campus. It is phenomenal here. It's a little snowy outside today, but it's a phenomenal place to bring clients and the clients of clients. I think it's such a great atmosphere. So I'd say that my biggest takeaway from this is whatever you thought SEI was probably isn't what it is. And so I hope we have an opportunity to spend a lot more time with the advisor and institutional community to better help them understand who we really are.

[00:28:06] Jack Sharry: Yeah. Yeah. Exciting times ahead. It's really, I look forward to it. I join you in that enthusiasm and excitement. So, one last question before we say farewell for now. Always my favorite. What do you do outside of work that you're excited or passionate about that people might find interesting or surprising?

[00:28:23] Michael Lane: Interesting. Well, I, what my wife will tell you, if you were to ask her that question, she would say, one of the biggest challenges for me is I, I have so many interests outside of the industry. I love the industry, I spend way too much time in the, probably 80 hours a week in the industry. But then when I'm not doing this, probably the number one thing that I spend my time scheduling is to be on the tennis court.

[00:28:43] Jack Sharry: Oh, really? Interesting.

[00:28:44] Michael Lane: And, so yeah, I was a competitive player growing up. I played in college, I played after college, and I still enjoy the game. And in fact, last night I was watching a qualifying match of the Australian Open with one of the people I practice with. And so unfortunately he lost in the qualifying match, but he is, he's doing great. Back up in the top 200.

[00:29:03] Jack Sharry: That's another thing we share. I used to be a tennis pro, not… teaching pro, not at the level I'm hearing you play at, but way back when I used to teach tennis through college and actually through my twenties.

Michael Lane: Oh, that's excellent.

Jack Sharry: We'll talk about that for another time. So…

Michael Lane: Yeah.

Jack Sharry: Terrific. Well, Michael, this has been great. Really have enjoyed the conversation. I was, I had high expectations. You've exceeded them massively. So thank you. Not only for what you shared, but I think where we're headed together. So for our audience, thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we're doing here at WealthTech on Deck, we're available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All of our episodes are there, along with blogs and curated content from many folks around the industry. Michael, thanks again. This has been a real pleasure.

Michael Lane: Thank you, Jack. This was fun.

[00:29:53] Intro: Thanks for listening to this episode of WealthTech on Deck, our ongoing conversation about improving financial outcomes for all. This podcast is brought to you by LifeYield and produced by Reverb. Subscribe to future episodes in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can connect with our host, Jack Sharry, on LinkedIn and Twitter. And for more information about our perspective on the future of financial advice, visit our website at lifeyield.com.