Jack Sharry: Hello everyone, thanks for joining us for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. It seems everyone I speak with lately is focused on one or more of the following, organic growth, tax optimization, alternatives and private investments, artificial intelligence, unified managed households or UMH, or frankly all of the above. In fact, it’s mostly all of the above. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re speaking with two people who have been deeply influencing how AI reshapes financial services, Bassam Chaptini and Rabih Ramadi. Bassam and Rabih are the co-founders of Avantos, a next-generation AI native operating system, transforming how financial institutions onboard and serve clients. Their work connects products, service teams, workflows, and client expectations to a unified platform, all powered by AI. Bassam is a former McKinsey and Company Partner, and Rabih is a former KPMG Senior Partner, each bringing deep industry experience and expertise in this new wave of intelligent client servicing infrastructure. Today, we’re going to catch up with both to hear what financial services are asking them today, how AI is shifting client expectations, why they built Avantos and really what Avantos is and where they believe the future of advisor platforms is headed. Bassam and Rabih, welcome to WealthTech on Deck. Always great to have innovators like you on our podcast. Welcome.
Bassam Chaptini: Thank you, Jack.
Rabih Ramadi: Thank you, Jack. Great to be here.
Jack Sharry: So before we get into a number of things that we just discussed, I would like to have our guests talk a little bit about who they are, what they’re about, what the company’s about. So, Robbie, why don’t you kick things off? Tell us a little bit about your background and then how that led to Avantos. So give us a background on where you fit and what you do. And then, Bassam, we’re going to talk about the same thing on your side.
Rabih Ramadi: As quick background of myself. I’m the co-founder of Avantos with my good friend, Bassam, here. And we started the company with the vision of changing the way client lifecycle management is done in the industry and financial services. Prior to Avantos, I was a founding team member of an enterprise tech company called Unqork. And prior to that, I led capital market consulting for KPMG. Throughout my experience, Bassam and I have really focused on how can we help fintech or financial service organizations optimize the way they can onboard and manage clients. So we had the idea with AI coming in the industry to build an operating system, specifically focused on the way financial institutions can onboard and service clients. So we built an operating system specifically focused for that space. We’re focusing for now on the wealth management industry, but our ambition is to replicate this across financial service segments.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha.
Bassam Chaptini: Yeah, and Jack, thanks again for having us. Yeah, my background is actually fairly similar to Rabih as well. So co-founder of Avantos, founding member of a fintech company called Unqork before as well. Before that, I was a partner at McKinsey, so spent a lot of time dealing with the client management problems for big enterprise. So a lot of the problems we’re tackling today with net new capabilities, which is AI behind the scene. And we’ll come back to how we’re using all of that. And before that, I’ve done a lot of my research in a prior life at this point in AI as well. And so have deep understanding of the technical application of how we can take AI to a lot of our clients and how to get the value out of it.
Jack Sharry: So I want to dig in a little bit. Everywhere I go, I’m reading, hearing, talking about AI and my observation, there’s a whole lot of us that are curious, interested, know it’s the future, but not sure what to do with it. So Rabih, I’m going to get down to the nuts and bolts of it. So, I’m at an RIA. What are you doing for me? Where do you guys fit? What do you do? How does it play out? Describe that sort of infrastructure, enterprise, or that layer that you all talk about. Talk about how it plays out for a real life client situation. We’re going to onboard the Sharry family and there’s an advisor that we’re working with. How do you guys make it easier, faster, better?
Rabih Ramadi: The good thing, Jack, with the way we build and apply the AI is we started with the business problem, which is the way you do onboard and service client. And we use the AI to build it from scratch versus coming up with the AI feature and trying to solve for something. So specifically in this case of this family you mentioned, the idea for us is we start by onboarding the client with AI helping in everything from document ingestion to understanding basically the profile of the client to pre-filling database on unstructured documents. But the key thing for us in that onboarding experience is we’re doing it for the client for multiple products at the same time. Our AI capabilities are multi-products. We believe that the client should be onboarded once to multiple custodians, multiple channels with one experience, one ability to pre-fill data and to ingest data and to integrate with downstream systems. And once the client becomes a client of the institution, the idea is to automate proactively all the ongoing servicing of the client. So if the clients want to add a new product, they want to change any of the account structures, they want to add the beneficiary, all these events we strongly believe should be automated through AI, but proactively detecting when these events should happen before even the client asks for it, and then automating the workflows and underlying integrations.
Jack Sharry: So if I understand you, Rabih, what you’re saying basically is that you’re a very fancy CRM that knows everything about me and you get smarter and smarter with your AI capabilities where you’re going to know more and more about me and my family and my holdings and my documentation, all the information, financial information, you’re going to keep bringing that in to make it easier for the advisor to serve me better. Is that fair to say?
Rabih Ramadi: Yes, and unlike traditional CRMs, traditionally CRMs have been really focusing on understanding the client, the persona of the client. We change the definition to link it to the products and the people servicing the clients. We believe holistically to do the proper client relationship management, you need to understand three-dimension. You understand the clients and the client’s not just Jack. It’s basically your household structure, related parties, all the products that you own or you don’t own, but you can eventually own, and all the agents or the advisors, the operational people touching you in terms of servicing, that holistic view is the way we think is the future for basic client servicing.
Jack Sharry: So Bassam, wanna add to that? I’m getting that you’re basically getting a 360 degree view of the products I own, the people that serve me, my objectives, you know everything about me. Talk a little bit more about then how does that play out over time? In other words, I’m assuming this is all about providing better advice for me over time as a family.
Bassam Chaptini: That’s exactly right. And it’s all about deepening the client relationship. So a lot of the advisors have different views of the customer, of their clients, or don’t have enough time to service their customers well, or have the tools to surface insights for their clients to service them. Having a 360 degree view of your clients as an advisor is absolutely key to deepening the relationship for the clients. This includes not just being able to service your clients in a way that wasn’t possible before with AI surfacing a lot of the insights, but also taking on the administrative burden of the day-to-day things for advisors and make them more productive. And the key for us in Avantos, the way we built the company is around what we call the system of context. So in AI, the key things is context. It’s not just data. Everybody has a lot of data. There’s no lack of it. The key is how do you contextualize the data? And currently, if you go to a lot of the advisors, a lot of the wealth managers, context is completely fragmented. Operations have their own context. Advisors have their own context. A lot of it is in people’s head or on PDFs and things like that. And so what we did, this is why we say we are an AI native company, is we are that system of context. We literally built a knowledge graph around your clients, teams, products, and the journeys that your clients take. And then our AI has the same context as the advisor, so hence it truly, truly can be an assistant. And that has been game changer for Avantos users, Avantos advisors. Now an AI can understand the context of a conversation with the client. You can sit with the client. The client can tell you, I have a newborn in the family. Our AI understands that, by the way. The advisor doesn’t need to trigger it. And it will actually highlight opportunities that advisors need to talk to clients about. Maybe open a 529, maybe update your beneficiary, maybe open a trust depending on who the client is. All of these are part of that newborn in the family client journey that an AI can dynamically construct. We always have a human in the loop, so the advisor at the end of the day needs to make the call. But what we found is that it streamlines all of that. It also brings in opportunities that clients didn’t think about serving their clients. So it’s been really a game changer from that perspective.
Jack Sharry: So Rabih, let’s apply it to a term that gets a lot, it’s been a buzzword around our industry, unified managed household. So a lot of what you’re describing is the ability to look at the full Sharry, I’m talking about my personal situation, my family, my wife and four sons and their wives and our grandchildren and their children, our grandchildren. So you’re to know everything about the Sharry family. You’re going to know what we own presently, what we might own someday, about the 529 plans that we have set up, should set up, because we have some new ones that have arrived just recently, all that kind of stuff. Talk a little bit about that unified managed household and how what you do makes that real. Because so far it’s a good idea, but most advisors can’t pull it off because they just don’t have the tools and the wherewithal to really look at my full family picture from an investment wealth management picture.
Rabih Ramadi: So Jack, the key thing for us is the data structure we created to create this unified managed household includes some very advanced capabilities to model a complex household. So some of our clients we have are private banking clients. And as you can imagine for them, it’s not just a household. Sometimes it’s a household within a household, and then trust, and a lot of LLCs. So we built a data model that is sophisticated to handle what we think are the most complex unified managed households. And that is the brain that our clients is using. One, to really recommend additional products to clients, to service the clients, but at the same time, we are feeding other platforms that are needed to manage the portfolio of the clients. For example, we are feeding the portfolio allocation system, the tax holding systems, the tax return system, the tax planning. All of these infrastructures or all of these systems need the information to optimize the life and health of a client or the portfolio of a client. So we’re using it two ways. One is in the servicing space itself, trying to get ahead of things in terms of predicting or being proactively recommending actions you should do for the client based on that householding structures, but at the same time help other systems like portfolio management or tax loss harvesting in terms of optimizing the portfolio of the client or their financial plans.
Jack Sharry: Bassam, help me out here. At SEI, we bought into Microsoft Copilot. I use it every day. It’s helped me write emails. It’s very… frankly, as I gather, I’m barely out of… up at plate for the first time, barely in the first inning. And that’s what I’m doing. But what you guys are talking about sounds like we’re in extra innings and you have the wherewithal to do anything and everything. So take me through understanding what so much of us are doing, trying to figure out AI at a very low level. And what you’re really talking about is infusing it in the whole infrastructure so that onboarding, advice, guidance over time for the full family with all its complexities, better decisions are made, so just take me through what that looks like if I’m a client.
Bassam Chaptini: I mean, it is truly end to end. What we are talking about, it’s exactly what you mentioned, Jack. It’s not a specific capability, a better way to write an email or even like more complex stuff, like a better way to optimize your portfolio or your capabilities. That’s going to evolve and that’s going to be very much affected by AI. Like you’re going to have very specialized AI agents doing all that stuff. What we are talking about is an operating system to bring all of that together. We go back to like a system of context. How does agents, specialized agents or our own Avantos agents come together, play together to service your clients? And what it means for the end user, the clients, they’re gonna get better services from your advisors because they would be thought through from an inside perspective. They have a better view on what they have. They’re gonna get what we call their own, I’m going to call it a butler within SEI, within every wealth manager, a client advocate for them inside. That’s our AI looking around and saying what we have done for Jack. If Jack, you are a client, we’re going to have an AI just looking around and say, okay, great. Jack is delayed with opening his account. What’s going on? And we have an AI agent going and literally advocating for you within SEI and surfacing to the advisors so that the advisor can do that. So we think about it like that. At the end of the day, advisors are happy when their clients are happy. And we’re creating those AI butlers within your organization to make sure your clients are happy, so to speak. Does that make sense?
Jack Sharry: Yeah, totally. It’s kind of funny story I have for you guys and our audience. So I recently switched to a firm that has LifeYield’s capabilities in terms of a unified managed household. And the particular firm has the wherewithal to use LifeYield’s asset location tools and income generation tools and rebalancing tools and so on. And the advisor who is a CFA, a CFP, who really knows the systems and the stuff, didn’t know how to use LifeYield’s capabilities at his firm. So I was an AI agent of a sort in that I was telling him how to use the asset location tool, not in detail, but I was pointing him to experts within the firm that could help him. And he did what I needed. He helped me in terms of addressing the tax issues, but it sort of strikes me as you’re speaking. And I’m also trying to help our audience understand as I try to understand all this stuff. I was playing that role, but that’s, I’m not an expert in that regard. I just know it’s there and he ought to check it out with experts and utilize it. So really what we’re talking about, what you all are doing is you can get the full picture of the client. You can provide guidance. You can take in all the information around their tax situation around their, the structure of their accounts, their trusts, their, their qualified, non-qualified, Roths, all of that kind of stuff, 529s. Take it all together, make sense of it, manage the portfolio as they wish, minimize taxes over time. Am I getting this right? You guys are really kind of pulling it together to make this real. Rabih, you want to take it from there?
Rabih Ramadi: And I would say in a systematic way that humans cannot do because like it’s just a lot of information. So rather than relying on humans to think through things at the end, the delivery is done by humans. But we are basically helping this advisor to make client servicing a systematic approach. So it’s not left to somebody thinking about the client and they have a big portfolio of clients, but it’s basically now it’s a structural way, systematic way to make it very consistent. And as Bassam mentioned, effectively, we are, basically have AI agents who are advocating for each client the best way to service them.
Jack Sharry: So I’m going to ask you, Rabih, if you would take it a step further. A few weeks ago now that we saw this, but the big meltdown of LPL and Ameriprise and Schwab and all the big firms, wealth management firms, when Altruist made an announcement on a product called Hazel, which was a fine little tool. It was a little AI tool, basically. It’s a holistic plan for those that are paying attention to such things. And with some AI elements. So it was a nifty little tool. But the market read it as the changing of the industry forever. My take on what happened there, of course, the market way overreacted as it does, especially as new things are coming on board. And really what they were fearful of is what you guys have built. They didn’t know that at the time. And I know you’ve gotten a lot of attention in the press because you take that concept of bringing in tax information and all the rest of the information we’ve been discussing and do smart stuff with it. So I’m kind of curious what’s been the reaction in the marketplace as people understand you were the guys they probably should have been scared about.
Rabih Ramadi: We don’t view ourselves as like, we’re not competing with financial service institution. We view ourselves as enabling them to be successful in the AI age. We’re not obviously ever going to give advice. We’re never going to have advice on the platform. This is not our business model. Our business model is to help these institutions adapt to the AI age, which is like, it’s an expectation now. The news, yeah, it wasn’t surprising to us. It’s going to happen. Others are going to basically do it anyway. It just is a new way fundamentally similar to how the world moved from analog to the internet age. Like this is, it’s happening, it’s going to happen. If anything, it’s happening way more rapidly than the dot-com type. Like it’s happening super fast. And our business is to basically build product and functionality and capability to help financial institutions move to the AI age and be very effective and efficient.
Jack Sharry: You want to add to that, Bassam? What I’m thinking about here is that really, it is a general theme around AI these days about something to be feared. I just see it as an enabling capability to make things go faster, better. Frankly, it’s going to help me, whoever me is, have more money, whether I’m an institution or I’m an end client. I’m going have more money because you’re going to help me be more efficient. And if I’m an advisor, I’m going to operate more efficiently. I’m not going have to remember things. I’m not going to have to hope nothing gets dropped through the cracks. So expand on that if you would, because I really see it as an enabler of human advice, not a replacement.
Bassam Chaptini: We are on the same page here. We exactly see it the same way. It is an enabler, and it removes the things that get in the way of relationship. And this way, advisors can really focus on the relationship and on the insights with their clients versus hunting down tasks that should be taken care of by what we think are the AI agents behind the scene doing the work that is necessary to service your clients, offload it, and then the advisors can focus on the client. More importantly, now it also enables advisors to service a broader sets of clients. Because before advisors don’t have enough time to service a lot of households that they want to serve, they just don’t have the time. With that productivity and with that new way of enabling it, it enables them to now go and service a broader audience and give them the advice that they ought to give.
Jack Sharry: So I’m gonna let our audience in on a little secret, not so secret, because we’re pretty outspoken on the matter. So as I’m reading about it, because I’m at a company that’s doing a lot of interesting and cool things. I read about it like everybody else and had to turn to my colleagues and say, so what’s this? Of course, I went to my co-pilot friends and they told me and filled me in on what you guys do. And one of things that I spent a little bit of time on at SEI is just developing the narrative because there’s so much interesting and cool stuff that the company at large is doing that I wanted to make sense of it. So you guys probably haven’t heard what I’m about to share, but for our audience who pays attention to some of the things I talk about in terms of putting it all together, particularly around the UMH concept, here goes. SEI has invested in a company called Altigo. For years, it’s been a big player in the private investment space. It’s back office operator, largest processor of private credit. So between what it’s been doing over the past 10 plus years in terms of working with the likes of Morgan Stanley and many other big players in the alts space, Morgan Stanley Investment Management. They bought Altigo and have a platform and they’re building out what is now called SEI Access. So big in the alt space. They bought LifeYield a year or so, a little over a year ago. We’re about UMH, tax optimization, rebalancing, income generation. Oh, and we can also coordinate private and public investments to optimize for tax, liquidity, a bunch of different things you can do because you’re now dealing at the household level. A further investment was made in Stratos, which is an advisor, RIA, independent broker-dealer hybrid. That becomes the proving ground to doing all the things I just said and more on top of all the stuff SEI already does for banks, for brokerage firms, for its own advisors that custody assets at SEI. And all this is being brought together and what the role you all are playing is to make all that work for the benefit of our clients, whether they’re large wirehouses or they’re small independent broker dealers or they’re individual RIAs or big RIAs. So we’re really bringing it all together. So for those of you wondering where it all fits, we’re incorporating what Avantos do, We’re in the early stages of this. Oh, by the way, we just announced a deal with IBM where they’re helping us just make AI rampant throughout our system to have more, to reduce manual labor around all that we do around processing. So for those of you wondering how this plays out, we’re an infrastructure play on making it easier for advisors to do business, however, wherever you hang your shingle, whatever firm you work for. So I’m curious, were you guys aware of your role, the important role you’re playing at our firm and other firms? I know many other firms that you’re working with.
Bassam Chaptini: We’re very excited about that role. We’ve been talking with SEI and for a long time and even before the investment, we’re very excited about that role. And the partnership has been fantastic. And yeah, hopefully, SEI will leverage us to be part of the ecosystem that SEI brings to all of their clients. And so we’re very excited.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, because I was going to ask you about the future. I was curious how much, to what degree you guys were familiar with, but at least we had, and I’m sure you are. But for our audience who are less familiar with the details of either SEI or Avantos or any of the things I just mentioned, it’s about pulling it all together to make it easier for the advisor to do a better job for their clients. I don’t know, Rabih, if there’s anything you want to add to this discussion.
Rabih Ramadi: You know, we’re just saying basically like we’re super excited about the vision and the leadership of SEI. Like every engagement at SEI, we were pretty impressed. We love the vision that the company is aiming for and the fact we’re part of the vision makes us super excited.
Jack Sharry: Well, terrific. Well, this has been a lot of fun catching up. I appreciate you who know so much about the operating system and the AI and all the rest of it, speaking in language people like me can understand. So, and I know my audience appreciates it as well as we’re all trying to figure out how this plays out. But the good news is I think it enables advice and human advice at that so that everybody wins the investor, the advisor, and the firm. So, as we look to wrap up, one of the things we do with our guests, we ask them what they do outside of work. My guess is you guys are only working these days, but when you have a moment to take a breath, what do you guys do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about that people might find to be interesting or surprising?
Bassam Chaptini: I can maybe go first. Things I’m passionate about is work, like what we are doing is fundamental. And my kids, I have a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, and they’re just picking up lot of sports currently. And so I’ve been spending a lot of time with them on the tennis court whenever I can afford it. And so that’s been, something I haven’t played before, but my nine year old already beats me at this point.
Rabih Ramadi: And for me, beyond the 150% of the time I spend on events with Bassam. Like Bassam, by the way Bassam and I go all the way, we were roommates in undergrad. So we are on a personal level, also family friends and everything. But like Bassam, I have two daughters. I have nine year old and 11 year old. I spend a lot of time with them and they put actually even more than our clients the most pressure on me to make sure Avantos is working well. They keep asking me, they make sure like, make sure there are no bugs, daddy, and make sure it works well. How do you make sure? So they put me under a lot of pressure, which I really like. So good sounding ground for the software.
Jack Sharry: That’s great. That’s true. Gentlemen, thanks so much. I’ve been following you ever since I got the news, not that long ago. Fascinated by what you’re doing. Love the role that it plays because for those of us on the LifeYield side of things at SEI, we’ve been at this for 17 years. We had the longest startup, I think ever. And we needed guys like you to make it very real and very available to the marketplace because we think it’s important. So thank you for your good work. Thank you for this conversation. To our listeners, if you’ve enjoyed our discussion today, please rate, review, and subscribe to WealthTech on Deck. You can check us out at our website, wealthtechondeck.com for all past episodes and more industry insights. Gentlemen, once again, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.
Bassam Chaptini: Thank you, Jack.
Rabih Ramadi: Thank you, Jack.
