Ep #21: Data Integration Doesn’t Have to Be a Headache

Today on the Advisor Summit podcast, I'm excited to welcome Kyle Van Pelt, the co founder and CEO of MileMarker, a company that's truly transforming how financial firms use data and technology. Kyle's journey into finance has been anything but traditional. From professional sports to software to running a coffee shop, he's built a truly diverse background that gives him a fresh perspective on innovation and connection. Please welcome Kyle. And as we discuss one of my favorite topics, Data. Hi, Kyle. Welcome to the Advisor Summit. We're so excited to have you here.

Yeah, thanks, Molly. Thanks for having me. It's fun to be on this side of the microphone.

Yeah, I know I've, I've been. I. Like I said, I've been quietly kind of stalking your podcast as well as kind of your emails as that have been coming out and always learned something good. So it's fun to get the chance to interview for sure. I really enjoy what you've been doing at Mile Marker. I think this is going to be a great conversation around data. Obviously that's kind of where our hearts are attracted Advisor, but I think there's a lot to learn from you specifically, especially with the financial advisor industry. So we'll kind of dive right in and kind of learn about your path a little bit to Mile Marker. I mean, it's been anything traditional professional sports software, coffee shop owner, which we absolutely have to know your favorite coffee shop drink if you have one for certain. And then now you're obviously in finance tech founder. When you look back, what's one of the threads that like, really connects all of those experiences? Because that certainly is not a common the way to get into finance. And honestly, I'm still waiting for the one person that's like, I saw something on LinkedIn or I saw something on Indeed. And I came into the space this way because I feel like everyone has this, like, amazing story that they got into this journey on.

Yeah, Molly, it's. It's a great question. At the end of the day, I think I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. No, I was a very. I was a really competitive baseball player growing up. I got recruited pretty heavily out of school or going into college rather. And I always thought that was my plan and my path. I never really had a plan B. And then plans changed when I got to school and I kind of had to start figuring out what was next for my life. And so when it was no longer playing baseball after my first year at school, it became okay, how can I Work in sports. And so I studied sport management. I got into professional sports. I found out that really wasn't for me. Playing the game and working in the game are two very, very different things. And so that started a long journey of figuring out what I'm passionate about and where I'm at. And so I ended up in technology, kind of on accident, and really loved it. I got into it, I liked how innovative it was. I liked how the opportunities were for growth. Took a slight detour out of that, like you said, to start the coffee shop, and then ended up in financial services. And I think the thread that I found this maybe is going to sound really cheesy or basic, but I wanted to be in a place where it felt like we were helping people or that I was helping people. And so that was really personified. And I felt like all of these things came together because my first job in this space was at riskalyze and now nitrogen. And I remember all of these things coming together where the technology and the software background and wanting to help people. I remember the risk number being this big unlock for me because it just showed me that you could use software to help people better understand their finances. And we weren't just helping advisors run better practices. We were helping college educations get funded. We were helping retirements happen. We were helping, you know, second homes be built that grandkids could have wonderful experiences at and great memories. And all of that was because advisors and clients were able to have better conversations around money and around their risk tolerance. And so then that. And then what that helped me realize and where that comes to my marker and everything is, oh, it wasn't just helping people. It was. I really enjoy trying to take complex things and figure out how to make them simple so that people can have more success with those complex things.

Yeah, I feel like that's. I mean, that shows a lot to your character and your heart also is helping people. At the end of the day, I think everybody in this industry really has that goal of helping, you know, either retirees or, like you said, their kids or their grandkids. And that's what's really unique about our industry is a lot of people don't realize that it's people. It's not just accounts and numbers. And I always think of, like, the movies with quantum physics and numbers floating around. And at the end of the day, it's servicing people and their families. And that's what's really fun about, you know, this industry as a whole. But I think that's maybe what, what we can kind of lean on also is, you know, is that something that surprised you at ending up in financial services? I mean, your heart was to help others. Did you ever correlate that with financial services immediately? Or how did you kind of fall into Riskalize? What was that path like?

So shout out to Aaron Klein. I, you know, he was building Riskalize. I had a friend who was moving from the D.C. area to Atlanta and wanted to get involved in the technology scene. And so I was trying to make some introductions to him and all of that. Lo and behold, he gets a job at Risk. Lies not something I made an introduction for, but I had kind of been following them for a little while from afar. And so I said, hey, I, you know, I didn't think. Or how did you get hooked up with Riskalyze? And he said, well, they just opened an office in Atlanta. And he said, they're hiring and all of that type of stuff. And so I actually went on Twitter at the time and started sharing. Hey, this is this really cool company. They just opened an office in Atlanta. If anybody's looking for a new gig, like, this is a great place. And I really like what they're doing. And. And Aaron DMs me. And he goes, who are you? Why do you know who we are? And why are you promoting our company? Yeah, yeah. And so I kind of told him the story, which. The 32nd version for your audience is. Back in my very first technology job, I had no idea what I was doing or what was going on. And so I was, like, trying to read as much as I possibly could. And there was a venture capitalist name. Well, he's still in it. His name's Fred Wilson, and he was an early investor in Twitter and Foursquare and a host of other things. And he wrote this blog every day. And the blog was good. But what I found very unique is his comments section was this, like, community. And the same people would show up every day in his comments section on his blog. And it's sort of like cheers, you know, the same people would show up. Well, Aaron Klein was one of those people. And so I would go in there, and I still remember to this day when Aaron posted a link in the comment section there of the blog post where they had announced they were now selling to advisors. And that was when I kind of started following their journey and I stayed. Stayed into it. And so anyway, Aaron's like, how did you hear about us? And I told him the story. He's like, let's get on the phone, let's talk. And he's like, hey, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I'm, you know, doing this, I'm doing that. He's like, do you want to, do you want to come work for us? And you know, long story short, I started working there for them. And then that was where it did put two and two together, that financial services and software can really help the everyday people. And then just as a, as a quick aside too, I saw it in my parents life, right? So my parents have a, a really cool story and journey, but their financial advisor really helped them. And my dad taught me about the value of investing when I was younger because of that. But that's all because of a financial advisor who kind of changed my family's family tree and that allowed me to be the first one in my family to go to college and a couple of other things. So I'm a success story of the financial services industry, helping people.

Yeah, I think also shout out to Twitter if you're not on Twitter or X, what is it called now? If you're on indeed, go to Twitter. Is the, is the storyline here? That's still my takeaway from today. But no, I think it's true. Also, when you have a personal story that ties into it, that automatically is going to give you a lot of perspective in saying, hey, like I actually do. I saw this help me. I saw it help my family and my parents and myself and now I can kind of turn around and help others and that. So I think that's also what Mile Marker is doing. So let's kind of dive into milemarker and kind of the story and the vision. And I think what Mile Marker is really doing is tackling one of the biggest headaches of the financial services and that's data integration and ownership. And I will be the first one to say I am not an API expert, I am not a data. We do analytics for certain. That is our niche in our market. But the actual tech side is very interesting to me. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about like the gap that you potentially saw in the market that inspired you to kind of co found this company. And why, what need are you filling that mile marker for? Financial advisors?

Absolutely. I'm happy to share that. So at riskalyes, one of my jobs was to help build integrations. And we did, I think just north of 40 when I was there. And it was very good for our business and it was very helpful for our business. But one thing I learned is that in an industry where advice is the product that is being sold, there is no one path for everything. So I like to say if you took a household and you put them across the table from the five best advisors in the entire world, there's a very good chance that that household will get five different recommendations on what to do with their situation. From 5, objectively of the best advisors in the world. Well, it's really hard to build technology and integration paths when there's so much subjectivity and what the right thing is to do for people because it's personal. And there might be different opinions on what to do, and neither may be right or wrong. They're all just different options on paths to get to success. So that led me to realize that no matter how good an API was for these companies or anything like that, they were never going to be able to build every edge case, path or use case for every type of firm that's out there. And so these firms needed to have a flexible solution to be able to kind of take control of those integration pathways for themselves rather than relying on or having to work around whatever the limitations were of those companies. And shout out to all the technology companies out there, I know a vast majority of them absolutely want to serve their clients in the best way they can. But just like all of us, they have limited resources and limited budget. And when you're faced with, do I want to build 37 different ways that somebody can integrate my technology and Salesforce, or do I want to add new feature sets to my platform that's going to be a value add. They're going to pick adding new feature sets to their platform rather than all of these different integration pathways. So this is no fault to the technology companies on their own, but it just leaves this perpetual gap of RIAs or wealth management firms being frustrated because they can't get the technology to work exactly how they need it to for their workflows and their advice paths. And technology companies trying their best to serve these firms with their core genius, competency and the reason why you bought them in the first place. So Mile Marker enters the picture, inspired by some really successful firms, by the way. So firms like United Capital or even some of the Wirehouses, Carson and some of these others where they had these integrated unified advisor workstations that, you know, kind of pulled data from all of these operational platforms up into something that was really useful and valuable for the advisors to work off of. And we said, I don't think you need to have an eight or Nine figure per year tech budget to be able to make this happen. But what you do need is you need data centralized to be able to make it a reality. So we set out to solve that problem. We partnered with Snowflake, which in our opinion is the best cloud data warehouse platform in the world. We built all of the unique pipes to pull data from all of these third parties into Snowflake. And now you have true integration. When all of your data is in one place, we have integration. We don't have to worry about APIs between each other. I have all of the data integrated in one place in one database. And then mile marker built the ability to pull data directly out of Snowflake into software experiences so that you can have whatever path you want to serve those households the best way you can. And I'll just share a quick use case on that for some people. Actually most firms, you know, have different client levels. They might have a high net worth or an ultra high net worth or maybe a family office practice and they might have a mass affluent practice and they might have a, you know, a younger generation or Henry practice or something like that. They needed ways to deliver advice for each of those different type of client using the same types of data. But the offerings were different. Now they can do that because all of their data is together.

Gotcha. So you're taking it almost like this lake and then allowing them to decide which pathway that they want it to go, dependent on their office style. So really, mile markers for anyone. Would you say it's for any advisory practice just dependent on the path or style of office that you are?

I think that's correct. I mean, I would say with a little bit of the caveat that I think you have to have some complexity for it to make sense. I mean, if you are a solo advisor or an advisor with an admin or ops manager, there's probably not too much of a breakdown in what's happening with all of your data between you and one person. Start to get a handful of advisors or a lot of times when people come to us, they might have made their first acquisition and they're going, oh, wow, okay, this is pretty crazy. Now that we're pulling all of this other data in here and there's a lot of nuance to this and the way they build is different than the way we build and the way they handled CRM is different than the way we handled it. Even though we have the same two pieces of technology, it's a very different world. And we want to, you know, Create operational efficiency. That seems to be the big thing everybody's talking to us about is how do we create operational efficiency as we're growing the way.

Yeah, I feel like, especially with all these mergers and acquisitions that are happening, I feel like it's been increasingly quick that we've seen this, especially over the last year or two, that, you know, firms are just quickly being acquired. So I could see where this would be a huge asset to them to say, hey, like this is potentially how you did it in the past, but let's now pull it together, make it efficient, make it, you know, uniform so that we can actually look at this data. Is there anything within mile markers? So I understand, like you bring it into Snowflake from there. Is there like analytics that they're getting out of it? Is there different kind of avenues that they can go with that? How does that work? How is it a useful thing for them? Not just like having their data in one spot, but how do they actually take action from there?

Yeah. So two things I want to comment on your acquisition aspect because I think this is just important for people to know. So for as long as I've been in this industry, everybody's been talking about how the world is multi custodial. Everybody's trying to figure out how to solve multicastodial problems. Very true. What has not been talked about enough is that we are also now in a multi platform world. So because of all of the acquisitions, there are so many firms out there that have multiple portfolio management systems and multiple CRM, multiple branding tools and multiple whatever you want to call it, and you want to like, integration was hard before, but now when your firm has two portfolio management systems or three portfolio management systems, it's very difficult, especially for the executives, to get analytics out of that. Which brings us to the next point. So a lot of the firms that come to us, they have one person in their firm. We call them the XL wizard, who's responsible for exporting data out of those multiple portfolio management systems. And maybe the CRM and maybe their accounting tool like a Sage intact or a Netsuite or a QuickBooks. And they're doing Pivot tables and Vlookups and all kinds of Excel wizardry to help answer simple questions like what were our new net new assets across the entire business? You know, what is our client profitability across the entire business? You can't do that by logging into each of these. So Mile Marker does help with that by getting all of that data into one place. And then we have built this really beautiful overlay that connects what I call advice creation. So advisors are making recommendations and proposals to clients with advice execution, which is where you are executing trades, rebalances, cashiering, all of this type of stuff. A lot of firms have really powerful operational setups in the back end. But there's no easy way for advisors to connect to those. We have all of the data they have, we have a service portal request system that they can go and ask things of that ops team for any household. They can see all of that data at their fingertips and it really makes their lives way more efficient when it comes to making a proposal into the service center and then the operational excellence from the firm happening. So a combination of analytics to your point and then also how do we give these advisors tools to make requests of these centralized service orgs that they work under?

Right, Because I mean like you said there is multiple and it's not always a straightforward shot to say hey, I just need this from one company. Now you're working with several of them and how do you make it cohesive and straightforward? So I mean I love what my OMAR does. I think what you're doing is helpful to the advisor office, but not even just the advisor themselves, it's the teams. I'm such an ally for teams and I feel like that's where really the teams of these firms come into play. And it says okay, you know, my advisor walks in and they do want to know that information. They want to know what's my acquisition costs, what net new assets have I had over the past quarter. And it's making it simplistic for the teams to get that type of information for from a one stop shop place versus all of these other avenues for sure. So I love it. I also know like financial services in general can be really slow to adapt new tech. I think that that is one thing that it's funny to me because I feel like with financial services new marketing ideas pop up and everybody jumps on it, right? Like it's like this shiny new object and everybody runs toward it and they're like, well spend all the money, we don't even care. You know, like let's just try it out. And to adopt new tech is very slow moving in our, in our industry. How do you get firms to embrace this innovation without overwhelming them? Because I feel like a lot of the words use, you know, API and integrations. I feel like a lot of times advisors are like no, no thank you, I don't want it. You know, they're just there hesitant and so how do you kind of get over that barrier and educate them properly to say, no, this will help you.

In the long run in many ways. I actually think what you just stated is the unlock. So we are trying to help them get the most out of the current technology that they have. So a lot of people on calls with me, they'll hear me say this all the time, which is, the grass is green where you water it. So many firms will get so frustrated with one of their pieces of tech and they're like, oh, that's it, I'm going to move, I'm going to, I'm going to go through all of the pain of converting and changing and whatever. And I tell them, okay, you might solve that one problem you're talking about, but there's going to be something else you're going to be frustrated with with the other one, I promise you. Because they all have things they're really good at and they all have things they're bad at. And, you know, it's kind of pick your problems. So what mile marker is, is, yes, it is a net. It is a net add to your tech stack. But the whole point is taking all of the things that you already have and making them more adopted and more used as opposed to trying to just add another piece to the Jenga Tower and hope it doesn't fall over. Right. So we are trying to stitch together all of the tech that you're currently using and give you more adoption of the spend that you're already investing into your firm all of the time. So there's not a lot of new that we're bringing other than, hey, maybe a different way to request things from the front office. Maybe you're not going to pick up the phone and call somebody, maybe you're not going to send an Outlook email or things like that. But we are trying to help firms get the most out of the technology spend that they're already making and make them more efficient with all of those things.

I love that. It's like you're not adding a Django tower, you're rearranging it so that it's actually a constructive home. You know, you're actually building it from the foundation up, not just adding to the top and hoping it doesn't, which is huge. I mean, realistically, advisor, one of the main, I see this all the time in budgets. It's one of the main things that they're spending on, budget wise is technology and the cost there and just how much it is to spend that. And so if you can come in and make that more adaptable and say, hey, we're actually going to utilize what you currently have and make it useful. I think every advisor would be on board with that. It's not adding, it's taking what you have and utilizing it properly.

I think it's important too that we talk about who the technology's for. Right. So again in smaller firms it is common that there's one advisor and some support staff and all of that tech has to be something that they can use collectively. But when you start getting up into these mid market firms or these enterprise firms, it's really important for us to call out the fact that the portfolio management tool is actually an operations tool. It's not really an advisor tool. The CRM is more times than not an operations tool. It tends to have pretty low adoption from CRMs but I mean pretty low adoption from Advisor but it has high ops and trading and client service and things like that. Planning tools tend to be used probably more by advisors but also by paraplanners or things like that. I don't, I think a lot of times we all just talk about tech in this industry with a big blanket of, you know, oh, it's just for anybody who works at an RIA. But RIAs have gotten a lot more sophisticated and complex over the past couple of years and we need to really make sure that we are specifying which user in our firm is this technology for and who are we actually serving with this.

Right. And the purpose of it. Even when we onboard attracted advisor, it's like we, we don't allow the advisor to enter because similar to like the CRM, we don't want our advisors in there. We want you guys focused on selling and running the business and allow the teams to do what the teams do best and let that be the operational people. And I think that's so useful for them to know. It's. We're not asking the advisor to add another thing, we're asking them to focus on what they do best and focus on the team as well to allow them to do their roles also. So I know like future also future speaking AI and just tech in general I feel like is the new buzzwords of this year and ksu, I mean I love it, I love the way we're going and I think efficiency is so needed and it's so helpful in this industry but there's also a lot of hype around it and there's a lot of unknown around it. So how do you kind of separate, you know Fact from fiction with AI and the introduction of new technologies at mile marker and, and show them, hey, this isn't just something that's fiction. It's, it's realistic, it's not anecdotal. We are helping in this way.

You know, we had Natalie Wolfson from Orion on our podcast and I thought she had a really good commentary on this, which was in the early days. And I still think we're in these early days. There's a lot of experimentation to figure out, okay, how can we use this? And that's where you'll see a lot of the use cases that feel maybe a little bit more like toys or things like that. There's not a ton of use case or the use case feels very small and pointed and acute as opposed to real solutions. But you have to go through some of that experimental phase with, dare I say, lower impact areas of the business before you can start to look at bigger impacts. So I think there's a lot of TBD here. I also think our industry will be much slower to adopt just from all of the regulatory concerns people have. You know, there's a lot of stuff coming out right now about, you know, chat histories from OpenAI being released into Google Index results and things like that. So I think there's going to be a lot of trepidation around these tools and putting PII and putting client data into them. However, I think you're seeing some things have a ton of success from an efficiency perspective, like the note taker category, you know, Shout out to Jump and Socks and Zeppelin and our friends over there. I think Wealthbox just released a native one that felt like a really big win for the industry and what they're doing. But what I do know, Molly, is that at mile marker, one thing we're really passionate about is getting all of your data into one place is a prerequisite for compliant AI use. Because if you can bring AI to your data warehouse, then we can ensure that the data is not leaving the infrastructure structure that it sits in. So if you want to be able to come and look at allocations or, you know, what types of investments they're in, or have AI do research or have it do next best action type of things or AI agent work, my thesis is that you're going to want all of that data in one place so that you're not risking leakages or things like that from a cybersecurity perspective. So candidly that has has been a big conversation for us with a lot of firms is, hey, we know we want to do AI. We're not entirely sure what that looks like, but this sort of seems like a foundational piece that we should be focused on, which is getting all of our data into one place that we can deploy the AI against.

Yeah, step one before, step 10 for certain. I think also it gives a competitive advantage to your clients as well, or your firm as in general. If you have all of your data in one spot, can, you know, release that AI to do trend results and take a peek at that? Because it really can be a useful tool. But like you said, you have to have everything in one place. Then you can utilize it for your competitive advantage. Not necessarily, you know, going to five different avenues, trying to release it. And from compliance standpoint, shout out to compliance. We're on a call today too. I'm like, I never want to be you guys, but I really appreciate y' all so much. So I love them. They keep us in line. They're. They're certainly the people that keep us on the road. So what is kind of mile markers future, however, what are you focused on in the future now that you've, you know, been. Been successful up to this point? What's, what's the next step for mile marker?

One of the things we're really excited about is two pieces of tech we just released. So number one, I want to talk about investments for a second. So again, going back to advice creation, I think the formula of advice creation is looking at the plan, seeing how the plan is performing, and then making proposals or recommendations against that. So it's plan plus performance equals proposal or recommendation. Most of the firms that we talk to have a suite of investment solutions that they really like and they're excited about. They might make their own models potentially out of ETFs or products they manufacture. They might work with third party asset managers or TAMPs like Assetmark or Smart X or SEI or, you know, firms like that. They might have an ALTS platform like a case or an iCapital or something like that where they're pulling ALTS from. Or they might do direct alts. They might have a cash platform like Flourish or Stone Castle where they're doing cash management. And they might have a 401k management platform like Pantera or something like that. So you've got five, six, seven solutions that make up how we invest on behalf of our clients, which is great. There's so many offerings that are there, but you have five, six, seven logins for how do I go research this? How do I go do that, so one thing that we've deployed recently that's getting a lot of traction and a lot of adoption is we are combining the data from all of those investment platforms and we're giving that one beautiful overlay of every investment option in the firm, easily identified by whether it's a model, if it's a third party asset manager, and then we have this workflow platform where we can send things out to the appropriate person. So if you want to do a model change or trade request, that your third party asset manager, we send the data to them. If it's internal model trade that goes to your trading team, we send it to them. Right. And so we can route all of this info like a switchboard to the appropriate investment platform and give you just one beautiful firm branded investment experience connected to the ability to make trade requests, model change requests, cash raising, things like that. That's getting a lot of traction. We're really excited about that and we think there's a lot of possibility for partnership there. So we, we've, we've seen a lot of traction there. I can, I can secondarily and I'm sure this will be close to your heart with what you do. So one of the big problems we've also seen is there's lots of ways for people to get insights on their data or find out something that's going on with it, but then there's few ways for them to be able to take action on the insight they've been given. So, hey, here's this thing that I want to know about. Great, but what do I do about it? It's sort of like an MRI machine that diagnoses everything and then the doctor doesn't have a treatment plan for the diagnosis. They tell you exactly. Horn Achilles, what do I do about it? Go find somebody who can tell you what to do about that.

Yeah, exactly.

So we have built this thing right now that we call dynamic case resolution. So basically it'll be a table of insights and data for you. And then there is a way to take action on those insights directly from the table where you're looking at the data and there's dynamic ways of doing that. So maybe if this is a suitability problem, when you click that button, it pops up your suitability rules and you click a button and it resolves what needs to be happened. Either that creates a task for the advisor or whatever, so you can look at the things that need to be changed in your firm and then you can take action on changing them right there within the same window, and you can delegate or route to whoever is the person who can solve that very quickly. So it is diagnosis and it is treatment plan all in the same place. So you're connecting action with insight, which is really powerful.

Yeah, yeah. We've even. I mean, just on our side as well, we've released something very similar. It's looking at the data. We always say it's one thing to know your numbers, but another thing to understand it and do something about it. So it's kind of similar in that it's a prescriptive tool of I have a low stick rate. What do I do now? You know, and it's. It's the ability to tell you, okay, this is what I want to do. So I love a prescriptive tool. I think it's so useful, especially to create a task for the advisor, for the firm, so that they know, hey, this is what's. What comes out of it and what we can do to accomplish the problem and solve for that. So I think it's amazing. I think you guys have a lot of really cool things coming up, so I'm excited for you. Rooting from the. From the sidelines, for sure. So last question we kind of have on the advisory summit is where are you trucking today, personally or professionally in the next year? So what's. What's one big goal that you want to accomplish?

Hmm.

Another coffee shop.

Yeah, you didn't talk about that enough. The personal side, number of books read. I used to read a lot more books, and then things got a lot busier. So I used to be like a 24 to 30 book a year reader. Like, I averaged two per month. And I think now, I think last year I read like eight books, which is pretty disappointing for me. So I'm trying to get back up to that 30 number. And that's. That's something I'm tracking right now. Yes. And then professionally it is number of connectors turned on for clients. So, you know, we have all of these ways of connecting data, but we are focused on how do we make sure that we're connecting as much data for clients as possible.

I love it. Well, we can't wait to check back with you in a year and make sure you fulfilled your goals. And we'll have to follow you on Goodreads or any of the other platforms for the book reading, for sure. So, Kyle, thanks for joining. Thanks for talking about beta and just integrations. I think it's such a necessary thing in this industry, and we appreciate your insights.

Awesome. Thanks for having me. Molly, this was fun.