Digital Wealth News is pleased to bring you our “Fintech Luminaries” series – featuring thought leaders within the digital wealth ecosystems. For our latest feature, we’d like you to meet Mark Healy of FusionIQ, a digital investing platform that helps clients create a digital wealth investing experience for their end customer.
Name: Mark Healy
Title: CEO
Company: FusionIQ
How did you personally become involved in fintech?
I started out over 35 years ago on the trading floor of a government securities dealer. There, I was the first employee to use a personal computer to track the trading P&L of over 50 traders, processing about 10K TPD.
Approximately 20 years ago, I led efforts to grow Fidelity’s brokerage group by deploying an integrated technical workstation, which delivered a unified advisor/rep experience for over 1 million TPD. And about a decade ago, I leveraged a technical approach to vertically deliver digital experiences for AST financial, encompassing 6,500 publicly traded companies and their 6 million shareholder accounts.
Today, I’m focused on digitally deploying fintech services for RIAs, credit unions, wealth managers and banking institutions.
What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
Over the last five years, retail-facing technology has rapidly expanded to allow easy access to and massive growth of individual direct trading experiences—at the expense of credit unions and banks losing large deposit bases to upstart fintech providers. At the same time, RIAs are seeing their value propositions lapped on the investing track by DIY cell phone applications.
In the next five years, I believe we’ll see the rapid rise of RIAs, wealth managers and credit unions adopting and deploying a convergence delivery model fueled by digital tech. The transference from traditional analog provides and fintech services to more efficient, digitally based platforms will be swift and transformational.
TAMPs and their multi-platform overheads will be—or already are—at risk of being replaced by the more economically efficient, digitally based and value driven fintech replacements that are leading the way to a more aligned investing environment for advisors and their paradigm clientele.
What are the biggest problems facing the fintech industry in the future?
For fintechs it has become glaringly obvious that there will soon be complete disintermediation of both the standalone and traditional analog delivery of financial services. This will happen throughout the services stack for advisors and continue in the retail-based activity.
The real fintech deliverable of the future will be enabling an aggregated digital dashboard that is powered by transactional activity for all investing products. Balancing the traditional 1:1 experience with the convergence of digital empowerment will be critical for all financial services firms’ growth, success and relevance, across both the converting and new demographic investing ecosystem.
