As the RIA landscape evolves, so do client expectations. With best-in-class technology, advisors are better equipped to meet these changing demands while continuing to deliver quality service — empowered to focus on nurturing client relationships.

Clients LM Advisors, Belzberg & Co. and Fairman Financial spoke to us about how Addepar’s tools and tech have helped them increase advisor capacity and exceed client expectations. 

Can you walk us through a typical day for you as a financial advisor? What are some of your key responsibilities?

Alex Katchadurian, Belzberg & Co.
 I wear a variety of hats at Belzberg & Co. so my day-to-day changes all the time. One day, I may be focused on underwriting a new investment — another, on implementing a new process to make our firm operate more efficiently. But I can say that everything is driven by our firm's goal to provide a comprehensive, tailored and value-oriented service offering across all our responsibilities. 

I interact with our clients a lot, directly and indirectly — whether it be to discuss their liquid and alternative assets, new investment opportunities, financial forecasting or more. I do spend a lot of time sourcing and underwriting new investment opportunities across a number of asset classes and helping our clients to understand if the deal flow they receive makes sense to pursue as an investment. I’m accompanied by an amazing team of individuals, and we work in a collegial manner to address whatever need or want is most important on a given day.

As an advisor, how do you typically use technology throughout your day?

Leonardo Simpser, LM Advisors
Having accurate and timely digital information has become critical to serving our customers. Technology has enabled us to customize each of our client’s portfolios individually and to do so efficiently.

One of the biggest challenges across the financial industry is that advisors don’t have enough time in their day. Why do you think this is? Are clients asking more of their advisors?

Leonardo Simpser, LM Advisors
Our clients certainly ask us for more than investment advice and we try to serve them as best as possible. These additional services include anything from reviewing private investment opportunities to addressing family succession issues, providing a third party opinion on a business decision to introductions to strategic partners. 

Pat Gorgonzola and Nate Fullmer, Fairman Financial
As more light is shed on the importance of overall financial planning, clients are turning to their advisors for more topics than ever before. This means that advisors are more involved in their clients lives than they have been in the past, and a wider knowledge base is needed to meet client needs.

Have you found you have more time to dedicate to value-add initiatives due to Addepar? How much time do you save on reporting and preparing client deliverables with Addepar?

Alex Katchadurian, Belzberg & Co.
Addepar was important to us because we really care about building operating leverage so we can spend the majority of our time on work that has the highest impact on our clients. The platform has allowed our team to be more efficient with respect to consolidating and analyzing our clients liquid and alternative assets, creating reports specific to our clients needs, and net worth forecasting with the use of Navigator. 

For example, we complete comprehensive quarterly reviews for each of our clients; prior to having Addepar, the reports for these meetings would take a day or two to complete. Now, we can finish them in a few hours. In particular, calculating performance used to be a manual task and now Addepar allows us to run performance in real-time, which is a huge lift. 

How has this time saved changed your day-to-day responsibilities as an advisor?

Alex Katchadurian, Belzberg & Co.
For me, when I started at Belzberg & Co. in the beginning of 2021, our core investment team was a team of just three, and we were doing all our data gathering and reporting by hand. Our team has since expanded, but that, coupled with the use of Addepar, has allowed our team to cut down the amount of time it takes to do simple tasks such as consolidating new investment values and creating monthly performance reports. Now, we can focus more on things such as sourcing and underwriting new and existing investments for our clients, and complex financial planning. 

Additionally, we use Navigator to put together financial projections for our clients, saving us a lot of time and allowing us to iterate on a more frequent basis. This has been a big value add. I used to build and maintain those models manually, and Navigator has allowed me to do a lot more in less time.

Addepar was important to us because we really care about building operating leverage so we can spend the majority of our time on work that has the highest impact on our clients.

Alex Katchadurian, Belzberg & Co.

About the contributors

Leonardo Simpser, LM Advisors
LM Advisors (LMA) was founded in 1984 by Luis Maizel, and acting as a fixed-income shop for international clients, grew to $500M AUM. Leonardo Simpser joined LMA 15 years ago, when the firm started investing heavily in technology — aiming to manage money in multiple financial institutions for existing clients, expand to invest in equity and options, and begin to attract a younger clientele. Leonardo came to the US from Mexico and worked for Deutsche Bank doing equity research. He received an MBA from Stanford.

Alex Katchadurian, Belzberg & Co.
Established in 2021, Belzberg Investments LLC (d.b.a. Belzberg & Co.) is a family-backed investment platform. The firm provides tailored investment and wealth management solutions to the ultra-high-net-worth community, including a number of white glove services. Alex Katchadurian has been an investor on the team since 2021 and is responsible for sourcing and underwriting new investment opportunities, executing transactions, managing portfolio assets — and, business strategy and development.

Pat Gorgonzola and Nate Fullmer, Fairman Financial
Fairman Financial is a fee-only financial planning firm located in Chesterbrook, PA, offering wealth management, investment advisory, tax and personal accounting services to individuals and families. Investment advisory services are provided by The Fairman Group LLC, an independent investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (The Fairman Group LLC is wholly owned by Fairman Group Family Office LLP dba Fairman Financial). Fairman’s investment, tax, estate and insurance experts work together to provide integrated advice tailored to the clients’ individual needs. Pat Gorgonzola is a Senior Wealth Advisor at Fairman Financial and Nate Fullmer is an Investment Operations Specialist at Fairman Financial.