Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone, welcome to WealthTech on Deck. Thanks for joining us. As our regular listeners know, I have the privilege of speaking with industry leaders each week about issues that move our industry forward. We talk about the confluence of human and digital advice wherever it might take place, whether it’s wealth and asset management, retirement insurance, annuities, indoor technology, so our guests are working on strategies to help advisors investors, participants in firms enjoy better financial outcomes, we do tend to focus on the challenges and opportunities our guests are grappling with each day, what’s new and exciting and where the industry is headed. So today, we are speaking with Evan Rapoport, Evan is the CEO of SMArtX. SMArtX is a tech innovator in the Manage Accounts and turnkey Asset Management spaces. Evan, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.

Evan Rapoport: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jack Sharry: So let’s start with you telling our audience about SMArtX and your role at the firm. You guys have made some news recently. So maybe you want to share some of that, too.

Evan Rapoport: So sure, yeah. So I’m the CEO and founder over here at SMArtX. And at SMArtX, we specialize in building unified managed accounts technology, certainly a niche within the wealth tech space. But you know, we do focus specifically on helping advisors to both find third party asset managers through our platform through our tamp, to search them, combine them, rebalance them tax loss, harvest them, etc, all in a single account. So there are very few firms that do this. And, you know, we’ve been able to make some really great strides here over the past few years, you know, we’ve grown assets from just over a billion to almost 30 billion. And we’ve recently taken in an investment from Morningstar, who took our entire series D and invested 30 million in our firm. So we’re really excited about both that and working with Morningstar at the same time.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, that’s exciting. I’m sure we’ll talk some more about that. But it’s a pretty significant vote of confidence. So congratulations. Thank you. So what are you talking about a little bit about how you got started to have this whole thing get rolling? What’s your background? How did SMArtX come about?

Evan Rapoport: Sure. So I’ve always been in the wealth management, brokerage space ever since I came out of college, Jack, I came out I got licensed I started working at Paine Webber dates me a little bit, because PaineWebber hasn’t been around for a really long time. I remember to Yeah, I mean, if I said Kidder Peabody, then we’d really go back. But you know, I wasn’t that. But I started to pay him. And, you know, I was a broker, you know, I continued to work up the ladder on the brokerage side, until about 1998, when the Asian flu happened. And at the time, there was a Taiwanese chip shortage, and the President was going to be impeached to this is going way back, obviously, because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal or something that was going on the Russian ruble was being devalued. There was a whole host of stuff going on. And the markets dropped precipitously. And then, you know, again, recovered, and then fell again in 2000. But during that time, I recognize that as a broker, it was really hard to do two things well, that is both raise money and manage money, right, because they both are full time jobs. And candidly, as a young broker, I didn’t have the skill set that the analysts had certainly had researched and such and what they were telling us to buy and sell, but not the same skills that you know, an outsourced investment manager would have. And at the time, I found hedge funds, because they were kind of new and interesting, and provided absolute return. And I didn’t have to rebuild my book when the markets collapsed, right. And so I thought that was a really great way to grow. My practice was to outsource the investment management to people that, candidly were smarter than I was in that particular area, or were able to spend more time in that area. And so I started doing that, and growing my business in that way. But what I found was that there were no easy ways to source hedge fund information. And I had to know somebody, and they didn’t introduce me to somebody. Well, the information today is somewhat commonplace. There were no areas or places to get that information back then. So I started a hedge fund database called hedge co.net. And it’s still in business today. It’s one of the largest hedge fund databases out there. But we started that so I could find hedge funds. And then candidly, I dropped my practice, I sold it and I started focusing specifically on hedge funds, both working with them to raise assets, to quantify their data to produce software for them. And really, you know, just because of hedge Cohen, the popularity of it, we really expanded the practice pretty substantially. Now fast forward hedge funds had a great run, but after 2008 the markets changed right in that the hedge funds were no longer in favor and people were getting locked up and there was, you know, lack of not only transparency, liquidity security, there were side pockets and style drift there was made off. There was all of this stuff going on and so folks said There has to be a better way Jack. And what they came up with was separately managed accounts. Because in a separate account I have, I don’t have to worry about those things. I have my own account, I have full transparency, liquidity security, it’s my account, no one can steal from it. There can be no side pockets or funky business. Or if there’s style drift, I’m going to see it right. So that’s the Holy Grail. But most hedge funds wouldn’t give you a separately managed account unless you had $50 million. So that was the hard part, right. And this is really what spurred on the idea for hedge co invest, which became SMArtX. And that was that we recognized there needed to be a separately managed account platform for alternatives, because there were no ways to simply access this. And so we went out there looking jack, and there were no firms that could handle that or do that. So we had to build him. And we embarked on this mission to build a platform for alts. And we did that and we came up with a platform called hedge co invest. And the minute we came out, we want all these FinTech awards. But the larger firms swooped in, right Schwab investment, or Ryan, black diamond or Advent, and they all saw what we were doing, and loved it and asked us if we could, you know, work with them or figure out a way to help them. And, you know, we ended up choosing black diamond at Advent as our partner at the time, I had a lot of respect for ssmc. Coming out of the hedge fund industry, they are the platinum provider for administration, right, the number one provider for hedge fund administration, and an unbelievable Well, tech firm with 5 trillion on the wealth tech side. So we thought that would be a great partner, they didn’t have a tamp partner. And so we worked with them to develop SMArtX, what became smart acts from hedge Covestor and expand that to include long only managers in that we were doing things a little bit differently, Jack, and that we trade in real time. And we were publishing performance in real time or near real time. And you know, the architecture included sleep based sort of visibility at the, you know, we keep our investment book at the sleeve level. So we were doing things different because we were dealing with a different products that, but it turned out everything we were doing was so much more advanced than what was going on in the traditional tamp space. And the big the larger providers saw that and they said, Boy, we could take this technology, we can apply it to long only and make it so much better. And that’s what we did. And we focused on the RA side, we dropped the hedge fund side, we still have hedge fund strategies on platform. But we expanded the platform, we now have almost 1100 strategies from almost 300 managers. That includes all the largest firms in the world, BlackRock, Morningstar, Statestreet those types. And that’s how we got to where we are today. So that was a bit of a long story. But you know, kind of get you there.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, no, that’s great. I love the passion. I love early innovators. So it sounds like some things fell your way in terms of where the world wound up. So I’m especially curious now, when I see a big firm, like big, smart firm like Morningstar, make that level of commitment. They don’t do that lightly. That’s not a that’s not something. Just know that folks, they’re pretty well, very smart folks, making very strategic and smart decisions, talk about that your relationship where you fit into the organization. I know, it’s really early days, but we think it might lead on.

Evan Rapoport: What you’ve said is 100% accurate, they are a wonderful organization of really talented and bright people. You know, we had three term sheets, Jack coming from, you know, the largest players out there. And we chose Morningstar as our partner over the rest, because of a couple of reasons. One, the culture is fantastic. It’s very much in line with our culture. They are entrepreneurial and innovative in the way in which they’re looking at wealth and technology. And so that’s something that we wanted to be part of, you know, they’re going through a big rebuild of their entire wealth technology. And they’ve invested $50 million into that division to rebuild office and such. And so there was a real opportunity jack to take SMArtX and expand it and give it a larger footprint with Morningstar. And so it’s important to know, and I don’t think a lot of folks realize or understand this about SMArtX, and that we build unified managed accounts technology. So while we operate a tamp, because we had to prove out the technology, and we did this for Advent and for BlackDiamond. We still do this today for larger clients, not for smaller clients. But we really build the technology itself, the UNA technology. And there’s only a few firms that do this. There’s investment. There’s Vestmark, there’s us, maybe a little bit of invest cloud with the old APL structure, but very few firms and the legacy firms are just that they’re great and wonderful firms and that they’ve been around for a long time. But their technology has also been around for a long time. And we had the advantage of starting later. And so we were able to code into API’s, right. So we have an API first structure. We’re microservices, so we can scale really fast and our systems are really quick. You know, we have real time trading, which is a little bit different, as we’ve discussed, loosely based architecture, open architecture so we can integrate with anyone but you know, when it comes to Morningstar, they have an existing tap and they have a big model delivery business of almost $70 billion, but they need technology to be able to deliver that at scale. They were using APL it no longer fit their needs. They were looking To take that technology or technology that could process trades to the reconciliation process, third party asset manager trades, etc., but ingest that into their own ecosystem. And they couldn’t do that with these distinct technology Jack because it doesn’t use a or doesn’t have API’s available. And so the API’s are really important for firms that want to take components of what you provide, ingest that into their own ecosystem and provide a platform that is, for example, all Morningstar branded look feel it said, you wouldn’t even know that we’re in the inside. And that’s candidly, where we prefer to be right. We’d like to be the Intel inside. We want to power every tamp that’s out there, not just Morningstar. They’re wonderful. And they’re going to expand their tamp offering. And we’re a critical part of that. So the opportunity with Morningstar, not only was working with great people, great culture, very much in line with our culture, and our sort of thoughts over here and how we look at the world, but also a tremendous business opportunity for us strategically, in both powering their tamp. And now building out their direct indexing platform, which they’ve gone live in beta. You know, if anybody can produce a DIY solution, Morningstar is one of the largest index providers in the world. And we believe that they can be the leader or one of the leaders, and we’re super excited about being their technology behind that platform. So a lot of opportunity for SMArtX. And also it validates and gives us more credibility, as you noted Jack in the market so that other firms who, like you said, know that Morningstar doesn’t make a decision lightly, can also sort of draft their due diligence and, and then potentially utilize smart acts and be more comfortable about it.

Jack Sharry: So I want to take it up a few notches. One of the things that I observe you and I may have talked about this, but this convergence that’s going on in the industry, you see wealth and workplace coming together, you see annuities, not just being sold in a wealth management type accounts, but also now with defined contribution. You see, hedge funds being more readily available and accessible. You see, tamps working with tamps, you see tech working with tech, you just see a lot of convergence going on. And Morningstar is a great example. They do all sorts of stuff. But they also seems to me like I don’t have the inside scoop on this. But I’m assuming they’re happy that you’re not only working with them, but working with others, this sort of cross border is starting to come together. And it’s all driven by API. So there’s, you’re more nimble, you’re quicker, you can be more customized. Another buzzword that we hear a lot around is hyper personalization and more than the buzzword. It’s real people want it just the way they want it and all that. So if you would comment on that. So that broader trend, I’m talking about that convergence, that API driven way of being more custom, more nimble, more customized, talk about that, if you would,

Evan Rapoport: I think you’ve nailed it on the head, Jack, everybody’s different. And you know, you get into, you know, some of the larger firms example, we recently contracted Hightower, right, and we’re moving some of their advisors over from investment. But each one of those advisors, it’s a large firm has a different set of tools that they use, right? So one may use Orion one may use BlackDiamond other one Tamarack and Riskalyze or, you know, life yield, or, you know, whatever, right. And so we want to be able to provide these services, these technology solutions for them in a seamless or giving them a seamless experience, so that the technology can work together. And that’s what the API’s do. Of course, one thing that, you know, I realized with Hedgecock, going back my predecessor firm, and kind of told you a little bit about that, we tried to do a lot, right, we ended up you know, seeing all this opportunity, and we try to capitalize on a lot of it, we ended up becoming mediocre at everything, and not really experts said one thing, right. And so I promised I wouldn’t make the mistake with SMArtX. And we do just focus on you IMA, and we look to firms like life yield and 55 IP and those types, right for, you know, those other services that they can provide. And that does two things for us. One, it gives the client what they’re looking for specifically and integrates with their existing technology. So they’re comfortable, we don’t force them to change you know, what they’re doing today to it gives us best in breed those folks like the folks over at life you’d like you know, Jack, they, you know, focus every day of every year, right on their craft on their technology, we’re never gonna focus that much on tax and, you know, that type of tooling, right? And so this gives us a huge benefit of being able to ingest and, and then create a stack that is really platinum relative to its offering. And that’s the benefit of API’s. No one firm is going to be an expert at everything.

Jack Sharry: Like to have you expand on that your, your course speaking our language and life field. This is what we do. We really tax folks. But we work with planning tools, we work with portfolio management tools, like you’re one of the things that we’ve recently I’m not even sure we’ve told you about this yet. But we developed this concept of multicam. You have a I think we’ve probably talked about a bit and all we’re doing is taking existing capabilities and applying it because we’re API driven just like you are like the rest of world is becoming if they’re going to be nimble and they’re going to be stay current and if not try to get a competitive edge image. And one of the things that we talk a lot about, I’d love to have you comment on this is that I’ve been having this conversation a lot. In fact, a recent conversation with a senior executive Morgan Stanley, where the president of Morgan Stanley Andy San Burstein said that they’re connected and integrated with all their various partners, we’re one of those partners. And as I said to someone that works for him, as we were having a conversation, I said, we left an important piece out. And that is, it’s one thing to be connected, it’s another thing to be integrated, but it’s far better to be coordinated. In other words, need all three. And as you’ve just sort of highlighted, I’d love to have you comment on that. If you’re gonna prove outcome, our view of the world is you got to address cost risk tax, those are the three ways you can prove alpha, call it beyond the investment alpha, which, you know, that’s the stuff you guys do, we don’t do that we try to help with the tax piece. cost is a factor always, as you know, and then Chris risk how you manage that. And we don’t do that either. But if you’re going to make a risk adjustment, you’re going to have a tax consequence, you got to figure that one out, too, right. So I’d love to have you talking about this notion of coordination, because our sense of watching you guys were quite impressed with what you’ve done so far. And I think you’re going to be doing a lot more coming down the pike, talking about that coordination thing, talking about that API thing, talking about how you make this stuff work together and your role in it. Because you almost don’t want to say stateless, but you’re, you’re willing to work with anyone and everyone to make for a better outcome. So talking about that, if you would

Evan Rapoport: Yeah, I mean, it really is just that Jack, right? So you know, when you utilize smart acts, some folks, you know, care about as they should tax, right, and they do tax loss harvesting more frequently. You know, when they think about that, when they make investment decisions, I tell you that some advisors don’t at all right, I’ve got advisors that don’t do any tax loss harvesting, or think about it in a way that, you know, potentially they should. And their argument, of course, is performance, alpha versus tax Alpha. Right. And so that happens, sometimes you drift from the original model, or from the original thesis, right? By changing it for tax. But even if you do it right, that actually doesn’t happen, right? Because you substitute with a highly correlated name, and you’re making decisions from an informed perspective. So I don’t think that’s actually a good perspective to have and not think about that. But, you know, for those that do, you know, they want to see, for example, what the impact would be of a transition, right? And, you know, again, what happens if I sell and I buy or, you know, whatever the case, and, and so giving them that, as they’re working through smart acts, it’s critical, you know, they have to have that information at their fingertips at that moment. And we can give them that, but we’re not going to give it to them in a way that’s as robust as what a LifeYield is going to give them. Right. And with all of that functionality, and so, you know, it’s important to have that coordination. So it’s not just hey, like, it’s single sign on, no, it’s actually fully integrated. So that, you know, as I click that button, it’s giving me that information. And it looks like it feels like it’s coming from the same place. Right. And so it’s that coordination that creates that seamlessness that, you know, isn’t as bespoke, as when you move from place to place. And it just, it just feels like you’re just being forwarded. And it doesn’t, you know, work as well, a lot of clicks, right.

Jack Sharry: So and one of the things that, as you’re saying that really strikes me is the fact that we’re doing this sounds like you’re doing the same is we’re working with lots of different partners. So we work with financial planning tools, as an example, we don’t do planning, but we make planning better. Because while planning, and we’ll have a bit of tax stuff, when we look at it, there’s at least eight different ways you can improve tax alpha, its tax loss, harvesting, its asset location, it’s transitions as well, a bunch of different ways, you know, Roth conversions, and RMD, guidance, all that kind of stuff are all part of the mix. So planning tools go so far, but they kind of weren’t built to do tax management. They’re just not built that way. And we find that we work with, frankly, other firms that do transitions, because they do it one way. And we can support that at a higher level, since we do multi account. Certainly around working with the who’s ever security to arose around, especially but how do you coordinate? This was pretty question in the midst of all that. So I’m curious. And this gets us to my sort of my next question about where the world is going our sense and Dilip, have you comment on this, that increasingly, it’s really about how to build an ecosystem that will be lots of people that were once called competitors that are now called partners, or maybe not competitors, but competitors least for the dollar that an advisor firm is going to spend on tech, but really, increasingly, the game at hand and our view, love your comment is about how to cooperate is how to work together how to coordinate to produce a better outcome and contribute what you have to contribute, but love your thoughts on that.

Evan Rapoport: I’m 100% the same direction. In fact, we’ve had conversations internally about this jack that we plan on providing more of a focus, right, so while our platform is open architecture, and allows for a lot of this, you know, it’s been driven by consumer, the consumer and the consumer says, you know, I want this, you know, for me and a lot of folks including us, will do an integral Question, but it’s very specific, right? It’s a specific integration for that one client, it’s not a general sort of broad integration. And so there may be, you know, a lesser integration as a result of just providing what that client needs versus a broad integration, right? That makes it available to everybody. So there’s two types, right? Because very often, you know, revenue drives, you know, your roadmap, right? And it just drives your resources, as you know, right. So if a client saying, Hey, I’ve got, you know, this business that I want to put on there, and they need this, and there’s another guy right behind them, and they also say, I need this, well, sometimes you’ll do the quick work to just get that one client up and running, because you gotta get the other guy up and running, right, you can’t do the work. Whereas you know, what, really, we’re more focused on now. And today, right is expanding the general sort of integrations within SMArtX and creating those partnerships, as you said, Jack, more broadly, right and letting the advisor come to SMArtX and choose what they want, not just tell us what they have, right, but rather come on to SMArtX, pay a low base rate for SMArtX, it’ll be we’re going to revamp the pricing model, that’s going to be actually much cheaper than anything else that’s out there, relative to the TAM part. And then if you want to add some of these other services, like life yield, or a CRM, or a planning tool, or whatever, you can do that at a smaller cost, right. And you can do that right through the system. So it works as a distribution mechanism for both our partners. And it helps our existing users and matriculating the platform to the state that they’re most interested in, or at least in an environment that they’re, you know, most comfortable operating within. But it is a big focus over here to create this over the next, you know, sort of six to 12 months and really focus on these integrations and partnerships.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, what are the things I enjoy about doing this podcast, I get to talk to people like you, which is a lot of fun. Well, we haven’t chatted a whole lot. We’re simpatico for sure. And one of things that I find especially exciting as watching our industry and also learning by the way, the people that listen to our people like us people that are paying attention to this stuff, it’s sort of fascinating, I keep getting anecdotal information. In fact, I spoke to a group at at Aladdin the other day to their folks are inside sales and Cost Management, relationship management. And turns out, they all listen to the podcast because they want to hear what people like you out to say, where the world is going. So it’s been sort of fun to find that the way Spotify and Apple work, they don’t tell you who’s listening, just some numbers, but they don’t tell you who, anecdotally I hear it’s actually people like us that are really interested in where the world is going. So before we move on to start to close down our conversation, what haven’t I asked you about that you’re excited about, or that you see coming down the pike that we’ve talked a lot about this coordination thing, I think it’s central to where our industry goes. But anything else that comes to mind that you’re particularly interested in excited about curious about examining, I know you’re busy doing what you’re doing every day, but it’s got to be a few things out there that you’re wondering, when you’re going to be able to get to them?

Evan Rapoport: You know, there’s a lot of stuff that I’m excited about Jack and either products that we built, and we haven’t really announced yet over the last year, and ones that are forthcoming outside of the existing optimization of our business. And some of the new clients that we’re bringing on, you know, we are going to announce, also we signed are in the process of finalizing our contract, which is literally sitting on the desk, but with one of the largest custodians out there the largest investment and most respected investment banks in the world to be there, you have a chassis. And so they will be using smart acts as their tool. And they’re going to be building often around that tool. So that’s super exciting for us and can’t wait to put that announcement out there. Just more validation, outside of Morningstar, you know, some of the largest firms who have, and when you hear this firm, you will know that they are very, very careful about the decisions that they make. It takes years for them to make these decisions. And so, you know, we couldn’t be more excited about that announcement. And, you know, within SMArtX, we’ve got two things that we recently built and released. One is a cash management tool that allows advisors to automate RMDs and dollar cost averaging, choose where they want that to go right into the rebalance or pro rata equal weight custom, they can really just automate that. Because if you’re an advisor and you forget an RMD, it’s not a good thing, right? It’s, it’s bad. And you don’t want to do that. And you’ve got sticky notes, and you’ve got your admin and such systems reminding you well, the system just does it for you now. And it doesn’t in the way that you instructed to. That’s really exciting. It just helps with efficiency for advisors, we try to create tools that they can use that make their lives easier, and don’t rely on third parties or them calling 15 people to get it done. That’s one. The second one is more exciting. And that is that we just built a new billing application and tool that we went live with. That is and I say this humbly, no less than awesome, right? I mean, I’ve used the other tools out there. And, you know, what causes us to build over here is when we can’t find it in market. And that’s where, you know, you talk about integrations and API’s, right? I won’t build something that’s out there. So what we talked about, I’m going to be experts at what we do, right but I don’t want to spend the expense and then maintain it and optimize it and keep it The tool if it’s already available, and I could just license it for a low cost, because you’re going to go through that, buy it or build it, you know, lease it or build it, you know, type of bargain internally, but, but we couldn’t find a tool that did what our clients wanted at scale. And so our billing tool, you know, it’s the most advanced out there, in my opinion, it does, you know, backwards, forwards and arrears and advance quarterly monthly splits, carve outs, and it does it at scale. And it does it with a really easy to use interface. And that was the hard part of some of the existing tools that were out there. There’s one tool out there that’s been around forever. It just got acquired, you know, and that’s interesting to me, because what I find from some of these firms, like the larger firms is they go out there and they acquire stale technology, which is so strange, right? Like, you just bought something that I just blacked twice over, right? It’s far better, like way better, because you bought 10-year-old technology, right? So, you know, it’s hard when you’re buying old firms, right? Like you’re buying old tech versus a firm that’s building new tech, right and innovating. And so anyway, so we’re really excited about the billing app, we had, you know, we’ve run the we ran the billing through one of our clients, we found $200 million worth of unbilled accounts $2 million in revenue, right, that wasn’t being collected a lot of money, a lot of money, right on an annual basis. And then, you know, these firms sell and when they sell, they get a multiple of that. So what if you got a four or five times Bob, I just spent $10 million for you. That’s a lot of money. You know, the difference is when you have technology that can do this at scale, right, versus individuals and humans, that that’s really the thrust of SMArtX, a lot of what we do is automated reconciliation, rebalance, you know, there are teams of people at these firms that do this, they use another, they buy a tamp technology, and then they realize they have to spin up 12 people to do the Recon on it, which is crazy, right? My whole system, does that eliminate those 12 people. So that’s a real cost, right? But it’s also that when you use technology, there’s not going to be that human error, right, we’re going to run through things quickly, we’re going to find these, you know, mistakes or areas where the, you know, the lines don’t match up and, and the system is going to go ahead and do that. And it’s going to do that quick, right? So anyway, it’s really exciting to have the billing app out, it’s really exciting about the cash management app, we’re gonna come up with some cool names for it, we’re not good at marketing. And so we need to do that. That’s one area that you know, we’re not good at naming things but, but really excited about that. We’re excited about the new customers coming on. We’re excited about moving high tower and you know, we’re there’s there’s more stuff we’re building right now fixed income sleeve within a UNA which is kind of cool manager traded. And so that’s really not been done properly in the market. So like I said, I we talk to our clients, we listen to them, we, we hear what they’re interested in, we listened to what they don’t like, and, you know, we’ve got 125 People here now, Jack, so we’ve grown a lot, you know, from 20 people to 125. And a lot of those are, you know, 70 of them are engineers. So we will build and we will rebuild. If it’s not right.

Jack Sharry: Congratulations, this has been an admirer and fun to get the more the deeper view of what you’re all doing. It’s very exciting, very exciting stuff. So congratulations.

Evan Rapoport: Well, thank you so much, really appreciate that. And we I look, we’re excited to work with LifeYield. That’s one of the top integration partners that we are, you know, looking to onboard quickly. So very excited about what we’re doing together. Also, Jack,

Jack Sharry: I know we’ve been talking, it’s good to hear that. We’re heading that way. Normally. Now, I would ask for a summary. But you just did a brilliant summary. So I think we’re going to skip over that question. You have a lot going on. And it’s what I where I sit really smart. Really good. So the personal question I’d love to end on is as we do each of our podcasts, could you share with us something interesting or unique you do outside of work that people may not know about you and would find particularly interesting or surprising?

Evan Rapoport: Well, I like to go to the gym, you know? So I’ve got I’ve got two kids right? So and I’m divorced and I’ve got a girlfriend so you know I’ve got a lot going on right on the outside and so my time gets taken businesses keep me busy. And I get a lot of people here so you know it’s tough but I do enjoy going to the gym working out with free weights and such I enjoy biking a lot you know when I can get there I love going to the beach and taking the boat out. So you know we do that as often as we can we live in Florida for a reason. Those palm trees right behind me, right make it a lifestyle really easy. And we’ve got so many big firms now moving here, Blackrock just announced they’re opening an office. You’ve got Elliott, capital, Goldman, everybody’s moving here. So that’s exciting. That’s primarily what I like to do. And I tell you that I have an affinity towards cryptocurrency I also like, you know, dabbling and, and, you know, really intrigued by, you know, that industry and have been for a long time I’ve been a crypto investor for probably, you know, six years now, and been really deep in it. And to that end, actually, we’re going to be bringing crypto to SMArtX. That’s another cool thing that we’re doing. And cool, you know, working on that now hopefully getting that up and live either q4 q1, but you know, really interesting space. I love financial technology. I live, eat and breathe it. And crypto is a really big part of what I think the future is going to be as it relates to decentralized finance and tokenization of securities and such. So it’s exciting to get ahead of that.

Jack Sharry: Evan, thank you This has been a wonderful conversation. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and getting to know the depth of your business and you personally. So this has been a lot of fun for our audience. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please review, subscribe, and share what we do here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks this has been terrific, real pleasure. And I look forward to our next conversation.

Evan Rapoport: Well, thank you so much Jack pleasures of mine. I look forward to it as well.