Aquilance, which provides personal financial management to extremely high net worth families and family offices, has hired Kevin Reed as the company's first chief revenue officer. He joins from Morningstar, where he served as global head of channels and partnerships, building the enterprise partnerships practice and launching integrations with such technology companies as iCapital, Broadridge and Luma.
The addition of Reed is part of a larger effort by Aquilance to build its C-Suite team. In June, the company hired John Carey, the former head of consumer experiences for Envestnet, as CEO. Carey took over for Kenneth Eyler, who moved to Cresset as managing director of family office services.
Craig Setera, a former vice president of engineering at Envestnet, also joined Aquilance this year as its first chief technology officer. Setera is currently building a more scalable technology platform that will allow the company to go to market. The average current Aquilance client has about $100 million in net worth, Reed said.
“Being able to bring our solution to market in a way that clients in the high net worth space see the value in paying for the services we provide is really attractive to us and attractive to the firms we work with. Reed said.
The company created Reed's position with an eye toward growth. While the company's clients are very high net worth, a large portion of its business is referred by financial advisors in offices, RIAs and multi-family offices. Aquilance works through its advisors to assist with the entity's bookkeeping, bill payment, investments and accounting.
“From an advisor's perspective, that's really valuable because we're actually taking that information and producing personal financial statements, multi-entity financial reports, cash flow analysis—all these things that the advisor really should be able to provide the financial planning and reporting and all the trust and estate planning work that they do,” Reed said.
Reed will be responsible for the branding, marketing and education of financial advisors.
“Too many times advisors have become an accidental bill paying service, but it's not scalable. Their customer service associate is only doing this for two, three or four customers,” he said.
“Our technology platform allows us to professionalize the entire experience.”
Reed will also work on getting counselors to refer the service more proactively.
“What you've typically seen from advisors is that they bring in a service provider like Aquilance when there's a problem. The customer has a very clear event and they have identified that they no longer want to pay their bills.”
The company sees a huge growth opportunity there.
“Not many advisors are proactively talking about this with their clients,” Reed said. “If we all believe that advisers want to provide a more holistic service, you want to be more proactive in providing those things to your clients.”
Aquilance was rebranded in 2021 from its original name, My Accountant. At that time, it also underwent a recapitalization, carried out with a group of private investors, including some of the firm's clients. My Accountant was founded in 1987 by Bill Farren and Norb Janis as an outsourced accounting and payments firm.
Over the past three years, the company has tripled its revenue and doubled the number of customers.