Aquilance, which provides personal financial management for ultra-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 tech companies as iCapital, Broadridge and Luma.
Reed’s addition is part of a larger effort by Aquilance to build out 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 tech platform that will allow the company to go down market. Aquilance’s current average client has about $100 million in net worth, Reed said.
“To be able to bring our solution down market, in a way that clients in maybe the high-net-worth space see the value in paying for the services we’re offering is really appealing to us and appealing to the firms we work with,” Reed said.
The company created Reed’s position with an eye toward growth. While the company’s customers are the ultra-high-net-worth, a lot of its business is referred by financial advisors at wirehouses, RIAs and multi-family offices. Aquilance works through its advisors to assist with bookkeeping, bill pay, investment and entity accounting.
“From an advisor perspective, this is really valuable because we’re actually taking that information, and we’re producing personal financial statements, multi-entity financial reports, cash-flow analysis—all these things the advisor really needs to be able to deliver on 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.
“Many times advisors have become an accidental bill pay service, but it’s not scalable. Their client service associate is only doing this for two, three or four clients,” he said.
“Our technology platform allows us to kind of professionalize the entire experience.”
Reed will also work on getting advisors 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 client has a very clear event, and they’ve identified it that they no longer want to pay their bills.”
The company sees a big growth opportunity there.
“Not very many advisors are proactively talking about this with their clients,” Reed said. “If we all believe that advisors want to offer a more holistic service, you want to be more proactive in offering things like this to your clients.”
Aquilance rebranded in 2021 from its original name, My Accountant. At that time, it also went through a recapitalization, executed with a group of private individual investors, including some customers of the firm. My Accountant was founded in 1987 by Bill Farren and Norb Janis as an outsourced bill pay and accounting firm.
Over the last three years, the company has tripled its revenue and doubled the number of clients.