'We loved building our business, but also love helping advisors build theirs'

Jeff Gans of Purpose Advisor Solutions cut a satisfied man after winning this year’s WealthTech Service Provider of the Year award.

“It was nice to get the recognition for the work that we’ve done over the past five years,” Gans, who is Purpose’s chief executive officer, told Wealth Professional.

“It’s a journey and this is one step along the way. But it’s great to get the recognition and see from where we’ve come. So that was fun.”

The Toronto-based Purpose, which launched five years ago to provide a different option for advisors and portfolio managers, now has about $5 billion in assets, 10 large teams on its platform, 175 referring advisors, and 70 employees, and it’s still planning to build the business even more.

“We’ve got a broker dealer model in Canada that’s dominated by large financial institutions,” he said. “We looked to the U.S. and saw the RIA market is growing faster than anything in the U.S. market, and we saw that as an opportunity to give advisors the opportunity to build and run an independent business and to control the client experience.”

Purpose focused on what advisors need to succeed and how they can reduce the risk of setting up their own businesses. It has been steadily building its operating platform to automate the client-advisor experience, but also providing the service and advice advisors need for business success.

“When you set out to set up your own businesses, there are so many questions that you have about running that business and being compliant and profitable,” said Gans. “So, we really partner with them to help answer those questions.”

Gans said Purpose, whose clients range from $25 million to $2 billion in assets, is investing heavily in managing data so advisors have true insights into their clients and the data flows seamlessly, so they can reduce the time spent on re-entering and fixing data.

“We’re continuing to provide tools to them to manage their business more efficiently, so they can focus on what they want to focus on, which is understanding their clients and building deeper relationships with them,” he said, noting that automating their processes and improving business insights can help those who use their systems.

“The third thing is insight into their clients, so they have the right ideas at the right time to help their clients with their financial planning,” said Gans. “If those things are happening, that should free up capacity for the advisor to serve clients and deepen their relationships to get deeper insights.

“The biggest challenge to growth for advisors is not their ability to sell. It’s not marketing. It’s having the capacity to deal with the complexity of systems, the difficulty with data, dealing with errors, and handling paperwork. Even if paperwork has been turned digital, It’s still treated like paperwork versus automating workflows. All of that becomes an impediment to the advisor, so they are constantly dealing with challenges in the office instead of getting out and talking to their clients.

“What we’re focused on doing is trying to free advisors up so they can spend more time with their clients to help them achieve their goals and feel more confident about their financial future, but also go out and talk to new clients so they can grow their business.”

Gans said what he finds most rewarding about what Purpose is doing is sitting down with advisors who’ve transitioned to their platform and begun to realize all of the opportunity they now have to deliver the kind of client experience that they want in order to build their businesses.

“We’ve got a really strong pipeline of new clients, so we continue to see growth,” said Gans, noting Purpose now has clients in almost every Canadian province. “But it’s the success of the individual firms that really excites us.

“We’ve loved starting and building our business, but we also love helping other entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial advisors build their wealth businesses, too.”