Our Partners Bring Out Our Best
Partnerships are core to our company’s growth. Risclarity has found partnerships to be a strong pillar to build our business, and here’s why: Our firm helps wealth managers, family offices, and financial technology companies serving ultra-high net worth families by creating a technology platform that integrates all the systems, processes, and software needed to automate communications and operations, such as reporting.
Because our goal is to have clients use the best technology solutions that work for each part of their business, we must work with other technology companies to ensure that our platform can integrate seamlessly with theirs. As a result, our growth is intertwined with the partnerships we create with other service providers and software companies. In essence, we grow faster through strong partnerships with other successful, growing companies.
Why Build a Business on Partnerships?
A huge part of the reason we build partnerships into the growth of our company is that it’s more fun! Honestly, we love the process of building partnerships. But, an additional benefit is that the work we love to do is the work that makes our business stronger, and the same can be said for your business. The process of building partnerships means you gain these advantages for your business:
- Deep insight into customer need
- Opportunity to innovate
- Market pull for our integrations
- Thought leadership
- Stand out in your industry
In our case, the end result is that our partnerships help us attract clients because they are the clients already using our partners’ tools. Being willing to keep forging partnerships with companies that are developing best-of-breed solutions means we can better serve our industry. Having a partnership strategy also means we are always working with the best and brightest in the market.
Deep Customer Insight
Because we are working with other technology companies that exist because they solve some element of a client’s workflow, we gain deep insight into our customers’ needs. Our partners have built their solutions to meet those needs. Our job is to integrate those solutions with other solutions. In this way, we gain a deep understanding of each problem in the customer workflow. In addition, we gain a broader view of the entire workflow because we see all the integrations our customers have. Therefore, our perspective is both wide and deep, thanks in part to our partnerships.
Innovation Loves Company
Nothing makes you better than working side-by-side with the best! Our partners are also our colleagues and our collaborators. As we develop integrations to their products, we get to work at the bleeding edge with creative and intelligent people. Their best brings out our best in a way that working alone never can.
Market Pull
Because we work with partners, we know the features we are adding to our integration platform are necessary — otherwise, they wouldn’t have a product! We don’t have to question if we are pushing something onto the market that will go unneeded and unnoticed. By definition, we have market pull because we are integrating to a solution that already has a market. This means when we go to market, we know we are offering value to our industry.
Thought Leadership
Our work together with other experts in the wealth management ecosystem has helped us define an area where we are recognized as thought leaders in our industry. Often, we are asked for our opinions on suitability and fit of prospective vendors to a family office. Because no single solution exists that solves all of the challenges, it is our thought leadership that helps family offices clearly navigate the value of our partners’ offerings. In many cases, our insight helps strengthen the positioning of our partners.
Stand Out
We work in a highly fragmented industry. By partnering with the leading firms in each bucket of the wealth management ecosystem, we become part of the elusive silver-bullet solution — the one system that solves most, if not all, of a client firm’s needs. Since there is no one-size-fits-all solution, we get to play different roles in the ecosystem of each of our client firms. While we may aggregate, warehouse, and report investment information in one implementation, we may play the role of integration between legacy aggregation technology and business intelligence (BI) in another.
Partners Mean Long-Term Relationships
Even though we are a technology company, fundamentally, we are a company built on relationships. By creating partnerships with other leaders in the industry, we demonstrate that relationships are a cornerstone principle of our company’s culture and growth strategy. Through these relationships, we have formed relationships with clients. This has helped us deepen our relationships with our partners and the clients we serve. Even more importantly, it helps us stick with customers for the long haul as their needs evolve.
Originally published in the Denver Business Journal Leadership Trust on June 3, 2021
