Bryson Pouw (BP): Blaze Portfolio delivers web-based tax-optimized portfolio rebalancing and scalable trade order management system for wealth managers, investment advisors, multi-family offices, digital advisors and industry partners. Blaze Portfolio is a Chicago-based company that was founded in 2009 by Bryson Pouw. Bryson has worked in the investment management and trading division for many of the largest firms in the industry, including Wells Fargo, Allianz Global and SEI Investments. Prior to founding Blaze Portfolio, Bryson was a partner with Fascet LLC, a New York–based technology and business process consulting firm for global financial services organizations. He also served as a senior consultant with Advent Software, where he worked on numerous large-scale technology projects for leading firms in the investment industry.
 
Bryson holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Bryson has been using, implementing and developing trading solutions for more than 20 years. With extensive experience implementing trading platforms with hundreds of RIAs and investment managers, Bryson saw an opportunity to build better technology for advisors.
 
MutualFunds.com: What are the problems that your products are trying to solve?
 
BP: Investment managers, investment advisors and wealth managers all have many different investment strategies and approaches. They also work with many clients that have a wide range of investing wants and needs. The challenge is to manage multiple investment strategies in a streamlined way across hundreds or thousands of unique clients. Blaze Portfolio’s modeling and rebalancing features support both highly customized and scalable workflows, including household location optimization, global drift analysis, sleeve level modeling, rules-based modeling and tax harvesting. The Blaze Portfolio platform streamlines the trading process with real-time order management, including trade compliance, automated order blocking and real-time electronic order routing to more than 50 custodians and executing brokers.We support the electronic trading of multiple asset types, including stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, equity options and fixed income.
 
MutualFunds.com: Why is this problem worth solving?
 
BP: Delivering investment advice is a service business that comes with many risks. There are regulatory risks, the risk of trading across client accounts while adjusting for cash requests and legacy asset requirements and the risk of missing out on market opportunities. With a service business, time is best spent working directly with clients. Advisors need to save time and reduce risks by leveraging technology.
 
MutualFunds.com: What is differentiated about your solution?
 
BP: The Blaze Portfolio solution separates itself from the competition by combining a highly flexible model rebalancing system with a full-featured Order Management System for managing the trade execution process. Competitors in this space are either a rebalancing system with modeling capabilities or a trading system with OMS features. We stand alone as the only system that has a complete hybrid of both.
 
MutualFunds.com: What is the best way for prospective clients to learn more about you?
 
BP: Visit us online here.
 
MutualFunds.com: Where can attendees find you at the conference?
 
BP: We will be at the Schwab Conference Tech Alley.