Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: This week on the podcast Yet Another Banger. Sam Safe
Speaker 2: is founder and CEO of Purpose Unlimited. One of their
Speaker 2: holdings is Purpose Investments, about forty billion Canadian He is
Speaker 2: a serial entrepreneur and financial innovator. He created the world's
Speaker 2: first bitcoin etf in Canada, long before the US came
Speaker 2: up with one. He built one of the larger etf
Speaker 2: firms in Canada, sold it to Blackrock. On and on
Speaker 2: the conversation goes about all these fascinating things. I thought
Speaker 2: the conversation was really really intriguing, and I think you
Speaker 2: will also with no further ado, my conversation with Purpose Investments.
Speaker 3: Some Safe, Some Safe.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Bloomberg, Barry, It's great to be here, and
Speaker 4: thank you for that kind introduction.
Speaker 2: So I'm kind of fascinated by your background, your career,
Speaker 2: the whole multiple innovations, serial entrepreneurship. But let's roll back
Speaker 2: to the early days. You wanted to be an architect
Speaker 2: and then you went for a bachelor's in Industrial and
Speaker 2: Systems engineering from the University of Toronto. What was the
Speaker 2: original career plan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, since as long as I can remember,
Speaker 4: architecture was my kind of goal, and that fundamentally was
Speaker 4: something that just inspired me. I loved the mix of
Speaker 4: the creative side of my brain and the call it
Speaker 4: systems and structural mathematical side of my brain and bring
Speaker 4: them together.
Speaker 1: And just design was always something exciting.
Speaker 4: The interesting thing was that, you know, so now you're
Speaker 4: faced with this decision, you apply to you know, school
Speaker 4: for architecture and for engineering. And then in my you know,
Speaker 4: I went and spoke to a couple of architects and
Speaker 4: every single one of them said, this is.
Speaker 1: A stupid career choice.
Speaker 4: You won't be doing anything that you will you think
Speaker 4: you'll be doing. It'll be gruntwork, you won't enjoy it,
Speaker 4: and there's no money in it.
Speaker 1: And I, you know, of course, said well what am
Speaker 1: I signing up for?
Speaker 4: So I said, okay, I'm going to go do engineering
Speaker 4: with the idea that maybe I'll switch, and fundamentally that
Speaker 4: was not going to happen.
Speaker 1: And you know, I was in first year of engineering
Speaker 1: and said, okay, what is my second choice? What else?
Speaker 4: And you know, I really loved the concept of strategy
Speaker 4: and finance. I didn't know anything about finance and I
Speaker 4: hadn't been learning anything about it, but I got excited
Speaker 4: about investment banking and things like that, and so, you know,
Speaker 4: ultimately I decided that was the path I was going
Speaker 4: to pursue, and coming out of an engineering degree, I
Speaker 4: ended up, luckily just a timing really uniquely. At the
Speaker 4: end of nineteen ninety eight, got an opportunity to join
Speaker 4: the biggest bank in Canada, RBC, in their investment banking division,
Speaker 4: and so engineering was a really interesting path towards it.
Speaker 1: And you know, at the time.
Speaker 4: The tech bubble was happening, and I guess someone in
Speaker 4: investment banking said, hey, we need more engineers in here
Speaker 4: to tell us, you know, how to think. And the
Speaker 4: learning curve was pretty amazing in terms of starting with
Speaker 4: nothing and basically learning on the go.
Speaker 2: Huh. So you spend six years at RBC helping them
Speaker 2: build out their structured products group. Tell us about that experience.
Speaker 2: What did you learn?
Speaker 4: So investment banking is one of the amazing early learning experiences.
Speaker 4: And I've always been in sort of pursuit of you know,
Speaker 4: learning and call it pushing myself to certain limits. And
Speaker 4: you know, investment making today is very hard. Investment banking
Speaker 4: twenty five years ago was even harder. And you know,
Speaker 4: young analysts, young individually, you're ultimately working on you know,
Speaker 4: amazing things. But at the same time you are you know,
Speaker 4: being you know, you're working like a dog, like eighty
Speaker 4: to one hundred hour weeks. That's there is no better
Speaker 4: place as a twenty ey two year old, twenty three
Speaker 4: year old, twenty five year old to ultimately have immersive
Speaker 4: learning like and so it was amazing for me when
Speaker 4: I when I went into it.
Speaker 1: It's funny I.
Speaker 4: Had as a young individual always you know, I was
Speaker 4: an immigrant to Canada. You know, I didn't you know,
Speaker 4: my family was a good middle class family, but we didn't,
Speaker 4: you know, have stuff.
Speaker 1: So I always dreamed about this idea of.
Speaker 4: All the riches and golds and things of that, and
Speaker 4: you know, investment making kind of one of the things
Speaker 4: that kind of excited me was this idea of you know, hey,
Speaker 4: you're going to make lots of money. And and you know,
Speaker 4: the interesting thing was during the tenure, you know, the
Speaker 4: first few years, you know, you start making good money
Speaker 4: for a young individual, and then you kind of realize,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, this isn't actually motivating me. I remember succinctly,
Speaker 4: I came home. I was twenty five years old. It
Speaker 4: was three in the morning or two in the morning,
Speaker 4: and I just sat down and kind of weeped because
Speaker 4: I said, you know, I'm working like a dog, and
Speaker 4: I'm pursuing this goal, but I'm not happy. And I
Speaker 4: had to actually go through a deep perspective of like, Okay,
Speaker 4: what is the thing that actually drives me? What is
Speaker 4: the thing that actually motivates me to wake up on
Speaker 4: Monday morning and skip to work because I'm still.
Speaker 1: Enjoying what I'm doing.
Speaker 4: And what I realized was that the thing that actually
Speaker 4: I was in pursuit of was the idea of seeing
Speaker 4: my ideas progress, seeing the things that I was doing
Speaker 4: have real tangible outcome. And I go back to that
Speaker 4: principle of what was it that excited me about architecture
Speaker 4: or design. It was this very simple principle of you know,
Speaker 4: when you build something or you design something, you can
Speaker 4: actually see it in front of you afterwards. And so
Speaker 4: I actually correlate that really specifically around what was the
Speaker 4: thing that was my intrinsic motivation. So at that point
Speaker 4: I just said, look, I'm still learning, I'm having an
Speaker 4: amazing time, but am I going to ultimately achieve what
Speaker 4: I want here, and I said I won't, so I
Speaker 4: kind of gave myself a put I call it. I
Speaker 4: was twenty five years old and I said, Okay, I'm
Speaker 4: still here learning, I'm going to build my networks. I'm
Speaker 4: going to do all this stuff. But if I am
Speaker 4: in seat on my thirtieth birthday, I'm going to resign
Speaker 4: on that day. And that kind of woke up my
Speaker 4: mind to what else is out there, And over the
Speaker 4: next number of years, I started thinking about what was
Speaker 4: it that was going to be the next for me,
Speaker 4: and that ultimately came when I was twenty eight and
Speaker 4: started Claymore.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about Clay Moore. You launched this in
Speaker 2: two thousand and five. Globally, ETFs were a thing, but
Speaker 2: not the giants than they were today. They certainly were
Speaker 2: a tiny niche product in Canada back then. What did
Speaker 2: you see that all the other banks and all the
Speaker 2: other finance bros Completely missed?
Speaker 1: So you're absolute right.
Speaker 4: So in Canada specifically, there were fourteen ETFs listed on
Speaker 4: the Toronto Stock Exchange, basically all by Barclay's Eye units
Speaker 4: at the time I shares, and in the United states.
Speaker 4: You know, of course ETFs were starting to become popular,
Speaker 4: specifically in the institutional crowd, retail crowd. You had I think,
Speaker 4: perhaps like wisdomsr had just sort of entered the business
Speaker 4: and players like that, and so it was it was
Speaker 4: not an area that was logical or call it clear
Speaker 4: that said, I had. One of the things I had
Speaker 4: the benefit of, I'd actually covered some management firms globally
Speaker 4: and during my time at RBC, and i'd actually got
Speaker 4: the opportunity to cover Barclays and got to know the
Speaker 4: leadership of the of the organization and help them raise
Speaker 4: the capital. But more importantly, was supported and understood what
Speaker 4: they were doing on the indexing ETS side. And it
Speaker 4: got me really excited. I started to see the trends.
Speaker 4: But what I struggled with was the fundamental principle of
Speaker 4: you know, passive indexing.
Speaker 1: I really did.
Speaker 4: I actually love the principles of what indexing did. And
Speaker 4: at the time ETFs were deemed as indexing, right, that
Speaker 4: was the concept, right, It was actually anything you did
Speaker 4: outside of pure indexing was a no no. The industry
Speaker 4: players would say, well, this isn't an index. And so
Speaker 4: I got really excited about you know, the idea of
Speaker 4: you know what an ETF does, It's low cost, great
Speaker 4: product in terms of rapper and structure, transparent discipline, and
Speaker 4: its approach using an index. However, I just hated the
Speaker 4: fundamental principle of what market cap indexing did, which is
Speaker 4: basically by high and sell low.
Speaker 1: Right. So, in around the time.
Speaker 4: That I left our received started Claymore, I had actually
Speaker 4: read a research paper just serendipitously came out around the
Speaker 4: same time in two thousand and four by Rob are
Speaker 4: Not and Jason Sue, We'll spend some time on Rob,
Speaker 4: who's a really important person in my life, and they
Speaker 4: had published this article around non market cap weated indexes,
Speaker 4: smart data, Yes, and it was I read this article
Speaker 4: and I'm engineer, so I love these technical things, and
Speaker 4: I just got excited, and basically a couple of months later,
Speaker 4: I reached out, We went down and spent time with
Speaker 4: Rob in Pasadena.
Speaker 1: And he was a big thing.
Speaker 4: I remember Rob was a pretty big deal, but he
Speaker 4: took the time, he spent half a day with me,
Speaker 4: and I walked out of that office just having clarity
Speaker 4: on the future of what I was going to build,
Speaker 4: and more importantly, the future of where the industry opportunity was.
Speaker 4: And that was the principal starting point of the vision
Speaker 4: for building Claymore and you know the future of what
Speaker 4: I felt was going to be a really amazing thing
Speaker 4: around indexing and the future of indexing around and we
Speaker 4: used of course, we launched the first public investment fund
Speaker 4: on fundamental index and the RAFFI indexes.
Speaker 2: Huh really interesting. So you grow this to thirty four
Speaker 2: ETFs and a couple of closed end funds and about
Speaker 2: eight billion dollars Canadian I think, yeah, six billion US.
Speaker 2: What was the hardest part of building that sort of
Speaker 2: asset manager considering all the other products were giant bank owns.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, Canada of course has many structural I mean,
Speaker 4: it's an amazing region for opportunity financial services. That said,
Speaker 4: it is also you know, highly concentrated with the big
Speaker 4: banks and the control that they have with their distribution,
Speaker 4: and so it's a very challenging market for independence as
Speaker 4: you can imagine.
Speaker 1: That said, you know what, I really I go back
Speaker 1: to the period we had a really amazing product. No
Speaker 1: one knew what it was.
Speaker 4: I remember we'd go out in two thousand and five,
Speaker 4: two thousand and six, two thousand and seven. We'd sit
Speaker 4: down and talk to advisors across the country and you know,
Speaker 4: I'd walk into a room and I'd have a sign
Speaker 4: in sheet and saying, you know, name and email. But
Speaker 4: then I'd ask the question, how many of you use ETFs?
Speaker 4: And back then it was one out of ten would
Speaker 4: say yes. Most people were like, what's an ETF? It's
Speaker 4: what EFTs? You know, like, this is the time, right,
Speaker 4: But I fundamentally believe what we were doing is important,
Speaker 4: and it was, you know, we grew in Canada. Of course,
Speaker 4: remember about one tenth size of the American market, so
Speaker 4: you know, eight billion aggregate would be like eighty billion
Speaker 4: in that timeframe. But we actually in the first couple
Speaker 4: of years grew to about a billion dollars. So at
Speaker 4: the beginning of a weight, we got to eight hundred million,
Speaker 4: which is a great, great outcome early on in you know,
Speaker 4: from nothing, and then in the real thing happened in
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight, you know, and it's you know,
Speaker 4: it was a really great wake up call and called
Speaker 4: learning for me. We went through two thousand and eight
Speaker 4: and every single month and o eight we grew positively.
Speaker 4: We had the net positive sales I think we were
Speaker 4: going to bite the market environment. And in September October specifically,
Speaker 4: we had positive net sales, and I think we were
Speaker 4: the only firm in the country that had that. The
Speaker 4: principle was that disruption was critical for us at a
Speaker 4: time when we were trying to build a challenger idea
Speaker 4: and tell a really strong narrative. We needed the complacency
Speaker 4: of our investor base, of the advisor community of institutions
Speaker 4: to wake up and say, hey, wait a minute, you
Speaker 4: know what should I be thinking about next? And that
Speaker 4: was a really important point. So coming out of two thousand,
Speaker 4: we ended up in two thousand and eight growing from
Speaker 4: eight hundred million to one point one billion, despite the
Speaker 4: head of the markets, and then in two thousand and
Speaker 4: nine we went from one point one billion to four
Speaker 4: point four billion. Wow, So just an accelerant coming out
Speaker 4: of the financial crisis. The next year we went from
Speaker 4: four point four to five point seven, and then to
Speaker 4: six point eight, and then ultimately two months later when
Speaker 4: we closed the deal with black Rock to sell it,
Speaker 4: it was eight billion. And the momentum was just so
Speaker 4: unbelievably strong. And the reason was because when people the
Speaker 4: financial crisis occurred people left the market and they were
Speaker 4: going to cash, and then when they were re entering
Speaker 4: the market, they were asking themselves, now, what where do
Speaker 4: I go?
Speaker 1: What's the best investment vehicles?
Speaker 4: And all of a sudden, easys became something that they
Speaker 4: were learning about, understanding, and we were.
Speaker 1: Right there and it was amazing.
Speaker 4: At the same time, we also saw the acceleration towards
Speaker 4: the trends that were happening in advice as you know,
Speaker 4: the movement towards discretionary portfolio management, you know, the historical
Speaker 4: mindset towards commission oriented new issue type business that became
Speaker 4: challenged because of the market and the banks and the
Speaker 4: broker dealers wanted more stability, so advisors started to transition
Speaker 4: their practices towards more discretionary investment processes and model portfolios
Speaker 4: and ETFs of course, you know, fit extremely well.
Speaker 1: In the US.
Speaker 4: We've of course seen the RAA movement coming out of that,
Speaker 4: and those were an amazing backdrop of trend that that
Speaker 4: just drove the market and in parallel, the ETF industry
Speaker 4: alongside of it, and it's been an unbelievable number of
Speaker 4: years for everyone.
Speaker 2: Really interesting. So so the sale to Blackrock what motivated
Speaker 2: the exit, what was the process like, and how hard
Speaker 2: was it to let go of this thing that you
Speaker 2: had built?
Speaker 1: Very hard.
Speaker 4: So there's a My financial partner in the call it
Speaker 4: latter years was a firm called Googa IM Partners and
Speaker 4: an amazing partner, an organization. Worked really well with them,
Speaker 4: and you know, really proud of the relationship we built there.
Speaker 4: And the interesting thing was, of course I had sort
Speaker 4: of approached them and said, let's let's sort of, you.
Speaker 1: Know, let me buy you out.
Speaker 4: You know, they'd had a great outcome and it was
Speaker 4: a wonderful locome, but you know, we just sort of
Speaker 4: couldn't get to a price that made sense.
Speaker 1: So we decided to go through a process.
Speaker 4: And I at the time felt, Okay, we'll run a process,
Speaker 4: but I'm going to also be a buyer at the process,
Speaker 4: and I agreed.
Speaker 1: We agreed to that. At the end of the day
Speaker 1: though the process was very robust.
Speaker 4: Blackrock was a leading partner at that and I remember
Speaker 4: pivoting multiple times as the price kept going up on
Speaker 4: who my partner was going to be to finanza my buyout.
Speaker 4: And then at the end, I remember, on in December
Speaker 4: of twenty eleven, I was was my daughter's birthday. I
Speaker 4: was on the phone with one of my strategy partners
Speaker 4: around the purchase and we were having conversation about strategy,
Speaker 4: execution plan. And then I got off the phone. I
Speaker 4: walked down to my wife and I said, I'm holding
Speaker 4: on too much. The price has gotten well above what
Speaker 4: my target price was.
Speaker 1: I'm being too emotional. I think that the right thing
Speaker 1: to do is to sell.
Speaker 4: So I called the bankers. I said, I'll put my
Speaker 4: name behind the black Rock bid. I flew down to
Speaker 4: New York on January second. We spent a few days
Speaker 4: in a room negotiating the purchase. Still agreement.
Speaker 1: I mean, now it's the deal.
Speaker 4: I think on January eleventh and close a deal on
Speaker 4: March second, and that it was a really difficult period
Speaker 4: for me. I had a chip on my shoulder. I'd
Speaker 4: built this thing. You used the word serial entrepreneur earlier,
Speaker 4: and I actually have never believed I'm a serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 4: I don't build businesses to build businesses. I build business
Speaker 4: because I truly love what I do. I'm in pursuit
Speaker 4: of really building things that have endurance, have great value
Speaker 4: to our customers, that really think about changing the industry,
Speaker 4: and so this was a moment where I felt like
Speaker 4: something was being ripped out of me, and so I
Speaker 4: had a chip on my shoulder. We closed the transaction
Speaker 4: and I said, I need to take the time. I
Speaker 4: actually ended up building the business plan for what I
Speaker 4: was going to do next, which ultimately is purpose and
Speaker 4: while simple, within thirty days. But I said to myself,
Speaker 4: if I start today, I'm going to fail because I'm
Speaker 4: not doing it for the right motivation.
Speaker 1: I'm doing it for the wrong reasons.
Speaker 4: I want to do it because I'm in pursuit of
Speaker 4: getting back in the business.
Speaker 1: And so I ended up.
Speaker 4: Consulting for the Irregulator for a couple of weeks, and
Speaker 4: then I ultimately went to with my wife for three
Speaker 4: months overseas to Southeast Asia and I detached. I Back then,
Speaker 4: we had blackberries. I still probably have BlackBerry. People famously
Speaker 4: know I love blackberries. But I had BlackBerry and I
Speaker 4: turned it off and no one could get a hold
Speaker 4: of me. We went throughout Southeast Asia and it was
Speaker 4: the greatest thing. And I said to myself, if I
Speaker 4: come back and I have the energy and excitement around
Speaker 4: this business plan, then I'm going to do it. And
Speaker 4: of course we came back and you know, I once
Speaker 4: we landed in North America, you get all the texts
Speaker 4: and all the news, and my energy just started to
Speaker 4: really powerfully go up. And I said, okay, let's go,
Speaker 4: and I registered purpose and started the business plan.
Speaker 2: So we're going to talk in a little bit about
Speaker 2: why I think you're a serial entrepreneur. But you said
Speaker 2: something that I'm kind of fascinated by. And it requires
Speaker 2: a degree of self awareness that many people in our
Speaker 2: industry sometimes don't have. I don't want to say always
Speaker 2: don't have. We all have blind spots. You said you
Speaker 2: became aware that you were too emotional, too self involved,
Speaker 2: too you were holding too tightly. How did you come
Speaker 2: to that realization? You know, listeners aboard of hearing me
Speaker 2: talk about my early days on a training desk, But
Speaker 2: I became very aware that, oh, this is just way
Speaker 2: too much fun. You're trading for the dopamine hit, not
Speaker 2: for P and L. You either have to become more
Speaker 2: disciplined or shift your career. What was that insight that
Speaker 2: led you to say, Oh, I'm gripping this way too tightly.
Speaker 4: So I think self reflection is one of the great
Speaker 4: virtues that we all should have. It's one of the
Speaker 4: things I think often people don't have enough of. And
Speaker 4: I actually think, you know, it's something that requires anchoring
Speaker 4: to sort of early on to the kind of goals
Speaker 4: and the things that matter to you. So you're disciplined
Speaker 4: around what you're self reflecting around and it's hard as humans,
Speaker 4: like we're not trained, our mental state is not trained
Speaker 4: this way. So it's just something that I feel very
Speaker 4: confident in my ability to constantly be asking myself, Am
Speaker 4: I on the right track? Am I doing the right things?
Speaker 4: Am I pursuing the right goals? Am I going to
Speaker 4: achieve the things that I want to achieve on the
Speaker 4: path I'm on? And that that's just I think it's
Speaker 4: a critical learning and you know, the growth mindset that
Speaker 4: comes with that curiosity and willingness to be vulnerable is
Speaker 4: critical as a human. So this is this is I
Speaker 4: think a really important thing. I think our industry can
Speaker 4: always use that because you know, I like, I love
Speaker 4: the financial services industry one because it starts with a
Speaker 4: really amazing mission. We are here in service of individuals
Speaker 4: to help them ultimately achieve their out comes, their goals.
Speaker 1: There it is such an unbelievably.
Speaker 4: High mission industry, and we don't do enough to talk
Speaker 4: about that. Instead, we talk too much about ourselves. We're
Speaker 4: self centered. We talk about you know, hey, let me
Speaker 4: tell you about me, and now that I'm done talking
Speaker 4: about me, let me talk to you more about me.
Speaker 4: And you go to someone's website, it's always about me, me, me,
Speaker 4: it's never about the customer. And so there's this amazing
Speaker 4: opportunity as an industry to step back, reflect and say,
Speaker 4: why are we here? What's the actual job that we're
Speaker 4: here to do? And it is ultimately in service of
Speaker 4: individuals and their outcomes one hundred percent, and we complicate
Speaker 4: that so much, and so I think self reflection on
Speaker 4: that as an industry is a big opportunity, and those
Speaker 4: who get it are those who stand out and differentiate
Speaker 4: more than anybody else.
Speaker 2: Really really fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with
Speaker 2: some safe founder and CEO of Purpose Investments discussing financial innovation.
Speaker 2: I'm Barry rich Alts. You're listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 2: on blue Berg Radio. I'm Barry Redhults. You're listening to
Speaker 2: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm speaking with some
Speaker 2: Safe he is the founder and CEO of Purpose Investments.
Speaker 2: So we were talking earlier. You sold Claymore to black Rock,
Speaker 2: and instead of taking a couple of years off, a
Speaker 2: month or two later you essentially start Purpose as well
Speaker 2: as co founding Wealth Simple. So many people take a
Speaker 2: breather after an exit. Why go straight back in? And
Speaker 2: why two companies at want?
Speaker 4: So I had, As I said earlier, I had a
Speaker 4: very clear eye on what I wanted to do next.
Speaker 4: I was really excited about where the industry was going,
Speaker 4: what we were doing, with the momentum we were seeing.
Speaker 4: And it felt actually now I had this amazing gift.
Speaker 4: I was blessed with a blank piece of paper. And
Speaker 4: so when you have a blank piece of paper, so
Speaker 4: oftentimes businesses want to keep evolving, you want to, but
Speaker 4: you have to kind of deal with your legacy, you know,
Speaker 4: and technical data and things like that. And so I felt,
Speaker 4: blank piece of paper I can get to do. How
Speaker 4: would I start from scratch? And so I had this
Speaker 4: great energy. But I looked at both the continued evolution
Speaker 4: of modernization of investment management, but I also saw a
Speaker 4: bigger picture opportunity in wealth management. I said, the opportunity
Speaker 4: is not just you know, let's build ass some management products.
Speaker 4: Because when I started claymar I came from it from
Speaker 4: a technical engineering perspective, and I said, when I look
Speaker 4: at all the billboards and I look at all the advertising,
Speaker 4: all it says is, hey, we beat the market.
Speaker 1: We did this.
Speaker 4: And I said, okay, well, the job to be done
Speaker 4: is to beat the markets. And I thought that's what
Speaker 4: we were supposed to do. So I was in pursuit
Speaker 4: of building a product and a business that ultimately solved
Speaker 4: for helping people beat the markets. What I realized and
Speaker 4: one of my great stories around this was the first
Speaker 4: product we launched was the Canadian Fundamental RAFFI Fundamental Index,
Speaker 4: and we launched that and it was amazing. But it
Speaker 4: hit its five year numbers in twenty ten, just early
Speaker 4: twenty eleven, and of course five years you start to
Speaker 4: see real track record. And at the time it was
Speaker 4: the number two Canadian equity fund. It beat every active fund,
Speaker 4: all the main index. It outperformed by two hundred basis points,
Speaker 4: and that's a great accolade, of course in our industry.
Speaker 4: That's what you know, you were really excited about. And
Speaker 4: I felt, wait a minute, I actually don't know if
Speaker 4: we actually did anything, because it went down in two
Speaker 4: thousand and eight, just like the Maid Index thirty five
Speaker 4: percent or whatever it was. And I also looked at
Speaker 4: the journey and I said, if someone had bought it
Speaker 4: on day one when we launched it and held it
Speaker 4: all through that five years, they would have received that return.
Speaker 4: But the reality of what human nature was is that
Speaker 4: they were buying it at different times when they got fearful,
Speaker 4: they were selling it, and you know, their return was
Speaker 4: very different than the fund's return. And I asked myself,
Speaker 4: I said, did we actually change the industry?
Speaker 1: Did we do anything?
Speaker 4: Yes, we did something great technically, the product was excellent.
Speaker 4: We were moving the needle of how the industry operates,
Speaker 4: but we weren't changing the way the client and the
Speaker 4: customer was experiencing what we did.
Speaker 1: And so that for me.
Speaker 4: And at the same time I told you about Guggenheim
Speaker 4: was our partners and they had been working on their
Speaker 4: wealth part of the business with Danny Knoman, and I
Speaker 4: had this wonderful gift again to have the opportunity to
Speaker 4: learn and understand how the Danny was brought in to
Speaker 4: help them understand how to help billionaires and wealthy families
Speaker 4: and call it patriarchs and matriarchs to understand the transition
Speaker 4: from wealth creation to wealth management. And it was so
Speaker 4: powerful and the principles of what Danny talked about really
Speaker 4: resonated with me. I became a student of behavioral science
Speaker 4: and that sort of became really powermount to my view
Speaker 4: of what a modern assa management firm needs to think about,
Speaker 4: which is not just beat the markets, but develop investment
Speaker 4: products that actually have outcomes and goal orientation towards them.
Speaker 4: How do you help advisors and investors ultimately communicate together
Speaker 4: and work collaboratively around the actual goal the customers are
Speaker 4: asking us to do, which is help them meet their goals.
Speaker 1: And so I just.
Speaker 4: Felt the asse management industry, wealth industry both could ultimately
Speaker 4: optimize around that.
Speaker 1: And that was what Purpose's mission was going to be around.
Speaker 4: Is outcom oriented modern investment management, optimizing for all the
Speaker 4: inputs and how we manage money, not being active, not
Speaker 4: being passive. And then second is how do we help
Speaker 4: restructure the way wealth management could ultimately be oriented towards
Speaker 4: the customer journey as opposed to, Hey, we're just going
Speaker 4: to give you a sixty to forty portfolio.
Speaker 2: Huh really really fascinating. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 2: wealth Simple, which I described earlier as the default investing
Speaker 2: app for a young generation of Canadians. What did you
Speaker 2: see before apps like Robinhood were big and successful that
Speaker 2: was a thing that young people wanted.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the principal insight that I sort of had was,
Speaker 4: you know, if you looked at the way that the
Speaker 4: industry was operating, one of the big negatives was that
Speaker 4: because the industry made so much money, the margins were
Speaker 4: so good, we actually relied in a l easy way
Speaker 4: on what we call average economics. So what does that mean?
Speaker 4: Where do you see that It comes out as on average?
Speaker 4: You know, I like to run money for bigger customers.
Speaker 4: On average, my bigger customers make me more money, and
Speaker 4: on average, my smaller customers don't make any money. And
Speaker 4: how does that show up? You know, smaller customers get
Speaker 4: treated poorly, get high fees, get relegated to lower quality services,
Speaker 4: and larger investors ultimately get all the value. And people
Speaker 4: are gravitating towards hey minimums and big fees for big,
Speaker 4: big services for high net worth and ultra high networth.
Speaker 4: And I just felt that was stupid. The only economics
Speaker 4: class I took in engineering was something called ABC economics,
Speaker 4: and what that is is actually activity based economics. And
Speaker 4: so the idea of unit economics, and I said, what
Speaker 4: we need to understand in this industry is that I
Speaker 4: actually disagree that small accounts don't make you money. I
Speaker 4: just think that the systems, the principles of the infrastructure
Speaker 4: of the industry are poorly designed to serve smaller clients.
Speaker 4: And so what I I felt my whole wealth model
Speaker 4: was how do we restructure the infrastructure of the industry.
Speaker 4: How do we think about it from a unit economics
Speaker 4: using technology and structure and pipes that would ultimately allow
Speaker 4: for that. And then what you do is bifurcate the
Speaker 4: value for the different segments of customers fall early stage customers,
Speaker 4: middle of massiffluent all the way to ultra high net
Speaker 4: worth based on a service level offering. And the service
Speaker 4: level offering would change an increase based on the needs
Speaker 4: of those customers.
Speaker 1: So that was the principle.
Speaker 4: And I said, at the earliest stage, if you're twenty
Speaker 4: years old, twenty five years old, this is the most
Speaker 4: amazing period to build for. But the industry was treating
Speaker 4: them awful. So I said, let's go build this, and
Speaker 4: so we started with the technology, the infrastructure, and what
Speaker 4: will Simple has done is really unbelievable. It has become
Speaker 4: in Canada the most competitive platform in financial services against
Speaker 4: the big six Canadian banks. Canada has never seen anything
Speaker 4: like this before. And it all is rooted on on
Speaker 4: serving customers where they're needing us to serve them right
Speaker 4: when they're getting started or along the earliest stage of
Speaker 4: their journey, and then helping them compound not only their
Speaker 4: wealth but also the overall financial experience as they grow.
Speaker 4: From twenty five thirty thirty five, forty it has been
Speaker 4: an amazing experience.
Speaker 1: And you know today Well.
Speaker 4: Simple, I mean, I think we're we run about one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty billion, but we're doing more in net
Speaker 4: deposits than the biggest bank in Canada, RBC. That is
Speaker 4: an unbelievable City six and I'm proud of what that
Speaker 4: team and what the organization is doing to challenge the
Speaker 4: industry and change the way Canadians are served.
Speaker 2: So let's stay with wealth Simple a minute, because initially
Speaker 2: I assumed this was kind of a rub and hood
Speaker 2: like app with free trading and gamification and you know
Speaker 2: up to but not quite sports betting like that sort of. Hey,
Speaker 2: this isn't going to get anybody to their goals. It's
Speaker 2: fun entertaining stuff during the lockdown of the pandemic. Tell
Speaker 2: us about wealth simple in terms of the differences with
Speaker 2: an app like Robinhood.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the starting point actually is you start with
Speaker 4: the customer where they need you the most. Right when
Speaker 4: you're twenty five or thirty, you know, you're either just
Speaker 4: getting started, you might have five, ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: and the principle of it is you want to help
Speaker 4: them ultimately get going.
Speaker 1: So building a discipline, a structure.
Speaker 4: So we have the manage money programs, which are you
Speaker 4: open an account very simply and clearly, you basically build
Speaker 4: your portfolio, and your portfolio is basically a glide path
Speaker 4: on the markets and and such, and then you surround
Speaker 4: that with you know, the types of services and solutions,
Speaker 4: so direct trading accounts, you know, cash management, credit cards,
Speaker 4: you know all the crypto things like that are really important.
Speaker 1: So my principle is there's always a view of attention
Speaker 1: of these things.
Speaker 4: I come from a different way of it, which is,
Speaker 4: these are things that people are going to be in
Speaker 4: pursuit of, and what you want as an organization is
Speaker 4: not to duck your head in the sand at any stage.
Speaker 4: If you're an advisor, you know, saying hey, I don't
Speaker 4: do crypto is actually a wrong message or because your
Speaker 4: customers are going to be in pursuit of it. We
Speaker 4: know that sixty seventy percent of highit worth individuals have
Speaker 4: a direct account and many of them are curious and
Speaker 4: engaged in buying interesting areas like that. So I think
Speaker 4: an advisor firm or any firm, a financial service firm,
Speaker 4: has to find a way to balance the foundations of
Speaker 4: what is good long term you know, call it discipline investing,
Speaker 4: along with saytiating the needs and the desires of what
Speaker 4: an individual wants so that they don't always you know,
Speaker 4: turn their head to I need something different. And that
Speaker 4: actually comes from the mindset of find a safe and
Speaker 4: secure way to do those types of things on behalf
Speaker 4: of the customers and educate them and size it effectively.
Speaker 4: So you know, like for example, while Simple recently got
Speaker 4: approval to do prediction markets, and this is a really
Speaker 4: high tension area.
Speaker 1: It's you know, people have a you know, binary.
Speaker 4: View of this, and my view is if customers are
Speaker 4: going to be doing it, you want them to do
Speaker 4: it with you in a safe and secure way, then
Speaker 4: to do it elsewhere, and that's how you have to
Speaker 4: ultimately be building around. But at the same time, the
Speaker 4: whole business is oriented around helping someone where they need
Speaker 4: it the most, around their financial journey so they can
Speaker 4: ultimately achieve their goals.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: So this discussion about whether or not you're a serial entrepreneur,
Speaker 2: I have to click through a bunch of things that
Speaker 2: you've built that are fascinating. Starting with the world's first
Speaker 2: spot bitcoin ETF back in twenty twenty one, long years
Speaker 2: before the US approved one. It crossed a billion dollars
Speaker 2: in the first month. How did you get the Canadian
Speaker 2: regulators to approve this? How did you make them comfortable
Speaker 2: three years before the SEC was comfortable.
Speaker 4: So, first off, I've had a deep thesis on crypto
Speaker 4: for a long time, and that's the starting point is
Speaker 4: I wasn't doing it because hey, cool, dos your idea.
Speaker 4: Let's launch this and throw some thing against the wall.
Speaker 4: I had, you know, in twenty sixteen, just like most people,
Speaker 4: you know, I had been like, you know, been asked
Speaker 4: about bitcoin, and I was like, I don't know, it
Speaker 4: looks like a sort.
Speaker 1: Of scammy thing.
Speaker 4: And then I sort of self reflected and said, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, people are actually asking my opinion on this.
Speaker 4: I should go and do some research. So I spent
Speaker 4: the time learning and understanding the space. I actually the
Speaker 4: best way to do that is make an investment. And
Speaker 4: you know, over the next twelve months, I just became
Speaker 4: this student of what was happening. And you know what
Speaker 4: really excited me was, of course Ethereum, which is this
Speaker 4: call it sister technology that was really around taking what
Speaker 4: Bitcoin had done and really expanding the capabilities of it,
Speaker 4: around smart crypto and.
Speaker 1: All the ust it exactly. And so I got very
Speaker 1: excited about that. And so what I.
Speaker 4: Said was, we're so early in this, the infrastructure is
Speaker 4: not there, The fraud risks all of it for investors
Speaker 4: is going to be so high. So I actually launched
Speaker 4: the first publicly traded vehicle on Ethereum, called ether cap
Speaker 4: Partner with a group of people and I said, we're
Speaker 4: going to raise the money. We're going to buy a
Speaker 4: ether on the balance sheet.
Speaker 1: Effect.
Speaker 4: You know, we've seen these now become more popular in
Speaker 4: the last number of years, but it was the first
Speaker 4: one and we did this in twenty eighteen, and I'll
Speaker 4: tell you it was an amazing thing. And my message wise,
Speaker 4: we're going to find a safe and secure way for
Speaker 4: people to co invest alongside of us on this really
Speaker 4: great journey because of the asymmetric opportunity of this bet
Speaker 4: that informed me on so much. And then at some
Speaker 4: point and we used to do self custody in that
Speaker 4: corporation and all the rest of it, and then at
Speaker 4: some point we started to see the infrastructure change and
Speaker 4: that's when we went into the regulator and said, look,
Speaker 4: there's an opportunity here. The infrastructure is changing around how
Speaker 4: you can custody and fit this into a liquid ETF structure.
Speaker 4: We worked with them for nine months and ultimately got
Speaker 4: them comfortable. And this is a really important principle that
Speaker 4: I believe we as a registrant, as a money manager,
Speaker 4: we have great ideas, great innovation, and as long as
Speaker 4: our ideas are aligned with where the regulator wants the
Speaker 4: future to go, it's really important to engage with the
Speaker 4: regus later and have that dual relationship. That idea of
Speaker 4: helping them, educating them on where we need to get to.
Speaker 4: And so that was the kind of work we've done
Speaker 4: all throughout my career, and we did that on crypto
Speaker 4: and frankly, we really excited that we got the opportunity
Speaker 4: to launch it and that model. What we did actually
Speaker 4: ultimately informed the series of products launched in the US
Speaker 4: a couple of years later on how ultimately to structure
Speaker 4: ETFs in the crypto space. And of course the industry
Speaker 4: has grown and we've moved an asset from the fringe
Speaker 4: all the way to the core, which is what ultimately
Speaker 4: my thesis was in a deep way.
Speaker 2: And ef capital today is in what structure we.
Speaker 4: Actually converted it from that corporation to an ETF once
Speaker 4: that was available, and the gain there we built staking
Speaker 4: into it and those things weren't again available in an
Speaker 4: ETF form or call it doable, until they were, and
Speaker 4: when they were, we ultimately moved to the most efficient vehicle,
Speaker 4: which is the ETF structure.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about longevity pension funds, launched in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: the world's first income for life mutual funds, which uses
Speaker 2: longevity risk pooling to pay lifetime income like a defined
Speaker 2: benefit pension investors include allions and omers. How is this
Speaker 2: different from what in the US we think of as
Speaker 2: traditional annuities.
Speaker 4: So this is actually so first of this was my
Speaker 4: original thesis on purpose, which was, you know, the industry
Speaker 4: was all solving for the accumulation phase.
Speaker 1: Let's build them.
Speaker 4: Investment products to call it, solve for how do we
Speaker 4: save money? But no one was really solving within the
Speaker 4: asset management industry around the challenges of decumulation. And it
Speaker 4: was kind of left to the insurers, you know, with
Speaker 4: annuities and with defined benefit pensions and such. And I
Speaker 4: just felt there was this gap there that was really
Speaker 4: critical and you need to deeply understand the sort of
Speaker 4: the principles of you know how, longevity and structure and
Speaker 4: all the rest of it. We're going to be critically
Speaker 4: in there. And so I asked the team, I said,
Speaker 4: we need to solve for decumulation. And we were in
Speaker 4: pursuit of it. We were spending a lot of time
Speaker 4: working on it. Ultimately we came across a structure and
Speaker 4: I just got really excited.
Speaker 1: And the principles.
Speaker 4: We had to go to the regulator again and say
Speaker 4: there are some exemptions we need to make this work.
Speaker 4: If I step back for a moment, the greatest financial
Speaker 4: product ever created in our business or in the financial
Speaker 4: industry is the divine benefit pension plant. And frankly, if
Speaker 4: you go back to what that represented, it was such
Speaker 4: an amazing bargain. You join a company, the company says,
Speaker 4: we will, in an institutional way, organize to have a
Speaker 4: savings program alongside of your career, and it will not
Speaker 4: only solve for your savings needs while you're working, but
Speaker 4: once you retire, it will also solve for your income
Speaker 4: longevity for as long as you live and in some
Speaker 4: cases your spouse. That is like, if you think about
Speaker 4: the journey of a customer, it is the most unbelievably
Speaker 4: comforting and principal thing that we've done. And the industry
Speaker 4: has done everything over the last forty years to break
Speaker 4: that down, kill it and on with the concept of hey,
Speaker 4: we're giving you choice, and that has been so bad
Speaker 4: for people. So I always believe that we needed to
Speaker 4: get back to bring the system back. If every Canadian,
Speaker 4: every American had access to a defined benefit pench plon,
Speaker 4: ninety five percent of them would be unbelievably better off.
Speaker 4: The reality is it's not good for the industry. The
Speaker 4: fragmentation allows for agency to increase. And so what I've
Speaker 4: always said is how do we bring this back into
Speaker 4: the structure, And so Longevity Pension Plan was designed on
Speaker 4: how do we build a pension line for all? How
Speaker 4: do we do that in a mutual fund structure which
Speaker 4: is accessible the annuity structure that is of course it
Speaker 4: works similarly. The problem is it has it has the
Speaker 4: structure of you have to go off book for an advisor,
Speaker 4: or advisors don't really like them. Investors have to ultimately
Speaker 4: go through an insurance structure and it's individualized. Whereas the
Speaker 4: defined bension plane is a pool. And so when you
Speaker 4: get longevity risk pooling like that which is done in
Speaker 4: a defined benefit BENSUIP plan, why couldn't you do.
Speaker 1: That in a mutual fund.
Speaker 4: And that was our principle and so we designed that
Speaker 4: it's the first fund to really incorporate longevity risk pooling.
Speaker 1: So putting lives together with a mutual goal of.
Speaker 4: I'm putting money at work to ultimately solve for my
Speaker 4: lifetime comfort that I'm going to have in number life
Speaker 4: and if I die early, I'm ultimately supporting the cohort
Speaker 4: but I'm getting what I needed from it.
Speaker 2: So I want to click through four other innovative products,
Speaker 2: but I don't want to spend all week on it.
Speaker 2: Let's click through these four quickly, starting with cash management ETFs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so cash is something I think that of course
Speaker 4: everybody needs access to. So we had launched the first
Speaker 4: money market ETF in when I was running Claymore. When
Speaker 4: I came back with Purpose, we saw the movement towards
Speaker 4: deposit rates were much higher than money markets, so we
Speaker 4: actually went in. The unique thing we did there was
Speaker 4: we went and built a ETF that linked to a
Speaker 4: deposit account, so it's not to a security so it's
Speaker 4: actually one of the first of its kind, and that
Speaker 4: was a hugely important thing back in twenty fourteen. And
Speaker 4: of course the cash management industry has grown dramatically. We
Speaker 4: haven't seen this in the United States yet, so we
Speaker 4: haven't seen deposit based cash ETFs. We've seen money market
Speaker 4: based ETFs, but we haven't seen deposit based. So it's
Speaker 4: you know, based on the buck you know, it increases
Speaker 4: based on the on the value doesn't fluctuate, and it
Speaker 4: goes right into the bank deposits of you know, several
Speaker 4: banks and you get therefore a higher rate.
Speaker 1: So we were really really proud of that innovation. It has.
Speaker 4: It goes to show the kind of principal first or
Speaker 4: the first principle mindset that our organization always thinks about
Speaker 4: is solving problems because many advisors moving to discretion and
Speaker 4: we're saying, like, I want to bulk trade cash, but
Speaker 4: it's my organization isn't making it easy.
Speaker 2: So I have to sweep it exactly Sodian at night
Speaker 2: into it really is is it should be capable of
Speaker 2: being automated and maximizing yield without increasing risk. But there
Speaker 2: are just a million impediments.
Speaker 4: I sell qqqs and I want to go into cash
Speaker 4: in my balance of my model, my administrative assistant has
Speaker 4: to go and do all the basically account by account.
Speaker 4: Now with the ETF, you were able to go from
Speaker 4: from you know, qqs to cash and then back to
Speaker 4: qqqs or whatever you were doing in just a simple
Speaker 4: single trade.
Speaker 2: Let's let's talk about option based income products. I've never
Speaker 2: been a fan of this as a brokerage product. It
Speaker 2: just felt like there was so much costs, so much
Speaker 2: commission built into it. It really when when you're dealing
Speaker 2: with relatively tight margins, it's a challenge as a retail
Speaker 2: investor to derive any value out of it, real value.
Speaker 2: It's certainly great for generating fees. How do you how
Speaker 2: do you manage an option based income product that works
Speaker 2: for the retail investor.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the principle why right?
Speaker 4: I believe that options and derivatives actually play a really
Speaker 4: important role for management of portfolios and return stream.
Speaker 1: So it goes back to that principle.
Speaker 4: Can you design outcomes and the trade offs that come
Speaker 4: with options, because that's ultimately what you're doing, whether it's
Speaker 4: call options or put options, and so for an investment
Speaker 4: return stream that you're designing, options can be really powerful.
Speaker 4: That said that, to your point, they're high friction for
Speaker 4: an advisor, very hard to execute and you know, across
Speaker 4: your business, but too for individuals. It's very hard and
Speaker 4: very expensive to you know, the spreads and the costs
Speaker 4: and the sizing.
Speaker 1: But it's excellent.
Speaker 4: It's actually what option structures are really designed for ETFs
Speaker 4: and institutional money management in a great way because you
Speaker 4: can do at scale really amazing programs. So we've been
Speaker 4: doing these for twenty five years. You know, back when
Speaker 4: I was at RBC, we used to help firms build them.
Speaker 4: At Claymore, I build them, and then at Purpose we've
Speaker 4: done it, and I find that they are so designed,
Speaker 4: so perfectly designed for the structural outcome that you want
Speaker 4: to ultimately create and manipulate in your return stream.
Speaker 1: But they do come with trade offs. I'll give you
Speaker 1: a great example.
Speaker 4: One of the first things when I was in my
Speaker 4: you know, starting in my career in talking to advisors,
Speaker 4: the thing that they the old school advisor would say, oh,
Speaker 4: I write put options or call options for a couple
Speaker 4: of my clients on their large names, but I can't
Speaker 4: do it for all my clients.
Speaker 1: And I'd say, why do you do that?
Speaker 4: Well, because you know I'm owning this stock, and you know,
Speaker 4: if I'm going to own it for the next ten years,
Speaker 4: why not generate some income along the way. And that
Speaker 4: was a really important mindset that people had, but they
Speaker 4: couldn't do it across their business. And I said, well,
Speaker 4: if I own a name like a JP Morgan and
Speaker 4: I'm going to own I love JP Morgan. The actual
Speaker 4: optimal well way to own JP Morgan is to have
Speaker 4: eighty percent long JP Morgan and twenty percent covered call
Speaker 4: overlaid JP Morgan, so that you're generating the long term
Speaker 4: beta of JP Morgan. Plus you're generating some ongoing return
Speaker 4: from the option income as volatility is there, and you're
Speaker 4: taking advantage of the volatility to generate a return trip.
Speaker 4: And that's the best way, optimally from a risk adjust
Speaker 4: basis to generally own most stocks.
Speaker 1: So how do you do that?
Speaker 4: And so if you design product We've designed something called
Speaker 4: the Yield Chairs which was designed specifically around single name
Speaker 4: stocks that we people most love, and then you write
Speaker 4: options against them to generate the option income so that
Speaker 4: it complements a long only position.
Speaker 2: How do you avoid getting called away when the stock
Speaker 2: has a sudden surge and all the problem isn't merely hey,
Speaker 2: you can always go out and re buy it, but
Speaker 2: now you have a giant capital gains hit you have
Speaker 2: to pay when the stock gets called.
Speaker 4: So in one thing in Canada is we don't actually
Speaker 4: have the difference between short and long term capital gains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's a really nice thing.
Speaker 4: You know, you can buy and sell something in a
Speaker 4: day and ultimately get capital gain streatment at the lowest rate.
Speaker 1: Our rate is a little higher, but but still it's.
Speaker 2: A short term thirty percent long term.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so our long term is twenty five twenty seven percent.
Speaker 4: The principal mindset, though, is this is what institutional programs
Speaker 4: are really great at. You don't write one option on
Speaker 4: one strike, price on one position.
Speaker 1: You use stack them, so you might have if you have.
Speaker 2: A whole matrix exactly different strikes, different dates.
Speaker 4: And then with technology today you can optimize all the
Speaker 4: structural elements of do you roll it for tax efficiency?
Speaker 4: Do you ultimately buy it back? Do you do you
Speaker 4: wear along a curve an option? Do you basically roll
Speaker 4: the capitol into at any point? So you're constantly in
Speaker 4: this call it vintaging of your portfolio overlay, which is
Speaker 4: really important. That's what institutional money management needs to do.
Speaker 4: If you're just singularly buying one option on one strike byce,
Speaker 4: that's actually a very low quality execution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we used to see a lot of that on
Speaker 2: the broker side. So the single stock yield chairs. How
Speaker 2: many different versions of this are there or are they
Speaker 2: all tossed into.
Speaker 4: Twenty No, we have a single names, so I think
Speaker 4: we might be at like twenty something twenty five. I
Speaker 4: don't know what the exact number, but it's north of
Speaker 4: twenty Canadian and US names.
Speaker 1: And they've been very popular.
Speaker 4: You know, they've been very popular with both advisors and
Speaker 4: direct investors.
Speaker 2: Huh. Really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with
Speaker 2: Sam Safe, CEO and founder of Purpose Investments, discussing why
Speaker 2: he built Purpose Unlimited. I'm Barry rich Alts. You're listening
Speaker 2: to Masters Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Redults. You're
Speaker 2: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra
Speaker 2: special guest this week is Some Safe. He is the
Speaker 2: founder and CEO of Purpose Unlimited, which also owns Purpose Investments.
Speaker 2: He has founded and sold a variety of different companies
Speaker 2: over the past let's call it twenty almost twenty five years.
Speaker 2: So Purpose is now about thirty one thirty two billion
Speaker 2: Canadian or about twenty two billion US across ETF's cash, alternatives,
Speaker 2: private assets, et cetera. Tell us the problem that Purpose
Speaker 2: is trying to solve for your clients.
Speaker 4: Sure, so total Purpose actually run over around forty billion,
Speaker 4: now forty BILLI yeah, on the platform. So on the
Speaker 4: asset management side, just over thirty and on the wealth
Speaker 4: side now just round ten and growing quite fast, and
Speaker 4: the principal mindset has always been so on the asset
Speaker 4: management side, was you know, let's build a modernization of
Speaker 4: investment management and products and services to meet clients where
Speaker 4: they need to be. How do we help advisors and
Speaker 4: investors build more resilient portfolios, not just long only equities
Speaker 4: and long only bonds, but how do you optimize for
Speaker 4: the types of return streams that support a world where
Speaker 4: potentially bonds aren't your protective assets. How do you optimize
Speaker 4: for the types of return streams that ultimately are designed
Speaker 4: around an outcome as opposed to just the return of
Speaker 4: a beta.
Speaker 1: And so those are the first start.
Speaker 4: And we have the inputs of we care about not
Speaker 4: only the quality of our investment product that we manufacture,
Speaker 4: but also they call it artisan quality of our investment inputs.
Speaker 4: So the team, the capabilities the process for investment strategy
Speaker 4: using both quantitative methods active methods in each of the
Speaker 4: different categories. I think the second component was then we
Speaker 4: have this big picture that goes back to this system
Speaker 4: and I use the reference to the defined benefit pension
Speaker 4: plan as a phenomenal product.
Speaker 1: How do we.
Speaker 4: Redesigning the way advice and investment management work together on
Speaker 4: ultimately achieving a client's goal. And so we've designed this
Speaker 4: whole infrastructure around the wealth management to support one the
Speaker 4: movement towards independent wealth management. So as you know in
Speaker 4: the United States, you've seen the US RIA segment. Canada
Speaker 4: has a nascent segment there, and you know, we saw
Speaker 4: this really important movement towards and a need for that.
Speaker 4: So we built the infrastructure to support and movement towards
Speaker 4: independent wealth management. But then also the services and the
Speaker 4: tools and the capabilities over and above that to support
Speaker 4: advisors in basically driving their businesses towards more planning based,
Speaker 4: portfolio outcome oriented investment management and wealth management and experiences
Speaker 4: as opposed to you know, I pick better stocks in
Speaker 4: the next guy, I'm better at delivering better returns. More
Speaker 4: around how do we help customers ultimately achieve their goals,
Speaker 4: And so we've built all of this technology and systems
Speaker 4: around that outcome.
Speaker 2: So I like the idea of emphasizing outcomes over benchmarks,
Speaker 2: but you know, we have half a century maybe longer,
Speaker 2: of organizing portfolios around those benchmarks and trying to beat
Speaker 2: the index. Explain what's wrong with that approach?
Speaker 4: Well, it goes back to the behavioral science start. That's
Speaker 4: first and second ones. It is also a structural thing.
Speaker 4: If you go back to the last the last ten
Speaker 4: years or so, when I looked at the space that
Speaker 4: I felt that the industry had become a little bit
Speaker 4: complacent towards this idea that the call it the best
Speaker 4: and optimal portfolio was a sixty forty portfolio. And the
Speaker 4: reason was if you actually span yourself out and looked
Speaker 4: at the returns of the sixty forty portfolio going back,
Speaker 4: you know, one hundred, one hundred and ten years, which
Speaker 4: we did the research on, it actually only met its
Speaker 4: long term goal of seven percent in five of call
Speaker 4: it eleven or so decades. And this is a couple
Speaker 4: of years ago we did that research, and those of
Speaker 4: those five, three of them were in the period of
Speaker 4: teen eighty to twenty twenty, and so I felt that
Speaker 4: that had created this bias and anchoring bias in call
Speaker 4: it the industry. You know, Barry, the one thing you
Speaker 4: realize about our industry is that very few people have
Speaker 4: a historical experience beyond nineteen eighty. Most people's career spans
Speaker 4: are from nineteen eighty onwards, and so you know, you
Speaker 4: get biased towards what you know, what you see?
Speaker 1: What do you see when interest.
Speaker 4: Rates go up, they pretty rapidly go back down. When
Speaker 4: you look at any three or four year cycle, the
Speaker 4: sixty to forty portfolio generally was giving you positive returns,
Speaker 4: and so that meant, hey, that's an optimal way to invest.
Speaker 4: I looked at it and said, wait a minute, if
Speaker 4: you actually look at periods where interust rates actually not
Speaker 4: just go up a little bit and then come back down,
Speaker 4: but actually go up and stay up, how does that
Speaker 4: affect bond portfolios?
Speaker 1: How does that affect the overall balanced portfolio?
Speaker 4: And so I said that we needed to be prepared
Speaker 4: for that, and that's what was the starting point.
Speaker 1: The second though, was this behavioral component, and I.
Speaker 4: Just said, look at the end of the day, you know,
Speaker 4: we've kind of lost touch with what the customer actually
Speaker 4: is asking us to do. And the customer wakes up
Speaker 4: and says, look, what I care about is I want
Speaker 4: to know when I wake up, I'm going to be okay.
Speaker 4: And you need to be in the business of serving
Speaker 4: me on helping me solve that question.
Speaker 1: Am I going to be okay? And like a pension plan, you.
Speaker 4: Should have a liability a goal, and you should have
Speaker 4: an input, which is your portfolio, your savings program and
Speaker 4: your portfolio all designed around are you going to be okay?
Speaker 1: And I felt that, you know, the idea that you.
Speaker 4: Know, we should wake up and say, hey, we're here
Speaker 4: to beat the S and P five hundred or we're
Speaker 4: here to beat some benchmark was a silly concept. All
Speaker 4: that matters to a customer is am I going to
Speaker 4: be okay? And everything we do every day should be
Speaker 4: in service of that. And so that's how I always
Speaker 4: looked at it, and the principle of the design of
Speaker 4: an investment firm should be around the kinds of programs
Speaker 4: and asset strategies that help an advisor build better portfolio
Speaker 4: to answer the question of am I going to be okay?
Speaker 1: With their customers?
Speaker 2: So I have so many different ways to go with
Speaker 2: this that I'm very enthusiastic about. Maybe we'll put a
Speaker 2: pin in the whole idea of out of sample testing
Speaker 2: because everybody is so framed by it's not just their
Speaker 2: own hindsight bias, but the recency bias of what they
Speaker 2: just experienced entirely has such a big issue. But let's
Speaker 2: stick with the concept of behavioral finance and the sixty
Speaker 2: forty I have gotten a lot of pushback for saying,
Speaker 2: if you're in your twenties, thirties, forties, do you really
Speaker 2: need bonds if you're not going to retire for well,
Speaker 2: twenty something year old might not retire for fifty years. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's some emotional salve from some ballast that's uncorrelated and
Speaker 2: doesn't have the volatility of equities. But if I go
Speaker 2: back in time, forget what the market did. If I
Speaker 2: was twenty today, I wouldn't own a single bond, and
Speaker 2: if I was seventy five today, I would own a
Speaker 2: whole lot more tax premunis. So raises the question, sixty
Speaker 2: forty does that make sense for a forget twenty year old,
Speaker 2: for anybody under fifty.
Speaker 4: It's actually a really important question, and in many cases
Speaker 4: the answer is.
Speaker 1: No, you don't need bonds.
Speaker 4: And you know, the reality of it is that if
Speaker 4: you look at the last five six years, bonds wouldn't
Speaker 4: have done you any good. And so you know, especially
Speaker 4: if you're in an environment like we're in right now,
Speaker 4: where you know the greatest risk right now to a
Speaker 4: portfolio oftentimes is the volatility the uncertainty and interest rates
Speaker 4: and inflation, and so I think it actually the return
Speaker 4: this was logical in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen zero.
Speaker 2: Right, You go from nineteen eighty twenty twenty forty years
Speaker 2: of bonds.
Speaker 1: Of phenomenal Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean that's a unique.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But the thing that was the thing that was the
Speaker 4: big driving for us was the movement between the seventies
Speaker 4: to the eighties when interest rates spiked into the teens.
Speaker 4: That was the thing that's set up, of course, the
Speaker 4: next forty years of declining interest rates, and so you
Speaker 4: have to step back and have that context.
Speaker 1: It's just like timing the market.
Speaker 4: The reality is that if you had bought in the
Speaker 4: mid seventies, you would have had a horrible experience.
Speaker 1: Right with that portfolio structure.
Speaker 2: There's pre and post pull fulker that's the defining But it's.
Speaker 4: Actually different that it's pre and post the economic situation
Speaker 4: that was happening that led to an inflationary spike that
Speaker 4: we ultimately had to address, and that was what you
Speaker 4: were dealing with. But to your point, recency bias drove
Speaker 4: people to believe that this was the optimal way to invest.
Speaker 4: I think for an individual, again, it goes back to Okay, Yes,
Speaker 4: equity is a hope based strategy.
Speaker 1: Investing is a hope based strategy.
Speaker 4: And when you're in your twenties and thirties and forties
Speaker 4: and even potentially you know, fifties, because you know, I'd
Speaker 4: say call it twenty years before retirement, call it like
Speaker 4: a pension plot. T minus twenty years anything T minus
Speaker 4: twenty years plus is a lot of You have a
Speaker 4: lot of room for hope. Hope is a wonderful thing
Speaker 4: that you should take advantage of because you know, ultimately
Speaker 4: you want strength and momentum, and you have the time
Speaker 4: to get it right. But once you get into that
Speaker 4: T minus twenty period, that's the period where you better
Speaker 4: have some structure and discipline to what you're ultimately achieving
Speaker 4: to get to T. Because the one good thing is
Speaker 4: you can move T T can move. That's the time
Speaker 4: of retirement that can move. You could say it's sixty five,
Speaker 4: but if you really needed to and your advisor said,
Speaker 4: hey it's a bad time, you need to move to
Speaker 4: sixty seven, you can move to sixty seven. A it's
Speaker 4: going really well, we can move to sixty three. But
Speaker 4: T minus twenty is a really important window where structure
Speaker 4: discipline in your portfolio has to be designed. Everything before that, Absolutely,
Speaker 4: you can take as much hope as you want, you
Speaker 4: can take as much risk as you want, because you
Speaker 4: haven't entered that window.
Speaker 1: That's how I look at it.
Speaker 2: Really interesting as someone who's partial to the math and
Speaker 2: science half of my brain, I'm curious how you reconcile
Speaker 2: the rigorous, structured environment of being an engineer, Like there
Speaker 2: is an internal logic and a set of hard mathematical
Speaker 2: principles that govern that. How do you reconcile that with
Speaker 2: the squishy emotional side of all of Dannie Kahneman's teachings,
Speaker 2: which is, hey, this is just how we are built.
Speaker 2: We weren't made for this sort of decision making.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think the beauty of when you marry the first principles,
Speaker 4: you know, call it linear kind of thinking around what
Speaker 4: engineering can do, and then you apply that with the
Speaker 4: nonlinearity of human behaviors. It's actually a phenomenal. We call
Speaker 4: it a mixture of thinking. And that's what you want.
Speaker 4: You want those multiple inputs to basically change your mental
Speaker 4: model of how to design and think. What I love
Speaker 4: about engineering in general is it is a reverse engineering
Speaker 4: mindset is going back to the hypothesis a scientific method, right,
Speaker 4: which is I have an idea of what the answer
Speaker 4: will be, but I'm going to do everything I can
Speaker 4: to prove that. So if you apply that to any problem,
Speaker 4: which is, hey, i'd like to solve for this problem,
Speaker 4: I have an idea of how to solve it, and
Speaker 4: then you reverse engineer how to ultimately get there, or
Speaker 4: you build around a scientific method of it. It's a
Speaker 4: wonderful way to approach problem solving in general. And then
Speaker 4: if you bring in the input. So one of the
Speaker 4: things we did a purpose is we've actually brought on
Speaker 4: behavioral scientists to actually support the organization in the way
Speaker 4: we think about product design, the way we think about marketing,
Speaker 4: and all the things that we do, because it actually
Speaker 4: helps influence the mental models and the way that we
Speaker 4: make decisions.
Speaker 1: Those are really powerful.
Speaker 4: So I just believe it's goes back to that original
Speaker 4: comment abound the creative mind and the call it structured
Speaker 4: discipline and mind. I think you bring those two together,
Speaker 4: it's a very powerful mixture to build with.
Speaker 2: Really interesting. So we've been speaking for an hour and
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence has not come up, which I think is
Speaker 2: a first this year. How do you think about AI
Speaker 2: from a managerial perspective, how do you think about it
Speaker 2: from an investment perspective? What do you see the impact
Speaker 2: of this going forward? Especially, I appreciate the opportunity to
Speaker 2: ask someone who's an engineer about this because essentially this
Speaker 2: is software engineering at the highest level.
Speaker 1: So I've never been more excited in my career.
Speaker 4: I feel a sense of energy in the last nine months,
Speaker 4: specifically coming into twenty twenty six that I've just been
Speaker 4: excited about because of what this new technology is enabling us.
Speaker 1: And more importantly, it's not.
Speaker 4: Just how do we build features or you know, solve
Speaker 4: some problems or create a little bit of incremental productivity.
Speaker 4: It is about the grassroots, you know, go to first
Speaker 4: principles of how should we ultimately design the way we work,
Speaker 4: the way we optimize our business in and around a
Speaker 4: technology a replatforming. You know, it would be no different
Speaker 4: than in two thousand if you were going through this
Speaker 4: period and the Internet was now becoming real and scalable,
Speaker 4: and you were sitting there as a retailer or any
Speaker 4: other business saying, if I just think about the historical
Speaker 4: way to run a business, and I've got this new thing.
Speaker 1: I think you lost.
Speaker 4: Whereas if you actually said no, no, I need to
Speaker 4: redesign the way I work to this new platform Mobile Era,
Speaker 4: which was a different one, same thing I did redesign
Speaker 4: the way we work, and AI is the same thing.
Speaker 1: So we've been at purpose.
Speaker 4: Have been really deeply embedded in the way we operate
Speaker 4: the company. The first thing is we are effectively driving
Speaker 4: forward deploy engineering, data science, and product across the whole organization.
Speaker 4: We are driving into smaller teams and squads. We're rolling
Speaker 4: that out across everything, and we're driving the company with
Speaker 4: this mindset that we What a modern organization needs to
Speaker 4: design around is vulnerability, the ability to have innovation and
Speaker 4: intelligence moving through the organization constantly and data flowing and communication,
Speaker 4: you know, and this is on top of, of course,
Speaker 4: leadership strength. In the past, the organization was all driven
Speaker 4: by leadership strengths. How good was the leadership And my
Speaker 4: view is vulnerability and communication are going to be the
Speaker 4: things that really drive and AI enables for that in
Speaker 4: a really amazing way. What that is is a system
Speaker 4: of way you work. So we are doing that in
Speaker 4: a great way. The same time, though you know, when
Speaker 4: I look at the industry, we are still stuck in
Speaker 4: this idea of AI as a feature set. So I'm
Speaker 4: going to design features. I'm going to design something I
Speaker 4: used to do that took me an hour. I can
Speaker 4: do it now in five minutes. Those are really cool.
Speaker 4: But that's no different than what excelled it for us.
Speaker 4: You know, you know the accounting industry. You can imagine,
Speaker 4: you know when excel came, was a little nervous, but
Speaker 4: then actually adopted it and wanted to do and it
Speaker 4: created a great value. But what this actually allows for
Speaker 4: is a way to change the way we operate. And
Speaker 4: that's what I hope that the industry really leans into
Speaker 4: more deeply.
Speaker 2: Really really fascinating. All right, I only have you for
Speaker 2: a couple more minutes. Let's jump into our favorite questions
Speaker 2: that we ask all of our guests, starting with who
Speaker 2: are your early mentors who helped shape your career?
Speaker 4: So I talked about Rob or not. And Rob is
Speaker 4: someone that I care so deeply about. He not only
Speaker 4: introduced me to his own way of thinking. Rob has
Speaker 4: a special thing and you spend time with him. Rob
Speaker 4: is you know, unbelievably intelligent that can go toe to
Speaker 4: toe with any Nobel Prize laureate, you know, from an
Speaker 4: academic perspective, but at the same time actually is an
Speaker 4: excellent communicator and marketer. It's a very rare combination, and
Speaker 4: he taught me that in such a deep way. So
Speaker 4: much of who I am was during that format of
Speaker 4: the years of working alongside and seeing him in motion.
Speaker 1: So he's been an amazing person in my life.
Speaker 4: He also introduced me to his advisory group, which was
Speaker 4: people like Harry Markowitz, Peter Bernstein, Rick Roll, you know,
Speaker 4: Keith ambecksh here, some of the most amazing deep thinkers
Speaker 4: that I got this immersive opportunity to spend time with
Speaker 4: that just informed so much of my principal thinking at
Speaker 4: a time when I was very raw and really open
Speaker 4: to that curiosity.
Speaker 2: It was exciting, really really interesting. I have some hilarious
Speaker 2: rob or not stories that I will share with you
Speaker 2: off air. Let's talk about books. What are some of
Speaker 2: your favorite What are you reading right now?
Speaker 4: So I love books, and autobiographies are one of the
Speaker 4: things I actually think. You know, people always say learn
Speaker 4: from failure. I love to talk about learn from success.
Speaker 4: So how do you learn from people's you know, careers
Speaker 4: and lifetimes successes. So some of my favorite books An
Speaker 4: Education of an American Dreamer by Peter G.
Speaker 1: Peterson.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you've read that one. A phenomenal,
Speaker 4: great story about an individual who of course ended up
Speaker 4: co founding Blackstone later in life. But just an under
Speaker 4: the little journey about an immigrant family who.
Speaker 1: Just basically moved.
Speaker 4: He just did unbelievable things and the evolution of a career.
Speaker 1: That's so fascinating. Creativity, inc you know, we're just talking
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: I literally just got it delivered two days ago.
Speaker 4: I love that because when I finished that book, I
Speaker 4: said to myself, if I was to ever write an
Speaker 4: autobiography about my career.
Speaker 1: I hope it would sound like this.
Speaker 4: It was the creativity of what Ed Katsmill did, but
Speaker 4: more importantly, the relationship of how he explained his partnership
Speaker 4: with jobs and the love he had for Steve and
Speaker 4: the way he was so intricate about that.
Speaker 1: It was just so inspiring for me. I loved it.
Speaker 4: And then you know, I look at some of them,
Speaker 4: of course, recent books that have just really inspired me
Speaker 4: around unreasable hospitality. I think one of the greatest business
Speaker 4: books one of the best business books has been written
Speaker 4: in the last couple of years. If you haven't read it,
Speaker 4: it's a critical book. And then I recently finished a
Speaker 4: couple of years ago. It Never Split the Difference by
Speaker 4: Chris Voss, and it is unbelievably strong, and in fact,
Speaker 4: yesterday we had the team from Chris Voss's group come
Speaker 4: in and train our people on how to apply that
Speaker 4: type of negotiation skill into our daily way we work.
Speaker 4: It's an unbelievable way to think about the concept of
Speaker 4: being comfortable with the word no. We're so afraid to
Speaker 4: hear no in life and in business, but actually allowing
Speaker 4: no to become something that lets you get to yes.
Speaker 4: It's really important, whereas it's so counter to all the
Speaker 4: things that people had learned through the Harvard programs around
Speaker 4: getting to yes. It's actually an unbelievable way to think
Speaker 4: about Nico and.
Speaker 2: One of the people I work with just recommended that
Speaker 2: book Never Split the Difference. And it's sitting on a pile.
Speaker 2: I'm holding my hand up this high and I'm like,
Speaker 2: all right, I'll get around to it one day. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to move that up to the a little
Speaker 2: higher in the pile. Let's talk about streaming. What are
Speaker 2: you either watching or listening to, either Netflix or podcasts
Speaker 2: or whatever.
Speaker 4: We have four kids at home, so you know, my
Speaker 4: wife and I are always trying to find that hour
Speaker 4: to stream. The one show that you know has really
Speaker 4: touched me is the show Shrinking, of course on l TV.
Speaker 1: And it's just the way that the.
Speaker 4: Writer, Brett Rolstein talks about emotions and you know, communicating.
Speaker 4: It's just such a touching I finish every episode that
Speaker 4: I think. I'm teary eyed every single time. That's been
Speaker 4: amazing thing about my wife and I. We love, you know,
Speaker 4: lots of different shows we just don't get to We
Speaker 4: have like seven different series that we are in the
Speaker 4: middle of watching right now. Uh and but but we
Speaker 4: try to find that time and it's an important time
Speaker 4: for both of us.
Speaker 2: You mentioned on Reasonable Hospitality. We just finished the final
Speaker 2: season of The Bear and throughout that show you can
Speaker 2: see some of the ideas right from that book.
Speaker 4: You see it in season two, you really so much. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's when it really becomes prevalent and they of course.
Speaker 2: A little hot dogs and all the stuff they do
Speaker 2: to go over over and above the call of duty.
Speaker 2: It's impressive, it really is. So our final two questions
Speaker 2: what sort of advice would you give to a recent
Speaker 2: college grad interest in a career in either investing or
Speaker 2: financial innovation.
Speaker 4: So, you know, I'd say there's two answers to this
Speaker 4: that are important because we're you know, you got the
Speaker 4: tension of what's happening with AI around this industry.
Speaker 1: I'll start with the foundations. This is a wonderful industry
Speaker 1: to be in.
Speaker 4: And if you look at the sort of trajectory, financial
Speaker 4: services as an industry will continue to grow meaningfully.
Speaker 1: If you're in the wealth industry, it will double.
Speaker 4: In the ESSA management inustry double just in the next
Speaker 4: ten years by virtue of savings and market appreciation. So
Speaker 4: you know, as an industry participant, the size of the
Speaker 4: pie is growing and continuously.
Speaker 1: So that's a really good thing too.
Speaker 4: You've got an aging demographic of individuals in the space,
Speaker 4: you know, advisors of constantly aging, and so there's a
Speaker 4: huge opportunity for younger talent to come in and so
Speaker 4: that's an awesome setup to be in the business. The
Speaker 4: principle I'll go back to is it's an amazing place
Speaker 4: that has high mission. But I want young people if
Speaker 4: I was to come into it, to really focus on
Speaker 4: how do I achieve this to help conduct the customer
Speaker 4: truly win, as opposed to the historical mindset of I'm
Speaker 4: here to basically manage money and do.
Speaker 1: All these things.
Speaker 4: And I think there's a really amazing opportunity to do
Speaker 4: that in a great way and approach it if I
Speaker 4: take the tension of AI. You know, there's always this
Speaker 4: question of like what's it going to do to the
Speaker 4: advisor industry or the investment industry, And I look at
Speaker 4: it as only enabling. If you think about the opportunity
Speaker 4: for a young person today, this is going to to
Speaker 4: be an unbelievable period. The way I would approach this, though,
Speaker 4: is recognize as a young person that a career in
Speaker 4: any financial service or any career is not a sort
Speaker 4: of a set of stairs. It's actually looks more like
Speaker 4: a J curve, and you're going to have to go
Speaker 4: through very difficult periods that look very uncomfortable, where you
Speaker 4: look like you're not doing great to ultimately see this
Speaker 4: great outcome. And that comes from curiosity, learning and immersing
Speaker 4: yourself to ultimately take risks and do really important things.
Speaker 4: It's an unbelievable time right now, I think as an
Speaker 4: individual and a young person coming into this space.
Speaker 2: Good answer, and let's jump to our final question, what
Speaker 2: do you know about the world of investing, of ETFs,
Speaker 2: of again, of financial innovation today might have been useful
Speaker 2: twenty five years ago when you were really ramping.
Speaker 4: Up Well, I mean, I think that I go back
Speaker 4: to the constant learning of how behaviors and emotions really
Speaker 4: drive outcome. And I wish, you know, I'd learned that earlier.
Speaker 4: I wish I'd kind of been exposed to it. I
Speaker 4: think the most important thing, though, is it is this
Speaker 4: idea of how do we help truly solve problems along
Speaker 4: the journey of a customer. How do we put the
Speaker 4: customer and their moment of need at any point, whether
Speaker 4: they're twenty five, forty five, sixty five, or eighty five,
Speaker 4: and ultimately help them with the types of services and
Speaker 4: solutions that drive that. If I had had that principal
Speaker 4: mindset twenty plus years ago, I think I would have
Speaker 4: built even more powerful businesses back then. It's really fun
Speaker 4: to do what we're doing, but I wish we'd done
Speaker 4: this even earlier.
Speaker 2: Some I am so glad we finally got to do this.
Speaker 2: We've tried to set this up a couple of times
Speaker 2: and the dates just kept getting crossed. I'm thrilled you
Speaker 2: came in to do this. We have been speaking with
Speaker 2: some say founder and CEO of Purpose Investments. If you
Speaker 2: enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure to check out any
Speaker 2: of the six hundred and fifty discussions we've had over
Speaker 2: the past twelve years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify,
Speaker 2: Bloomberg YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would
Speaker 2: be remiss if I didn't thank the correct team that
Speaker 2: helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is
Speaker 2: my video producer. Joan Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke
Speaker 2: is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritoults. You've been listening
Speaker 2: to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.