Evan Rapoport, founder of unified managed accounts technology provider SMArtX, is stepping down from his role as CEO, having held the job since the company launched its TAMP in 2017. He will continue to serve on the company’s board of directors.
Taking over as chief executive is current president and COO, Jonathan Pincus, who has been with the firm since May 2020. He spent the previous 13 years with Northern Trust Asset Management, the last seven of them serving as the global head of investment operations.
In its five-year existence, SMArtX has gained significant traction as an innovator in the managed accounts technology industry.
Most recently, in July, the company announced it had built a new slimmed-down version of its platform that will be free to advisors, called SMartY. Rapoport said at the time that it will be sponsored by asset managers and should be generally available in the fall.
In May, SMArtX announced a partnership with custodian TradePMR that would enable the latter’s advisors to access SMArtX’s unified managed account technology, which included use of its model marketplace, automated rebalancing, tax harvester, cash management, billing and advisor-as-portfolio-manager tools.
And in April, SMArtX announced it added 54 strategies to its unified managed accounts platform, bringing the total available to 1,181 from 290 asset management firms (up from 475 strategies in February 2019 when it also announced the launch of its outsourced chief investment officer service).
“Demand for best-in-class investment strategies is particularly strong in the independent channel, where SMArtX has emerged as a player of note, not least due to its partnership with Morningstar,” said Will Trout, director of wealth Management for Javelin Strategy & Research, earlier this year.
In May 2022, SMArtX closed its Series D funding round with a $30 million investment from Morningstar Investment Management, the unit of Morningstar that provides discretionary investment management and advisory services. The company had closed a $4 million round of venture funding in early 2020.
Following Morningstar’s most recent investment, Daniel Needham, president of Morningstar’s wealth management solutions group, and Michael Holt, chief strategy officer at Morningstar, joined SMArtX’s board of directors.
That investment in turn came after a November 2021 announcement that Morningstar would use SMArtX’s unified managed account technology to power its own turnkey asset management platform. Morningstar had previously used Tegra118 to power its TAMP (itself carved out of Fiserv in a private equity deal).
SMArtX took home two Wealth Management Industry Awards in 2022, in the TAMPS category for its Model Market Places, and Tech Provider CMO of the Year for Alex Smith-Ryland.