← Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
John Mathews – Steering the Largest Wirehouse at UBS (Private Wealth 2, EP.444)
00:54:40
John Mathews is the Head of Private Wealth Management in the Americas for UBS. UBS is the world’s largest global wealth manager with $6 trillion in assets, of which $2 trillion is under John’s purview. He oversees 230 teams comprised of 661...
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Ted Seides
Foreign.
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Hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access Premium content@capitalallocators.com All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast. Thirty years ago, institutional investors held most of their assets in stocks and bonds. David Swensen led a movement to an approach to portfolio management that broadened the asset mix to alternative investments, including hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and real assets. These days, almost every institutional portfolio incorporates significant allocations to alternatives to produce better outcomes with similar risk or similar outcomes with lower risk. However, capital in the hands of individuals has not yet followed suit. Private wealth portfolios, particularly the so called mass affluent, typically hold only 2 to 5% of their assets and alternatives, compared to a range of 20 to 50% for institutions. But that's changing quickly. Innovations in structure have allowed individuals to access alternative strategies at lower minimums, with liquidity options not previously available. According to arctos partners, the six largest private banking and wirehouse platforms committed $110 billion to funds last year, approximately twice the amount invested from the six largest institutional investors in North America. And those flows are just beginning. The potential investment dollars from private wealth to alternatives are staggering. Every 1% asset allocation shift would equate to approximately $500 billion of new investments. The impact of these capital flows will have ramifications for GPs and LPs for decades to come. How will the capital get deployed? What will it do to asset prices? What will it mean for returns and for fees? And who will win and who will lose? This mini series, Private wealth, explores the important questions raised by the accelerating convergence of institutional style investing with private wealth. We'll hear from three of the most influential asset owners, one each from the Private Banking Warehouse and RIA channels, and three of the most significant asset managers playing in this space. Just as this channel is in the early innings of changing the investment landscape, so too will this mini series be just the beginning of our exploration of what it means for you. My guest on the second episode of Private wealth is John Matthews, the head of Private Wealth Management in the Americas for UBS. UBS is the world's largest global wealth manager with $6 trillion in assets, of which 2 trillion is under John's purview. He oversees 230 teams comprised of 661 financial advisors, each of whom manages over $1 billion in assets. Our conversation explores how the largest wirehouse empowers its financial advisors to act as entrepreneurs to bring tailored investment solutions to their clients. We covered the scale and scope of the UBS private wealth platform, the need for personalization, specialization and customization, the bank's centralized investment strategy and decentralized implementation, its curated alternatives platform and the evolving landscape for financial advisors.
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John Matthews
Before we get to the interview, we're excited to share a new opportunity to join the Capital Allocators team. We're hiring a Head of Content to lead everything we create and share with you, our listeners and followers. That includes our flagship podcasts, our newsletters and written content, our website and social channels, and our new video content. We're looking for someone who's excited to roll up their sleeves, get into the weeds and own our content processes from start to finish. Most importantly, we're looking for a fan of the show. Someone who's jazzed about long form interviews with leaders in the institutional investment industry. Someone who brings energy, pride and a sense of purpose to our mission of compounding knowledge and relationships among asset owners and investment managers. This person should be detail oriented, organized, experienced in project management, and ideally have a background in media or podcast production. The job posting is in the show Notes and on our site@capitalallocators.com about thanks so much for spreading the word about our Head of Content job opening.
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Ted Seides
Please enjoy my conversation with John Matthews.
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John Matthews
John, thanks so much for joining me.
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Ted Seides
Ted, Good to be here with you.
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John Matthews
I'd love to have you take me back through your path that led to you being in this big seat you're in today.
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Ted Seides
I call myself the Accidental Executive, so went to the University of Florida. I'm from a small town in the state of Florida. Always thought I was going to be a lawyer, but when I was graduating from college all my friends were going that direction. So I said why not do something different and decided to become a stockbroker. Now we call ourselves Financial advisors. I think I had somewhat of a successful early career, was asked to get into management, into leadership. Fast forward 34 years later and I now lead the private wealth business for UBS here in the Americas.
- [06:11]
John Matthews
So take me back in those early years and through what you saw in the Evolution from stock brokering to what it is today.
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Ted Seides
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was really all about equity selection. Buying stocks, building positions, trying to make our clients money through buying the right equities. And then the industry really evolved to more asset management fee based solutions for our clients. For some reason I was always an early adopter. So I was the first person involved with managed accounts and I was one of the first people involved with looking at estate planning, insurance solutions. And to me, the consultative view of the business, which was much more appealing to me than the individual stock picking. Because of that, I guess I was thinking in the future and that became the future of our business. So much of our business now is tied to asset allocation, using managers as a proxy, to picking individual stocks, using indexes and charging our clients an advisory fee as opposed to a commission per transaction. Early into that led me into trying to lead other people in that direction. At the same time, we've seen our clientele become extremely wealthy, especially in the last 15 years since QE. And what I noticed back at that time, when interest rates are sitting at zero for a period of time, wealthy clients were going to get significantly more wealthy faster. When there is zero cost to borrow and you already have assets, regardless of what's happening in the markets, you can redeploy those assets, you can buy businesses and borrow to buy those things at basically zero. What we saw the last 15 years was this enormous growth in wealth in the United States and globally. During those times I found myself gravitating towards those complex situations with those clients who are accumulating wealth quickly and and what to do and how to help them with those situations. That's how we went from being an advisor from a small town trying to figure it out, to now working with some of the wealthiest people in the United States.
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John Matthews
The path of accidental executive. What were the most important steps for you in that path?
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Ted Seides
I view my job as really a leadership position and I love the business. I love clients. I love working with financial advisors. I love directing strategy to try to think five years ahead, to try to put our advisors in the best position and our clients in the best position. I love the leadership principle of it. And I have hundreds of private wealth advisors that report into our business here at UBS in the Americas. I think of it as like the special forces of our UBS army in the United States. And I think we're really good at what we do. And so the passion of me to help people grow professionally and help their clients do even better is what drives me at this. I tell people all the time my job is to help our clients do better for themselves, our advisors do better for themselves. If we help our clients do well, our advisors do well as well. It's like one large partnership.
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John Matthews
When you look today, what is the size and breadth of the platform that you're overseeing?
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Ted Seides
Let's take a step back and just look at the UBS platform from a large perspective. We're the world's largest global wealth manager. We manage on our wealth platform alone over $4 trillion. If you include our asset management company. We're over $6 trillion of wealth around the world. $2.1 trillion of that wealth sits in the United States. So we're a very large wealth manager in the US but also globally. We're the largest wealth manager in Asia. We're the largest wealth manager now in Latin America after our Credit Swiss acquisition. And we're the fourth largest wealth manager in the United States based on assets under management from wealth largest wealth manager in emea. That global perspective and insights and the ability to connect clients and learn from clients regardless of where they live, I think is really the special sauce of ubs. For example, if we have clients in the United States that are looking for insights from someone in Asia or maybe they want to start a business in Asia, we can make those connections really quickly. We have boots on the ground everywhere in the world and we have clients on the ground from everywhere in the world. That's the exciting thing about our business in the US $2 trillion of assets under management. About 60% of those assets are in ultra high net worth assets. It's been the fastest growing client segment that we've had at our firm for the last 15 years. We classify clients in different segments. We have core affluent, mass affluent, high net worth and ultra high net worth. I get to oversee the part of wealthiest client segment here at the firm. And it ranges from anywhere from a business owner that just happened to sell their business and now they're wealth to some of the largest families and their family offices in the United States and trying to help them navigate the complexities of the investment landscapes out there so.
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John Matthews
That on the client side gives a sense of this incredible scale. How about the advisors?
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Ted Seides
We have 661 what we call private wealth advisors. Those are the advisors that primarily focus on the ultra high network client segment. You have to have some certain criteria to qualify for that. You already have to have a certain number of ultra high net worth clients in your book of business. And then you have to go through an accreditation program that we make all of our private wealth advisors go through. So we have 661 of those that's comprised of 230 teams. Most everyone's on a team now. Because what I found is this is a team sport. Really hard as an individual to manage the complexities for our clients. So part of it's about investments, but a large part of it's about helping them with the complexities of everything else in their life too.
- [11:51]
John Matthews
I'd love to understand how you organize all this. There's the US piece, there's this global piece. And you mentioned, yeah, you should be able to have access information. But 660 just in the US how do you even start to think about how this all comes together?
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Ted Seides
We have different managers and locations around the country, and managers will report into us. So it sounds complicated, but it's really not because everyone reports into another channel and that channel may report into me globally. I have people around the world that do what I do. We have regular communication and contact and very collegial for me to pick up the phone and have a discussion with someone in Asia or the Middle East. So sounds complicated, but it actually comes together pretty well. And I've also been running this business for 14 years. Maybe I'm simplifying a little bit more than it needs to be. But the relationships that I've built with our internal stakeholders in the organization as well with our financial advisors at the firm, and also our external stakeholders, our partners and asset managers that we work with probably makes it a little bit easier for me.
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John Matthews
So when you go from that highest level to where you're sitting, all the way down to the individual client, you can imagine there's a need for both some standardization on the investment side and plenty of customization.
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Ted Seides
How does that all happen?
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It's really hard. A couple of things is we are an open architecture platform at UBS in the United States. So we can talk about different products and services and asset managers until we can't talk about them anymore because we offer just about everything. We have our own internal UBS products and services as well. We have our asset management company, which I think is one of our crown jewels. But our advisors aren't required to recommend that to their clients if they don't want to. It's whatever they think is the best possible investment for the best possible price for the client at that particular time. We're completely agnostic in our private wealth business. We have this foundation that we try to build everything off of three words Personalization, specialization and customization. Now that's extremely hard in a wealth management business that's very compliant, driven. We have a lot of regulatory requirements have to work under, but at the same time we have to be competitive in the marketplace. So everything we do has to be about how personal are we getting with that client and what they're trying to accomplish. Sounds like that's simple, right? Everybody is, but it's not. There's a lot of cookie cutter approaches to the wealth management business today. And especially in the ultra high net worth space, there is no cookie cutter solution. It's not a one size fits all, it's a one size fits one. Those private wealth advisors, every client they have, they may be similar, but what client A needs can be completely different than what client B needs. So it's that deep personal attachment to them. And then the specialization, which I think is some of the secret sauce of our business here in the United States is many times our advisors are going to bring in internal specialists to talk about things like trust and estate or philanthropy, or family advisory or alternatives or asset allocation. They'll bring these experts in as a internal third party subject matter expert to speak with their clients. I am convinced that that specialization is critical because clients are smart. And if you bring someone here that's not really a specialist, the clients aren't going to say anything to you. They're going to smile and say thank you and they're going to walk out the door and they're going to go find somebody who's a real specialist. So while our private wealth advisors in many cases are generalists in how they approach the business, they bring in these specialists. We have an army of specialists I think are the best in the business. For example, we have over 30 trusted estate attorneys at UBS. We don't outsource this stuff. We only outsource if we feel like we can't do it internally. Most everyone an advisor will put in front of their clients as a UBS employee. And in many cases the buck stops with me. Clients like that. And then the third leg stool is customization. We have to figure out how to customize the relationship because that's what the clients expect from us. They expect some level of customization. Whether it's something that they need, a special report, I want to get that compliance approved, which is a highly regulated industry. But if our control partners are comfortable with what we want to do with our clients, they're great partners to have in the sink. Now, when you run a large wealth management business, you have to have a lot of consistencies, you have to keep it right down the middle in most cases. So my job as the leader of the organization is to try to find ways to operate within it, but to create that personalization, specialization and customization.
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John Matthews
When you hone in on just the investment part alongside all the services, where do you centralize and where do you allow the decentralization of decision making?
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Ted Seides
Our advisors, what I love about them is they're almost like independent contractors. They work for ubs, but they're entrepreneurs. They have their own styles and philosophies. Now we have guidelines and guardrails in terms of what they can recommend to clients. They'll follow our chief investment office strategy, but they always have their own twist to it. One private wealth advisor may have a different overall strategy than the advisor in the office next to them. We think that's what makes us great is that entrepreneurial spirit that they bring to it. But more often when they bring in our specialists to talk to their clients about strategic asset allocation or the right alternatives to put in a portfolio, as you build it out, we build a little bit more consistency into the overall offering.
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John Matthews
If you look at, say, an individual advisor, maybe they're new and they're coming onto the platform. What is the CIO office telling them today about what those guidelines are for serving their clients? On the investment side, especially today, we're.
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Ted Seides
Talking about times of extreme volatility and uncertainty out there. And I think our Chief Investment office has done a great job of let's stay the course. This is not the time to make major changes. Unfortunately, clients sometimes want to. We become the psychologist of our clients. So stay the course. If you have the right plan in place, you may want to tweak that plan, but you don't want to drastically change the plan. And history has told us that the S and P is going to return around 10% a year. Last couple of years, it's returned over 20%. Maybe there's some regression to the mean. Right now, the steering of our CIO office is let's make sure we're allocated properly first, and then let's make sure we pick the right investment second. And let's don't panic. We're trying to be pragmatic about it, understanding that when markets are volatile like this, clients get nervous. But if you take a step back and think longer term, maybe the world feels like it's falling apart. But there's been other situations where the world felt like that too. One of the things that I always try to do to put our CIO advice in perspective is I always give my five themes every year at the beginning of the year. And I try to think five to 10 years out. I'm not a futurist. I can't predict this stuff, But I'm pretty good at following demographic trends and understanding what interest rates do and where wealth is and how markets have reacted. We knew 2025 was going to be a year probably to reset. It was going to be tough, and we have to manage expectations for clients because the previous two years had been so good. We had the euphoria of the presidential election and markets ran up at the end of the year. It's like, okay, well, this is going to be a tough one this year. And so trying to manage early so you're not completely surprised when it happens.
- [19:31]
John Matthews
So that's one of the themes. What are the other four that you're out talking to the teams about today?
- [19:37]
Ted Seides
That's one is 2025 was going to be a year to be tested. The other four themes are really long term. The second one is the family is always the major issue. It's all about family. And so if you think about this whole demographic shift we're going through right now is most of the wealth in the United States of America is in the hands of baby boomers. There were 77 million baby boomers on the planet today. There's probably around 70 million baby boomers because they're starting to die. Born between 19, 1946 and 1964. The youngest baby boomer is 61 years old. The oldest baby boomer is 79 years old. But the average baby boomer's in the upper end of that. What happens is this baby boom generations, they're in the wealth accumulation stages of their life, about to go to the wealth distribution of their life. Depending on who you look at, 60%, 70% of the wealth in the United States is in the hands of those people. And so that's not going to change anytime soon. So we have this great opportunity to help them make sure they manage their wealth and how to make sure they distribute it properly, how to get it in the right hands at the right time, and how to make sure that their kids and their generation three is financially responsible. If we focus on that over the next five to 10 years, it could be the greatest five to 10 years in the industry for a financial advisor. At the same time with that group, they're going to live longer. So our job is to help them have enough assets to make sure they don't Outlive their money. We want their money to outlive them. And you would say, well, you deal with really wealthy clients, how can that happen? It happens all the time. And so we have to think about, you're going to live longer than you originally thought you were going to live. There's going to be medicine, there's going to be drugs, there's going to be everything that's going to make you live longer. So how do we as financial advisors make sure you're prepared for that today so it's not a surprise in 2035 because they're going to be alive then.
- [21:24]
John Matthews
So that's number two on that second theme. What do you do differently in the investment side of the house? Knowing that, let's say the assets have to have longer duration than they used.
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Ted Seides
To, we have to make sure we can maintain a competitive rate of return. We have to outpace inflation. Inflation's for real. Many of these clients don't want to take undue risk either. They've made their money. Sometimes I tell people you're the alpha generator in the equation because that was the business that you started. Our job is to preserve your wealth and make sure you don't blow it. But preserving wealth doesn't mean just to buy a fixed income security and hold onto it for maturity. Preserving wealth is to make sure we preserve it with inflation involved. So we have to have returns that outpace inflation. At the same time, we think that we can give you a consistent long term return where you'll outpace the normal living standards. And so it could be, is it the traditional 60, 40 asset allocation model? I don't know if that's it anymore. But we know that we can talk to clients about thinking longer term with some of their assets, maybe some of your assets you need more liquidity, shorter term, and so we'd be more conservative there. And then maybe there's intermediate term part time horizons on those assets for the next five to 10 years. We can be maybe more aggressive. But what about the money you'll never need? Why don't we think about longer term investments, things that we probably will never touch, but if we do, it'll be 15 years from now that maybe we can take a little bit more risk. Maybe we don't need the liquidity in those investments and we can create more alpha in those returns so that if you live 10 years longer than you thought you were going to live, you're still going to have plenty of wealth to live by and hopefully give away.
- [23:01]
John Matthews
How about the third theme Third is.
- [23:03]
Ted Seides
The security of everything. Meaning I think we live in a new world today in the United States. We've lived in a bubble where we don't really worry about personal security that much. And that could be an example would be if you had a house in Los Angeles. The fires came through and your house survived, but all your neighbors houses were burned down, but there's no one there to protect your house and what's in your house. You may have to hire a personal security guard for the next year to protect your house, or you need someone to make sure that your own personal computer system can't get hacked. And so you need Internet security. Everything's about security. The rest of the world's been going through this for the last five years or a decade. We haven't. And I think we all have to be more focused on our own personal security either. Understanding how to access those capabilities is important and we can help our clients do that. And understanding how to invest in those capabilities too is important because I think it could be a big opportunity down the road. The fourth one is AI. It's been on our list for four years now. And while is it accelerating and we used to talk about ChatGPT, it's so much more than that. In fact, every day there's a new AI entrant into the world that we live in. I tell our advisors and our clients, you have to be a user of this stuff, you have to embrace it, you have to use it. Are you using AI technology to help you run your practice better and live a better life at the same time? It creates investment opportunities for us. And then the fifth bookends, my first one about this year will be tested. It's we have to find a way to stay in the markets. It's bull markets are long and bear markets are short and painful. Trying to keep our clients focused on the long game and maybe repositioning, but staying in the markets so that they can obtain those returns that they're going to need over the long term of their lifespan. The fifth one is book into the first one, but this is a good time to reset things as well. Those are the five themes that we drive through.
- [25:00]
John Matthews
So as you share these themes with the teams that are working with all your clients, they then have to go into the markets and implement. And I'm curious what you're seeing on the platform in terms of the shifts in investments over the last few years and what you see going forward, especially.
- [25:16]
Ted Seides
In the ultra high net worth space. Ted, there's a larger and Larger allocation to alternative investments. No question. What has been one of our differentiators that create some distinction maybe in our platform for our advisors is that we have a very robust alternatives platform across a lot of different disciplines. And wealthy clients were asking for that. That's where they were looking for their alpha. And frankly a lot of them, they like the liquidity premium. It's like I don't need the volatility, I don't want to see it go up and down every day. What can we invest in that maybe we don't have to focus on day to day volatility? So alternatives to private equity and other vehicles has been a very attractive offering for our larger, wealthier clients. But now you see it becoming a little bit more mainstream. As long as clients are accredited or can fit the profile. You're seeing these liquid portfolios that don't have K1s, in some cases don't have capital costs. We've seen over the last couple of years, we're seeing the take up in alternatives coming downstream and it's just easier. The questions we get from clients today is I don't know if I want to wait for a 15 year payoff. What do you have in the alternative space that maybe has a little bit more liquidity, don't need daily at the same time, maybe receive some payoffs sooner. So we have a lot of different seasoned portfolios that we can offer the clients. But where it used to only be an ultra high net worth investment option, now it's becoming an option for many people in the high net worth space as well.
- [26:40]
John Matthews
How does that platform come together? How you architect the different investment options that advisors can choose from if you.
- [26:47]
Ted Seides
Take a step back on the larger platforms. We manage $2 trillion of wealth in the United States. It starts with just pure asset management using separately managed accounts, using indexing. In some cases, advisors build their own portfolios. Most of it is tied to a fee. Very little of our business is actually tied to commissions today. So whether our advisor uses separately managed accounts from all the largest asset managers in the world, including some you would never know. We try to give color all of those managers to our private wealth advisors and then they can decide on the asset allocation. That's the foundation. Then you have other products and services. Maybe above that you can think of alternatives. Alternatives will be not for everyone, but they're going to be for the wealthier client segment and for the advisors looking for a little bit more sophistication and maybe alpha in their portfolio. We have a wide number of people in our organization that monitor managers that decide who to bring on the platform, who not to bring on the platform, our separately managed accounts are continuously going through due diligence processes to make sure they're doing what they say they're going to do and that the same management teams are in place that we hired them with because we have a responsibility to our clients as well. Then you get to the alternative space and it's a whole other level of due diligence, probably more risk to it. There's certainly a lot less visibility into them from a client perspective. So we have to make sure we do our diligence because we have a duty to our clients to make sure we're not just putting anyone on our platform, we're putting people that we've done all of the work to decide do they fit, are there right controls in place, do they have the right leadership in place, and are they doing what they say they're going to do? Jerry Pascucci at our firm runs our alternatives platform. He runs a very curated platform over the last 15 years. Our alts platform is an area, I think that we've really created that distinction with our private wealth advisors. Whether or not they want to invest in it or not, at least we get to show them some very interesting alternative investments in two different areas. We could either be the mainstream big name core holding alternatives, but there's also that unique and exclusive piece to it as well. Everyone wants something a little bit different that they can't get somewhere else. We have a couple of different ways to look at on the platform.
- [29:04]
John Matthews
How does that curation work under Jerry?
- [29:07]
Ted Seides
We're trying to think where's the world going to be in five years from now? Where's it going to be in 10 years from now? Not where it is today. Let's identify the managers and the themes and the strategies that we think are going to fit in those categories. All the big name private equity firms have infrastructure funds and they have AI funds and they have data center type funds. They have real estate funds, which all of those are great for, maybe the core holding in a portfolio. And then we have all these other managers that we try to identify that may be the new up and coming private equity manager. They may have a unique value proposition and a very tight window or a narrow focus that they can bring to our clients as maybe a satellite approach to that core. And so I think Jerry's done an incredible job of identifying opportunities not because it's mainstream or because everyone else is doing it, but because we think it's going to be the place to be in five years from now.
- [30:00]
John Matthews
What are some of the rules of thumb, as let's say Jerry and the team are looking at different investment options, knowing there's 2 trillion just in the US, let alone 6 trillion around the world that might want to have access to whatever that special opportunity is.
- [30:17]
Ted Seides
We're agnostic to size of the fundamental and sometimes that creates a cue at the window to get them, and sometimes that creates clients not having the best experience because they didn't get it, or they got a much smaller amount that they originally wanted allocated towards them. The benefit of it is we are a global company and we have access to global opportunities. So we feel like there's an endless stream of opportunities for us to choose from. We're not afraid to go after smaller deals that we think are very unique because we know we'll find another small deal as well. But there could be something that comes from our colleagues in Asia that no one in the US is ever going to have access to, or it could come from our colleagues in the EMEA region. We think we have a variety of options. Sometimes they're so curated you may not have access to it, but we're pretty sure eventually you're going to have access to one that you want to do. On top of the normal names that you know that are outstanding, they're incredible partners and they do great for clients. But there's larger capacity. We always have those on our platform as well.
- [31:19]
John Matthews
In those situations with finite capacity. How does the allocation process work across the advisor base?
- [31:27]
Ted Seides
We'll come out early with the fund and clients will have to submit indications of interest for it for their accredited clients, usually for these types of funds. And then we just usually go through to identify who are the clients that we know are capable of investing in these investments, who are the advisors that we know understand these types of investments, and how do we make sure the clients get their fair share? Sometimes the smallest ones are the most demand and it's hard, but we know if we're going to come out with something similar, we'll try to do that to complete and so we can fulfill the demand that we have. That's the scarcity issue. And having scarcity sometimes gives me more confidence in the manager because they're not overextending themselves. And we have to talk about, to our advisors and our clients about it, that you may not get this one, but you'll get access to fund number two. And that's a great thing for the manager because they can Allocate funds to one offering and be focused on that particular fund. And then if they know they have additional capacity, we open up another one. I feel like they can manage it better themselves.
- [32:26]
John Matthews
From a manager's perspective, who's talking to the team on the platform, how do they think about the process of educating this very diverse space of advisors?
- [32:37]
Ted Seides
That's the tough one because we have advisors at a firm like ours and all the other firms in the U.S. by the way, that have no interest in doing alternative investments at all. And so how do you break through? How do you get anyone's attention? Whether it's the advisor or whether it's Jerry and the due diligence team? The funds have to be able to demonstrate and provide evidence that they have a capability that's worthy of our clients needs. And they can do that locally through our office managers. We'll have people come in and talk to them. They can come directly to me. We are not going to offer any fly by night fund of the days. And so the key is, can you provide evidence, can you demonstrate your track record and then what are you going to do going forward? We have a pretty rigorous due diligence process. Some say maybe more rigorous than others, but I think that's good. We have a duty to our clients to make sure that we do that. And everyone wants to be on our platform. By the way, when you manage over $5 trillion of wealth from two legged individuals primarily, and you do it globally. So it's not just isolated in one geography of the world. The benefit is everyone wants to be on our platform. The challenge is that we have a lot of people we have to say no to. It takes a lot of time to go through the diligence work on them. Because it's a unique platform, different than anyone else's in that it's globally diversified. Diversified skews to the ultra high net worth segment.
- [34:01]
John Matthews
Walk me through a manager first getting on the platform. What might their time look like in getting from not having a relationship to having a very successful and broad relationship?
- [34:12]
Ted Seides
First of all, they're going to have to have a distribution force. They're going to have to have a, I don't know if you want to call it a wholesaling network, so to speak, because our industry still is a relationship business and you can post all the numbers you want to, but there's gotta be some type of human interaction when you're talking about an illiquid, more complex investment. So first of all you're gonna have to have some sort of a network out there. And it doesn't have to be large, but enough for someone, if they have a question advisor can pick up the phone and give them a call. So that's number one. You have to have a network of people, wholesalers, however you wanna describe them, that can actually go press the flesh, talk to people individually. What we've done with a couple of our partners here is I'll do what we're doing right now. I'll do a podcast webcast and we'll talk about their fund, especially when they're just hitting the platform. And very similar about. Give me a little bit of your history. How did you get here? How did you get in this fund? Now, tell us about the sector, the scene that you're going after, and how can clients participate in it. It kind of gets broad distribution that way. But what we found is that the most successful ones are already big and already have those networks in place. The newer ones struggle with it a little bit. I don't have these people in place. How do we do it? Can you help me? We work really closely with the private equity managers and the fund managers to make sure that we can get their message out there a little bit more than just internal communications that you're going to see on our intranet. We are in a people business here. Those relationships that you have will make the difference in terms of someone saying, I like that fun. And also like them because they take my call when I have questions. And that means a lot, especially in this space.
- [35:48]
John Matthews
If you look out over the next couple years, there's a lot of simple math that says, oh, and the Private wealth channel only has 2, 3, 4% of their money in alternatives. The institutional channel's a multiple of that. If only a percent moves and you look at $2 trillion, a percent is a pretty big number, $20 billion. What do you see happening in asset allocation shifts within your client base over the next few years?
- [36:13]
Ted Seides
At our firm, in our private wealth business, it's just about 8% as it alts. I think it should be 20. Our CIO's calling for higher than 20. So we still have a long ways to go. Our alternatives managers know that too. It's a big opportunity for them. Our clients in most cases are demanding it. Our advisors in some cases have to get more comfortable with it. Just look at endowments and foundations out there that have a much larger percentage. We think it's important for the right client away, they have the right time horizon. We think they can produce alpha in the portfolio. We Think it takes out some of the volatility. We just think it for all the right reasons. But it's not easy to convince someone to do something when they don't have instant liquidity where they can sell it, have daily marks on their statements or online service. So we're gradually getting to that spot. Looks like we're in a pause right now a little bit. Private equity, I think has been difficult and one of the reasons is volatility of the markets. But at the same time, exits have disappeared. Right now most people invest in private equity. They're hoping they're going to get some money flowing back to them in the form of exits, whether that's IPOs or acquisitions. And certainly those have slowed over the last couple of years in environments like this that could slow things down in terms of private equity take up. So that's why you've seen a big shift into perpetual funds and in late vintage funds, because we're seeing, okay, do I want to go the traditional new private equity lockup 10 year fund, or do I want to buy a vintage fund that should all, you know, instead of going through this whole J curve, I'm going to get the bottom of the curve right now because the curve's going to start going up. So we see vintage, perpetual and liquid alternatives filling the gap of where maybe the traditional alternative platform was. And we see all of our alternative asset management partners out there coming to market with those types of programs as well.
- [38:05]
John Matthews
When you see 8% today, 20% or more in the future, what if anything, could derail that from happening?
- [38:17]
Ted Seides
I think a lot of it's market psychology. We are essentially psychologists for our clients. Clients get nervous when things are probably the best time to buy and they want to sell. And most clients want to buy when everything's bubbly at the top. It's our job as financial advisors. And that's why having a financial advisor is such an important key person to have in a client's life. Because we can moderate those mood swings. And I don't mean to be Pollyannish about it, but the reality of it is most people, if you look back over time, will tell you the best time to buy was when people didn't want to buy anything. And the worst time to buy is when everyone was buying. So our job is to make sure we stick to the fundamentals of asset allocation, stick to the fundamentals of investing, go back to the basics of why you invest and then how do you allocate properly. And I think in the new world of investing paradigms, it's you have to have money in equities, you have to have money probably some in fixed income if rates stay high or go higher. And then alternatives is that little bucket that you have out here that's bigger than 3%. Many of our advisors follow that school of thought. And when it's laid out that way, a client I think will make the rational decisions. Like yeah, I think that does make some sense. Then we have to perform. You've got to demonstrate, you have to provide evidence that you can perform. For the wealthier clients it's a little bit less of an issue because sometimes they have so much money, liquidity is nothing for them. They get tired of liquidity. So they're okay throwing a chunk of their assets and things they don't want to mark to market and they're very comfortable in seeing where it ends up in 15 years from now. But clients don't care about liquidity until they say I need liquidity. And so you just never know when that point comes as well as you.
- [39:55]
John Matthews
Stratify that client base across the ultra high net worth, the high net worth, the mass affluent. How different are the asset allocations today?
- [40:04]
Ted Seides
Sticking with this theme of alternatives, the further you go up the wealth curve, the significantly more alternatives are in there, either through us or them doing it on their own. So as we allocate capital to these types of programs, you'll see our wealthier clients have a larger percentage, more than 8% usually to the alternative space more heavily focused on private equity than hedge funds. That's been a flip. Fifteen years ago that was all hedge funds. Now it's mainly private equity. And as you go down it's a much smaller number. But those clients in that high net worth, let's say a million to $10 million range are trying to find ways to have access to the alternative platforms. And that's where you go into the perpetual funds and the daily liquidity funds and trying to gain a little bit non correlated if possible returns on their investments. And sometimes going through a market gyration that we're going through I think is going to make everybody rethink it. I think long term the markets are going to continue to perform. This is another glitch we go through every five or six years or so. But there's always a little reset. As I tell our advisors and our clients all the time, listen, why not use this as an opportunity to sit down and maybe we tweak the portfolio based on the new paradigm that we see happening, not a knee jerk reaction But a longer term view. That's why I'm very optimistic about the role that alts play in our clients portfolios. I've been a proponent for 15 years about this stuff and I think it's going to continue to grow.
- [41:28]
John Matthews
I'd love to ask you about alignment. And you have the UBS business, you have all these different advisors, you then have their clients and then asset managers and in particular alternatives. That's been a big issue for a long time. How do you think about the different layers of where incentives lie?
- [41:49]
Ted Seides
It's a good question. We try to be completely agnostic. Best possible solution for the best possible price for our clients. And we've set up the platform to where if you want to go in and charge whatever the fee is on, let's say the private equity fund that's listed on our platform, you can charge that private equity whatever the upfront fee, if there is one, and whatever the annual management fee or if you want to, we have a capability here where you can go in on an institutional pricing level and charge a client an advisory fee, no other fees. So think about separating the cost of manufacturing from the cost of distribution or advice. That's the fastest growing platform we have here right now. Where advisors want to say, Mr. And Ms. Jones, instead of me buying this the traditional way, I'd rather buy it in a more institutional way. But I'll charge you an advice that's totally separate. So that way we're on the same side of the table. In case the fund's not working, we can exit it right away. And I'm only working for you. So you're separating the cost of your advice from the factory. And that's how many of our advisors today are recommending alternatives to their clients. But at the same time, we're a completely transparent place. Any fees that are involved in any of the products are transparent to our clients. We want them to be fully informed on what the cost is. We give them optionality on how they want to invest in these programs. And our partners I think are really good about this. Our private equity partners and alternatives partners. If we tell them we need to change the way that they're pricing something and we're a big buyer, we're somebody that they look to, they'll usually entertain whatever we have to say.
- [43:22]
John Matthews
And if you take that up a level of the advisors and their relationship with ubs, there's long been a history of, as you said, the onset advisors as independent contractors and sometimes there are deals and they take their book of business and they move to a different bank and then they move back and they're back and forth. How has that played out over the years?
- [43:41]
Ted Seides
My view is real simple. If we can't create the best platform for them to operate on, then they should probably leave. My job, probably more than anything, is to work with partners like Jerry Pascucci and Solita Marcelli, who's our CIO and everyone else in the organization to make sure we build the best platform for them to serve their clients. In the United States, when an advisor leaves from one firm to the other, they typically take around 80% of their clients with them. When we hire an advisor from another firm, we typically get 80 or more percent of their clients with them. Sometimes those numbers change a little bit. It's normal course of everyday business. I don't like it. I wish everyone would stay here. But my view is, listen, our job is to build the best platform for them and their clients. And sometimes clients say, I don't want to leave. And that's refreshing. But I respect the financial advisor. I respect what they do. I view my role as a partner with them. And if they think they can do it better at another place, I wish them well. The attrition numbers aren't as high as people think. It's a small percentage every year, annually of the overall business. Actually smaller than what anybody would guess. But they're headline grabbing sometimes. And if you're a client, it could be aggravating. It's like, I gotta move, I have to sign paperwork. And I don't think clients like it at all. But sometimes advisors think they can serve their clients better. And if that's the case, fine. But I'm myopically focused on making sure our platform here is the best that any advisor can choose from.
- [45:05]
John Matthews
Now, alongside the demographic shift of the boomers and the wealth transfer, there's also this question about the demographics of advisors. Plenty like you have been in the business for multiple decades. Seem like there are fewer coming up. How have you thought about that from your business perspective?
- [45:25]
Ted Seides
When I started, everyone was a sole practitioner. Everyone worked on their own. And then you started seeing people team up for a lot of different reasons. To serve clients better, to maybe give them some more time off to run a more professional business. Clients were demanding and clients would say, what happens if you're not in? Ted, who do I talk to on the phone? So we went from being a sole practitioner business, and then in the late 90s, people started teaming up where almost everybody's on a team. We have very few sole practitioners at our firm any longer. But the big transformation that happened, really Covid, is what accelerated. It was those teams unfortunately looked like me, 3 or 455 year old white guys in the room. There was no diversity of age, there was no diversity of gender, and there certainly wasn't any diversity of ethnicity. Our industry's done a poor job in that area. And so what you've seen accelerate since 2019. I've been speaking about this at every presentation and speech I give. It's about your teams have to start looking like the clients you serve or they have to start looking like the world we live in. And that's not three middle aged white people. It's do you have diversity of gender? Meaning who's going to talk to the women in the equation? You realize right now women control about 33% of the wealth of the United States. In seven years, they're going to control over 50% of the wealth in the United States because of this baby boomer phenomenon. So the patriarch passes away, the money's passed over to the surviving spouse. Most of the times it's a woman. And if there's no woman involved in the discussions, they just look at you and say, okay, I'm going to go work with the team that's got women on the team. So most of our teams now have diversity of gender on their teams to make sure that we serve our clients the way they should. And now we're really working on diversity of age. I tell people with this whole wealth transfer, it's not about Gen 2. Gen 2 is just under the baby boomer timeframe. It's really about how do you keep Gen 3. So Gen 1's in their 60s and 70s, Gen 2 is in their 40s, maybe late 30s. And it's the Gen 3 that has no interest in dealing with a financial advisor whatsoever because they do it on their phone. How do you connect them to the organization? So you'll see most of our teams now, and this is they have an insatiable demand is how do we find junior people to join our teams to provide that connection all the way through the family tree from patriarch down to gen 3. We have a thing called the Wealth Advice center here at our firm. They now work with smaller accounts. They work in a highly controlled environment where we teach them how to have personal skills on the phone, how to talk to clients about asset allocation, how to talk to them about investing money. And that becomes the incubator or the growing area for these young advisors for our experienced teams to hire from we actually home grow these people in the organization working on existing UBS relationships that are smaller, sometimes they become bigger because they do a good job and they become eventually the training ground for our teams to pick up to be their junior partners. The success rate has been really promising and I'm super excited about it because that was a hole in our industry. How do we find that next level of talent? Because you have to grow a business in non traditional ways. Now here's a way we can just integrate them on the team immediately. The teams are sizable enough to help co invest in these people and my goal is in five years there'll be full partners on the team and they'll cover one segment of the overall business. Went from sole practitioners to just teaming for teaming's sake. And now the teams are trying to evolving to look more like the world that we live in.
- [49:06]
John Matthews
One last question before I want to ask you a couple fun closing questions. You were sitting at top, the largest wealth manager, in addition to some of these initiatives, how do you think about making sure that you stay at the top and continue winning?
- [49:22]
Ted Seides
It starts with clients first. If everything we do is focused around clients, then everything else is going to work out. I mean personally I spend a tremendous amount of time understanding markets, understanding demographics, understanding wealth, what people need, what they're asking for, how to help them professionally and personally. And then that translates to financial advisors is how do we become the best partners we can be for our financial advisors. So to build them the right platform. And if we continuously strive and challenge and if we continue to push ourselves, we'll have the right capabilities and product set for our advisors to be super successful. It starts with the client, it's partnering with the advisor, it's never being afraid to listen to a suggestion. No suggestion, stupid. They're all good. We can't implement them all. The second I lose, that is the second we go the other way around. The two things that I see that bring people down or businesses down or countries down, you name it, is ego and arrogance. If you think you're doing great and your ego gets really big, it usually turns into arrogance. And when it turns into arrogance, the end is near. You just don't know when it's coming. And I've seen it happen throughout my career. And so I try to check my ego at the door. I hope I don't have arrogance. If I do, I hope people call me out on it. And I think if I continue to work with that and have people around me think the same way, no ego, no arrogance. Let's just go get it done. You usually have a pretty good business.
- [50:54]
John Matthews
All right, John, a couple last questions. What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?
- [51:00]
Ted Seides
Anything outside. I like to be in the outdoors. I'm an avid fisherman, don't do it as much as I used to, but I love to saltwater fish primarily. I love to play golf and I love to hike. My wife and I love to go on hikes. We have a place in North Carolina in the mountains and just being out in nature is a great detox. Changes the world. I get to energize myself every weekend I try to do one of those three things and then I come back on Monday, supercharged, tons of energy.
- [51:31]
John Matthews
What was your first paid job and what'd you learn from it?
- [51:35]
Ted Seides
I grew up in a small town called Ocala, Florida, and my first paid job was my neighbor asked me to paint his house from top to bottom on the outside. And I said, sure, how much are you going to pay me? And he goes, eh, we'll just think about that. At the end, he didn't tell me I was going to have to use a paint scraper or whatever you could to scrape the old paint off the eaves around the it was one of the hardest jobs I've ever done in my life. It took me three months to paint the entire house, but it was one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. I learned hard work. It was hot. He would come out and inspect me, and at the end he paid me incredibly well. As many times as I wanted to quit doing that, and it was probably as many times as he wanted to fire me, he kept hiring me back and it taught me a little bit about hard work and dedication. And I don't want to paint another house from top to bottom, but it was a good starting point.
- [52:25]
John Matthews
How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to at the.
- [52:29]
Ted Seides
Beginning of this, I said, I'm the accidental executive. I truly believe that. I'm honored to lead so many great people and be part of a great organization. But I never thought it was going to be this way. I thought I was going to be living in that small town. I'd maybe be a stockbroker in town or maybe be a lawyer in town. And here we are at midtown Manhattan talking from my office. I would have never expected it in a million years. And sometimes I still don't believe it. And maybe that's why I work so hard to make sure that I don't disappoint what I've already done because I never thought I'd be in this position. In fact, at the end of this, I may be a financial advisor again. I love that part of the work so much. It's the accidental executive, and it's been great. The people that I've met globally, from all over the United States of America, I've met so many great people. I'm so lucky to have lived this life up until this point.
- [53:17]
John Matthews
What's a mystery you wonder about landing on Mars?
- [53:22]
Ted Seides
There's a lot of talk about it these days, but I'm really fascinated about can we actually get there and live there? Can we actually live on Mars? And I guess we're going to find out here in a few years.
- [53:32]
John Matthews
All right, John, last one. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about?
- [53:38]
Ted Seides
It's all about having a positive impact on people. Not just professionally, which I'm involved with so much of the time around here, but more importantly personally. I mean, at this stage of my career, it's all about how much I can give back to help people do things better in their lives. And if I can tweak one little thing or help them think a little bit differently and it impacts them professionally, but more importantly personally, that's a pretty good chapter in my book.
- [54:03]
John Matthews
John, thanks so much for sharing this super interesting platform you're sitting on top of.
- [54:08]
Ted Seides
Ted. Thank you. It's been great great seeing you.
- [54:11]
Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website@capitalallocators.com where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast, transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.