Ep. 214: Kyrill Asatur – Investing like a pro – how Centerfin brings institutional-grade service to individual investors

Connect with Kyrill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrill-asatur/

Full Episode Transcript:

< Intro >

Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. The podcast for accounting and finance professionals working in business. I'm Adam Larson, and today we're going to talk about something that is, no doubt, near and dear to you, namely, your money. 

My guest is Kyrill Asatur, the CEO and co-founder of Centerfin. As a longtime advisor to hedge funds and other large institutional investors, Kyrill was often asked by friends and relatives for advice on how they could better manage their money. How the big shots on Wall Street do it? And for a long time, he didn't have a good answer for them because that institutional level of service and expertise, simply did not exist for individual investors. 

This is the story of how he decided to correct that inefficiency, in the investment and management ecosystem through the power of fintech. This podcast is a must listen for anyone with a 401K and IRA, or any other investment accounts, which means it's pretty much for everyone. So let's get started. 

< Music >

So, Kyrill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to have you on. And I figured we could start off by just introducing you to our audience, and just so you can give us a little bit of background and your story.

Kyrill:             Sure, thanks for having me on, Adam. So my background is about 20 years ago, well, a little over 20 years ago now. Out of undergrad, I joined, at the time it was called the Global Operations Division at Goldman Sachs. And it was an analyst program, three-year program, where I got to rotate through several different roles. And, so, I did that. I was in foreign exchange for a little bit. Then equities, and then decided to find an area of the firm that aligned itself with the hedge fund industry. 

So I got, personally, very interested in the hedge fund industry, just always been reading about hedge fund managers. And at Goldman Sachs there's many different ways, as you can imagine, you can interact with hedge funds. 

But the one business that was directly correlated, so to speak, with the hedge fund industry, was the prime brokerage business, which is basically serving all hedge fund needs. And Goldman had, and still does have, the kind of premier prime brokerage business, top three prime brokerage business in the country. 

And, so, I was able to get myself a role in that business. So I was there for another six years, five, six years after that, after my first three-year rotation. And then I joined a hedge fund that I covered, they were actually ex-Goldman guys, too, and I was with them for another five years. 

Ultimately, I got recruited into a couple of different roles with other firms, and decided in 2016, so now about six years ago, to start my own advisory practice. 

And initially focused on working with hedge funds and other alternative investment managers, very organically and really through, as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention. 

I decided to start what is now Centerfin. And the idea was really because over the two decades or so that I've been working on Wall Street, I've always struggled to help friends and family that will come to me and ask me about what to do with their money. So they might have a retirement account, or a 401K, or just savings that they've saved up, that they would like to invest. And, frankly, I just never saw any great options out there that I can point them to. 

And having spent my whole career, or at least the biggest part of my career, interacting with large, sophisticated, institutional investors like pension funds, endowments, foundations, family offices. I, basically, learned the way that they invest their money, and it was very different than the options that were available for if you're an average Joe or Jane, so to speak. 

And, so, Centerfin was founded to address that need, in my mind. And we're basically two years into it, a little or two years into it. We went live at the beginning of this year. We have a tech-enabled, kind of tech-forward service. And, so, we spent a bunch of time building it, but we went live at the beginning of this year and growing nicely in these crazy markets.

Adam:            Yes, the markets are very crazy with everything that's happening, the inflation. And in the past three years with the market, the way it's going, I know it's been really crazy for everybody. And I know organizations, and our focus will probably be more on organizations and people within those organizations. 

I know organizations are looking to invest and trying to build their wealth. As well as they're trying to keep above water in this industry. What do you think the future of finance is looking at as things are, continuously, changing and the finance team has to adapt as they go along?

Kyrill:             Yes, absolutely. So really technology is playing a bigger role in everything. So one of the reasons why we started our company and the way we structured it, it was because we felt like technology was something that could be used to just create more efficiency in really any process. 

But, for us, it's the investment process, managing people's money. And by "Create efficiency", I just mean do things in a way that are cheaper to the end consumer. So for us it's an individual. But this works all the way up and down the chain internally at an organization or externally depending on we all have clients we serve.

And, so, I think technology is a major, and you've heard about it, people have referred to it as fintech. It's finance and technology combining, and the interesting thing is that it's still early, quite frankly. Because I do think that technology is making its headway in helping create efficiencies in organizations, and processes, and procedures. But, quite frankly, most of the financial world infrastructure is still what existed 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, in some cases. And, so, there's just a lot of opportunity.

Adam:            There is a lot of opportunity. And as you mentioned there, a lot of the systems that are in place, are still the same things that were built years ago. 

                        Now, is it more advantageous to go with a solution that may be more digitally native, that doesn't have the backbone of the original structures, but it's trying to be more agile and adaptive with technology advances?

Kyrill:             Yes, I think it's absolutely advantageous. So I actually was having a conversation with a former colleague this morning. And what struck me is that even when you try, and this is somewhat by design. 

But even when you try to structure your business in a way that's very customer-driven. And that's really our ethos, is that we really want to focus on the customer. What'...