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'...