At heart, Olivia Eisinger is a team player.
Eisinger was first introduced to the financial services industry while studying psychology and playing basketball for her alma mater New York University. Looking to subsidize her education, a friend pointed her toward financial services.
Her first experiences included internships with AllianceBernstein and Morgan Stanley. “I gave it a shot and just fell in love with the fast-paced, team-based approach and people working together to solve problems,” she said.
After graduating in 2011, Eisinger took a job with TD Ameritrade to help research high-performing RIAs. Following a brief stint with an insurance provider in 2014, she returned to TD as vice president of technology consulting and eventually moved into relationship management and institutional sales.
“I saw the impact RIAs were having on their clients’ lives and how they were often the first phone call when something really good or something tragic happened,” she said. “I was able to tie the work that I was doing to a bigger purpose. I think it was that the fast-paced team dynamic in combination with really seeing the power that RIAs were having on their clients’ lives that drew me to the industry,” she said.
In the fall of 2020, Eisinger joined Apex Fintech Solutions, known for providing custody and clearing for the early wave of robo advisors, such as Betterment. By the time she arrived as a sales director, Apex had begun broadening its reach and making its custodial services directly available to RIAs, competing with industry behemoths Schwab, Fidelity and Pershing.
Part of the job is making sure Apex works well with other tech firms an advisor may use—such as Orion, which described the Apex onboarding process as “the fastest out there” in 2020—to embed its custodial operations and “straight-through” processing into their platforms.
“We’re big believers in the innovation that’s happening in the third-party tech space. We want to consult with them,” Eisinger explained. “That’s different from the experience you typically hear about with the legacy custodians.”
Eisinger said her goal was to help other tech providers map out how they can tie into Apex to create a “better experience” for clients and advisors. That includes an onboarding solution for firm transitions and a fractional trading API that supports rebalancers such as AdvisorArch and Eclipse.
Apex is “leaning into” the open architecture, API-driven model to provide the choice and flexibility advisors are looking for, she explained. “What we know is that they want well-integrated technology that’s also decoupled from the custodian, so they can make changes as their business models and growth aspirations evolve and as they look to serve different customer types.”
The firm is working on implementing educational resources advisors can share with clients, and has launched an internal, AI-powered chatbot providing instant answers to a range of questions..
“We’re big believers in the role of the human advisor and how you can use AI and automation to make the process and the technology as frictionless as possible,” Eisinger said. “Really leaning into that hybrid model and empowering human advisors with tools to create a scalable experience is important.”
At the end of the day, Eisinger and Apex are on a mission to “enable frictionless investing for every person on the planet,” she said. “That’s the direction that we’re taking the company—and advisory and education is a big part of that.”
