At The Vested Bar With ... Leslie Wojcik, SEI

Yeah, well today consumers are so accustomed to accessing everything they want when and how they want it, and the financial services industry is still catching up at times. So I think the biggest challenge is in the question itself: legacy. They want to leave their legacies behind, and due to regulatory scrutiny, they're largely a risk-averse group. So moving from a legacy system, an outdated mainframe-based legacy system, to a modern platform is quite frankly scary. So I think when they're looking at the pressure they're facing to scale their businesses, it comes down to the question of inertia, where they're faced with so many different choices and each holds equal weight that they don't know where to start. Whether it's the choice to outsource, whether it's a dynamic UI, streamlining their back office processes, I think once they take that first step and understand where to start, it really starts that whole process of transformation for them.

Yeah, I really think all the way from front office operations straight through to the back, efficiency is really key in providing the best experience for managers and at the end investors. Improving your tech infrastructure really across the board is what drives that efficiency, and it improves accuracy, reduces errors, digitizes the experience, gives this massive amount of insight into data, and it really quickens delivery. So I think emerging tech really stands to create new standards for the industry and provide greater insight to the managers and end investors.

Yeah, I think there's certainly been a cultural shift in financial services companies over the last ten years. I do think in our industry, cultural change happens at a slower clip. We're fortunate at SEI; our CEO and founder, who's still at the helm today, instilled this culture of innovation from the very beginning 50 years ago, and he also envisioned the sense of family, and both are still alive and well today. Last year we launched this Autism at Work program. So we welcomed, I believe, around 20 children from the local school that were on the spectrum to come into our company and learn about financial services and about our company. These kids were incredibly bright; their IQs blew most of us out of the water. But we ended up offering two of them jobs in our Junior Leadership Program at the company. And it's really been such a beautiful thing to work with other local financial services companies in this partnership to better this program and really give them the opportunity and give us the opportunity to utilize their special skill set in different ways that help us innovate for tomorrow.

A lot. I'll start. I guess the top three would be cultural fit, certainly, especially for us; collaboration; and really creating an openness to challenge each other. Whether it's a traditional Wall Street institution or an edgy fintech, cultural fit is so important because that's what makes you feel comfortable working with each other in the space. Having a truly collaborative relationship really betters communication, which ultimately helps the success of each other. And the openness to challenge: too often, especially in financial services, we get kind of stuck in what was the right way, and we need to be challenged, to be pushed out of our comfort zones, and that's truly what helps us grow as a firm. And we treat it not as your traditional vendor relationship; it's truly a partnership.

We've actually been asked this a lot recently, and hands down, creativity takes the cake for us. We have had so much fun listening to the ideas and the perspectives; they're so unique and exciting. It's almost reinvigorated us. And the people, the people is a close second. It's felt like a team, and true to what we just talked about, a true partnership. So we're really excited to see what we can accomplish.

Yeah.