Adam Holt drew on years of experience as a financial planner as well as his Drexel eMBA to create a tool that helps clients make better financial choices.
Early in his career, Holt saw that most clients didn’t care to receive reams of financial reports and jargon from their advisers. “What they kept asking me for was clarity on their own condition,” he says.
Coursework during his eMBA at Bennett S. LeBow College of Business pointed him toward a solution. “The simulations in B-school were critical,” he says, highlighting accounting, strategy and intellectual property assignments by key faculty members like Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship Dean Donna DeCarolis.
He had just been selected to lead his firm RubinGoldman and Associates, and the simulations helped him envision a technology backbone that could become the practice management and financial planning engine for the company.
Between studies, he filed a patent application and began building out his vision for that “backbone,” a data visualization platform he named Asset-Map.
Asset-Map is unique in that it draws information from disparate sources into a comprehensive view of a client’s financial inventory on one page, including assets that are typically omitted from dashboards common in the industry. Over the years, the platform has evolved to reflect progress toward financial goals.
Financial advisers typically focus on the investments they manage for clients, Holt says, since that’s where they make their money.
“That’s not actually the most important aspect of financial planning and client empowerment,” Holt explains, listing other crucial considerations such as estate planning, retirement goals, taxes and long-term care.
Holt established Asset-Map as a company in 2013 after deploying the software with his own clients at his Bala Cynwyd firm. Within a decade of adopting the platform companywide, assets under the firm’s management grew to over $1 billion.
More than 6,000 planners serving nearly two million clients in different languages and with diverse currencies have used Asset-Map to bring clarity to more than $1.4 trillion in financial instruments.
Along the way, Holt has stayed connected with LeBow professors and other alumni, eventually being elected president of the Drexel LeBow Alumni Association. He credits is eMBA cohort and LeBow Finance Professor Ed Nelling with helping to refine the platform. “Ed Nelling challenged all my finance assumptions,” he recalls, which enabled him to compress 30 pages of financial projections into one page.
Now a member of the Drexel President’s Leadership Council, Holt has remained close to his alma mater, and there are ongoing discussions to possibly pilot Asset-Map within the University community.
“We’re trying to empower consumers by making sure there’s a competent tour guide there to ask questions,” Holt says.