According to PWC, the amount of managed assets between 2016 and 2025 is set to double, going from $84.9 trillion to an estimated $145 trillion. Portfolio owners—individual or institutional—rely on the help of wealth management advisors, asset managers, and investment experts to reach lofty return targets. In recent years, technology has made asset and wealth management more accessible than ever, but it has also complicated the field in new and unexpected ways.
Investors can now keep investments in a multitude of different platforms, web portals, and trading companies. Although opportunities to make money are off the charts, the ability to manage all the moving pieces is so complex that it is even challenging for seasoned wealth managers to keep up. Luckily, there are technology innovators creating solutions that make the landscape more manageable, profitable, and secure.
One of those innovators is Gustavo Trigos. Two years ago, as a young professional and passionate problem solver, Gustavo started Mentum. Designed to make it easy for wealth managers, financial advisors, and other industry experts to tap into their client's entire financial landscape, Mentum uses API connections to bring together data and insights from banking systems, investment platforms, and other financial custodian services.
Now, instead of manually pulling information from a top-5 American banking institution, two nationally and internationally renowned investment funds, and many other platforms to create a full financial picture for their clients, multi-family offices and wealth managers can go to one place, Mentum, and get all the information they need to do their jobs.
Learning the Ropes
Gustavo studied finance, with a concentration in statistics, at Hult International Business School in San Francisco, CA. The Colombian native was not new to living in new places; he had moved around Latin America, living in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia throughout his childhood due to his father's work as a mechanical engineer. But in San Francisco, he was exposed to the world of Silicon Valley, the world of major technical innovation, and the world of fintech.
For two years, he worked at Newday Financial Technologies in charge of the Portfolio Analytics Team. He mastered utilizing APIs to connect to different financial data platforms, developed complex financial models with said data, and eventually automated the equity investment management process. This exposure was foundational in the creation of Mentum, but he had one last stop before he took on the title of CEO.
With a full scholarship, Gustavo went back to school at Hult, where he successfully received a Master of Science in Business Analytics with a concentration in data science. Although he was offered a competitive position at BlackRock, the largest asset management business in the world, he left the Quantitative Investment Group Team to create Mentum and change the game for wealth managers and financial advisors around the world.
Mentum Finds Momentum
After creating its proprietary platform, Gustavo launched Mentum and began reaching out to financial institutions across the United States and Latin America. Rapidly, partnerships started forming, and funds from investors began coming in. To date, Mentum has garnered $4.2 million from Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists. In its first eight months, Mentum went on to work with some of the largest wealth managers in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.
Gustavo leads a team of 11 people, but he expects that in the next five years, that team will grow to at least 50 talented innovators. Mentum supports 15 wealth managers and seamlessly connects to 100 different financial institutions. At a granular level, Gustavo and his team built a product that now supports 16,536 investment portfolios.
Because of his passion and commitment to innovation, Gustavo was able to build a product that will change how wealth is created, grown, and secured all over the world. There's no question as to why Mentum gained momentum, and this is just the start.
