The turning of the year is always a good time to take stock of the past and assess the road ahead, and as 2024 rolls into 2025 I am especially proud of how the Vestmark team has performed and is positioned.
To me, the mark of success is not just in the number of new and renewing clients, financial results, and accolades (although all of these reflect what is happening at Vestmark) but being a business of integrity with a commitment to its customers and strong business ethics, which Vestmark has shown through 2024.
We have delivered on our promises, been honest and transparent, and put in hard work to strengthen, improve and expand the foundations of our company. Besides just being the right thing to do, it helps make us the kind of partner our clients want to do business with. We need to earn their trust every day through our actions, not by demeaning our competitors or papering over challenges.
Helping firms and advisors manage investment portfolios is a challenging business, after all. Our clients have made promises to their customers, and as a key component of our client’s wealth ecosystem, we bear a heavy responsibility. Since arriving at Vestmark in August of 2022, I have focused on reinforcing the bedrock of the company, which we have seen come to fruition in the past year.
Vestmark’s foundational values provide a base for client success
Our focus on our core values has led to numerous successes across the business over the past 12 months.
- Reliability: In 2024 we have shown enormous improvement in the stability and resiliency of our core VestmarkONE® managed account platform. It is deeply embedded in our clients’ business, and its performance can affect the reputation of our clients as well as Vestmark. We have invested tremendous resources into our core product over the past few years, and we are proud to see the hard work we did to make the platform bulletproof pay off.
- Stability: Thanks to renewals by each of our top clients and the addition of many new clients in 2024, Vestmark today is stronger as a company, generating record revenue and an excellent client retention rate. We enjoyed strong earnings and will end the year with a very healthy balance sheet, providing the funds we will use to continue to harden our core technology, respond to customer requests for new features and launch new products and functionality responding to market demand. We have diversified our client base to ensure long-term stability as we continue to grow. We believe this is extremely important to our clients because it means we have ample resources to invest in our products and support, and we will be here when they need us.
- Innovation: In 2024 we accelerated the rollout of Vestmark VAST®, helping firms and advisors achieve portfolio personalization and tax management at scale. Vestmark has over 20 years of history and success with our core products. The launch of VAST builds upon our foundational strength, leveraging the scalability of our core product to bring new capabilities to our clients with the same level of reliability and consistency that they have become accustomed to from Vestmark. We have also launched our new reporting and billing solutions with many more product innovations and releases scheduled for 2025.
- Leadership: We have added experienced, visionary leaders to our roster, including Robert Battista as Head of Advisory Solutions, Freedom Dumlao as Chief Technology Officer, Corey Fiedler as Chief Product Officer, Rebecca Mackenzie as VP of Product Management and Steve Gottschalk as Head of Marketing. They and other key new hires add decades of fresh experience to our long-tenured team, who are the heart of Vestmark and understand our clients intimately. Together our leadership team will ensure that we continue to deliver on our promises while imagining new ways to help our clients.
- Partnership: Over the last 12 months we have successfully executed long-term extensions with many of our largest clients and brought many new and innovative firms into the Vestmark fold. These wins and extensions are validation of our people, products and business. Vestmark is also in the unique position of being an independent private company with no external influences other than our customers and prospects and the markets in general. This provides us with the ability to work with a diverse set of industry players to improve the overall customer experience. We are extremely grateful to our customers for the trust and confidence they place in us every day and we look forward to being a part of their future success.
- Vision: We have publicly discussed our future product roadmap, which will include additional access to alternative investments and fixed income products, householding, a revamped proposal generation system, a streamlined advisor user experience and artificial intelligence-powered tools and solutions that will continue to make our customers’ lives easier and enable them to deliver excellent service to their end users and advisors.
Positioned for a strong 2025
We’ve had a lot to celebrate in the past year. We appreciate that we must earn our reputation every day – when things go wrong, the industry has a long memory, and we know all too well that misconceptions about a business can linger long after things have been put right. But make no mistake, this is a new Vestmark, powered by a strong foundation and an even stronger employee base.
Our achievements of 2024 are just the foundation for an even stronger future.
If you would like to discuss how Vestmark can help you succeed in the wealth industry, feel free to contact me at kroessner@vestmark.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
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