Sid Yenamandra is no stranger to data complexities.

As the CEO and founder of Entreda, he’s spent more than a decade focused on helping advisors and broker-dealers navigate what he calls the ‘Wild West’ of cybersecurity and compliance. But still, he believes, the wealth management industry is only scratching the surface of its data management problem.

On a recent Beacon Flash Podcast episode, Beacon Strategies’ Managing Partner Chip Kispert sat down with Yenamandra for a conversation about cybersecurity, compliance and data management, as well as Yenamandra’s latest entrepreneurial initiative, Surge Ventures, a new kind of venture platform built specifically to enable companies to test ideas more quickly, solve problems at an accelerated pace and ultimately get to market faster.

When it comes to data management, Yenamandra explains, organizations are amassing data at an exponential, non-linear rate. And particularly for broker-dealers, whose offices have become more dispersed than ever as a result of the pandemic, managing ownership of and responsibility for all of that data has become even more challenging.

Data organization, governance, privacy and compliance complications are plaguing the industry, and multiple stakeholders – advisors, broker-dealers, custodians, tech vendors, CRM players – only compound the problem by making it more difficult to visualize exactly how much data any one organization has. 

“The data problem is an octopus in my opinion,” Yenamandra says. 

Solving it will require focusing on one facet at a time. One area he believes is ripe with opportunity is the permissioning of data ownership and data rights.

“How do you dole out ownership and manage the ownership of that data in an effective way, and how do you do that continuously as you’re growing data at an exponential rate?”

Every organization, he explains, is focused on more data. More data equals more insights equals better business decisions – but as more data is being amassed, they’re losing sight of how it’s being organized and governed. 

“That keeps me up at night,” he says. “But I’m also excited because I feel like it’s an opportunity.”

Overview
A Changing Industry (05:35)
Trends in the Wealth Management Space (17:15)
Data and Cybersecurity (22:14)

Resources
Sid Yenamandra's Linkedin
Surge Ventures' LinkedIn
Chip Kispert's LinkedIn
Beacon Strategies' Website