The more he is asked to detail the long list of accomplishments that comprise his 27-year wealthtech career, the more Hailin Li adjusts his glasses and shrinks in his Zoom window as a shy smile spreads across his clean-shaven face.
It's not a reaction that comes from discomfort or a lack of confidence. The former senior vice president of advisor solutions at Morningstar who left the firm to found Advyzon back in 2012 is every bit the industry leader that his résumé suggests.
But after a few moments of discussing work, it's evident that Li is a man who prefers walking the walk over talking the talk. He's perpetually thinking of new ways to support advisors and is eager to roll up his sleeves and get dirty to make it happen, C-suite status aside.
That's because for Li, the hard work is just as fulfilling as the payoff. It's a mindset that permeates not only his professional pursuits, but also his personal passions.
A self-proclaimed car enthusiast, Li is well aware of the thrills that can be had when behind the wheel. But he has even more fun under the hood with a wrench in his hand and a problem to solve.
"Figuring out what to do and getting it working … that is the passion I have for it," Li, CEO of Advyzon, said in an interview with Financial Planning.
That hands-on mentality is one of the many reasons John Mackowiak, Advyzon's chief revenue officer, said working alongside Li for the past 20 years has been such a pleasure. It likely played a role in the Chicago-based firm securing a spot on
But Mackowiak jokes that in many ways, Li is the anti-CEO. He doesn't chase the spotlight. He isn't hungry for airtime. He doesn't rush the podium to make an acceptance speech when his
"He's been a little bit behind the scenes for a CEO. But that's how he likes it," Mackowiak said. "He's much more happy to have the company get recognition or other contributors on the team to get recognition than himself. And I think he would much rather be working on solving the problem than trying to get out there and be the face of anything."
Instead, Mackowiak said the soft-spoken leader makes heads turn through his actions and work ethic.
"He's able to inspire and motivate everybody, because he leads by example. He'll troubleshoot an integration directly. He's working with the custodians to enhance their integration capabilities. He's taking client calls. And that's in addition to all his CEO duties.
"If you look at McDonald's, everybody goes through Hamburger University so they know how to do every job from the ground up. And that's something he embodies," Mackowiak said, adding that Li also knows when to call in help from the subject matter experts.
"He knows how to do everything here. And he's willing to do it day in and day out, so no one is going to outwork him. I can assure you that."
Mackowiak traversed the same Morningstar to Advyzon pipeline that Li did. Their time as colleagues dates back to 2004, when Li was working as the chief architect of Morningstar Office and Mackowiak was the first salesperson associated with the product.
"We built up that program. … Long story short, they shifted some strategic priorities, and we felt we could do it better," Mackowiak said. "Essentially, if you're not going to do this right, then we will."
Breaking away and building up
The decision to leave Morningstar in the early 2010s and bring his own vision of advisor technology to life though Advyzon wasn't one Li made lightly. At the time of his departure, he had given 16 years of his life to the company and locked down his spot as a leader in the firm.
After joining Morningstar in 1996, Li started as a technical lead for
Despite being responsible for all of Morningstar's advisor-facing technology, Li was driven to make a change by what he considered to be the unanswered "why" of wealthtech at the time.
That "why" being, "Why was so much wealthtech so painful to use?"
"I wanted to know, can we change the user experience for the better? If you recall in 2007, Steve Jobs changed the way the world worked with a touchscreen phone. Suddenly, user experience became a competitive advantage for a company," Li said. "That kind of formed our belief system when we created Advyzon. It leads with users."
So Li set out to simplify the wealthtech experience without cutting any of the capabilities advisors had become accustomed to. After two years in development that included a private beta, Advyzon's comprehensive set of applications integrated in a single platform made its debut.
The firm offered CRM, email synchronization, calendaring, portfolio management, portfolio modeling, goal-based planning tools, an intuitive report builder, a client portal, billing and more.
And just like he was the first sales rep assigned to Morningstar Office when Li was at the helm, Mackowiak was there from the beginning, becoming Advyzon's first official hire in 2014.
He remembers those early days fondly, even if they were littered with the unique challenges that come with operating a wealthtech startup.
"I was quite literally handed a laptop and told, 'Get to work,'" Mackowiak said with a laugh. "We did not have any clients. We didn't have an actual phone system. I worked off my cell phone in the basement for about three weeks until the phone system was set up."
Still, chasing that "why" pushed Li and his team forward through the hard times. Looking back, the Advyzon founder believes his background as a scientist is part of what fuels his dogged pursuit of answers, as well as his willingness to experiment until even tougher problems in need of solutions emerge.
After earning a bachelor's degree in physics from Peking University in China in 1988, Li moved to America and earned his Ph.D. in physics from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1996. He carried those credentials into wealth management and later earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 2008.
"In physics, we work behind the scenes and we always ask why we're doing something," Li explained. "Similarly, I think in this case … it's always asking why our clients use Advyzon. And how can we do better?
"If physics helped me with anything over that five years of Ph.D. experience, it is that process."
The secret gets out
Similar to its CEO, Advyzon as a company didn't do a lot of chest pounding or attention hogging after making its debut.
Sure, the company was present at some trade shows during the mid-aughts, but Mackowiak said Li was committed to getting his firm's secret sauce just right before spooning it up for advisors.
"We were very mindful [of our approach], especially that first year. This is not that big of an industry, and reputation is super important, so we didn't do much in the way of marketing," Mackowiak said. "I've seen a lot of companies come out a little too hot and do all the marketing and PR and everything on the front end, and the product doesn't really live up to what they're pushing. So we were very much the opposite of what you see with tech companies in that we just didn't do a whole lot."
Li directed his team to take it slow and steady. And soon, the work itself started making plenty of noise. Advyzon landed about a dozen clients by the end of its first year. By the close of year two, it had 50 clients, primarily RIAs, that relied on it for solutions.
As the firm approaches the end of year 11, Advyzon now serves nearly 1,400 advisory firms across the nation.
In 2017, Technology Tools for Today (T3) Conference Producer Joel Bruckenstein referred to Advyzon as one of the industry's "
That praise was followed by advisors who signed up saying the same thing year after year. At the
That includes earning the highest rating in the survey's all-in-one software category for the sixth consecutive year.
Advyzon's average rating across all the categories it qualified for was among the highest of the more than 800 firms featured in the report. The analysis also noted that while most of the solutions providers in the all-in-one software category have followed the "all-in-one-by-acquisition trend" by purchasing and merging best-of-breed software from multiple categories, Advyzon is an exception, as all of the platform's solutions were built in-house on single-source code.
That shy smile returns when Li is asked to discuss the positive response that his passion and his product have received from the industry thus far.
Once again, the anti-CEO shines the spotlight elsewhere and makes it all about the user.
"It's very rewarding. But the most rewarding part is the ability to work with like-minded folks. We really wanted to build something to make their lives easier," Li said. "Although it's not like a big mission, we feel like we do make our financial advisors' lives easier so they can grow their business and become more profitable without spending too much time or money."
Under the hood
With one decade of business in the books and the first year of the second decade quickly coming to a close, Li is reflective but no less enthusiastic about the mission that first motivated him to move on from Morningstar 11 years ago.
Shyness that manifests when talking trophies melts away when discussing problems that need solving. Li is full of ideas that he believes should be more commonplace in wealthtech, such as speed being a crucial part of a positive user experience. Or crafting software so intuitive that hours of training aren't required to leverage its full potential.
The firm also shows no signs of slowing down or limiting its scope, as the past two years have played host to a steady flow of additional changes and innovations.
In March 2022,
A year later,
In May,
Earlier this month, Advyzon announced that its
And on Oct. 18, the firm announced updated integration capabilities with financial planning software RightCapital. The integration sends data directly from Advyzon through API access and offers multiple capabilities, including connecting important information to client plans, allowing advisors to import client profiles from Advyzon into RightCapital, and sending RightCapital reports directly to Advyzon.
Once integrated, investment account and life insurance data can be synced from Advyzon to RightCapital.
Mackowiak said more growth and change is on the way for the firm. But with Li at the helm, advisors don't have to worry about waking up one day and no longer recognizing the company they have come to trust.
He also knows that Li won't rest until every last "why" that he can come up with has been answered.
"No one in this industry works harder than him. I might put in my time, but I can't keep up. To his credit, he doesn't expect everybody to put in the effort that he does. He expects everybody to work really hard, of course. But like I said, no one's going to outwork him," Mackowiak said. "He's often up at 2 o'clock in the morning working on stuff. And then the next day, it could be 10 a.m., if a client has a question that he needs to help with that he can apply his unique knowledge to, he'll troubleshoot with a client on the phone. Not just enterprise clients or key clients. All clients."
