30 Best CEOs of the Year 2020 30 Best CEOs of the Year 2020 | Page 37

What are the qualities required to be a successful CEO? There are three qualities a successful CEO must have. First, a good financial sense, the ability to understand the numbers. Second, a good operational sense, the ability to understand the business and lastly, a successful CEO has the ability to inspire others! If you had not become a CEO, what else had you dreamt of being? I had the dream of being close to the creative industry. I grew up wanting to be a cartoonist; I admired, George Shultz’s “Peanuts” and the Snoopy era, I really wanted to do something like that. I have in sense achieved that. I have created another business that is I’m producing and directing documentary films and a television series for our local PBS affiliate. What do you think was a striking factor that made you to choose this profession? solution which allows advisers to streamline and expedite client on boarding by automating the process of opening accounts with financial institutions. It takes quite a bit of time, and we are building automation with the ability to move money between accounts. When they need to place trades or move cash between banks, we can automate a lot of those steps and a lot of those processes. When I graduated in 1997 there were not a lot of opportunities available for people with my background in finance and computer science and I couldn’t find the job that I was looking for, so I just decided to create it! Ever since then, I’ve always tried to create jobs that I want. Are there any products that your company is planning to launch? Quite a few, we serve advisers that serve very wealthy families, and we have developed a number of tools that will allow those advisors to help serve their families efficiently. We’re looking at adding risk modeling tools for our portfolio and investment reporting solutions. We’re currently launching a new Overall, we are creating a technology ecosystem for firms so they can support these very wealthy and sophisticated families. This ecosystem connects everything from their CRM and accounting systems to their financial planning tools and investment management platforms. We reduce redundancy and the areas where human error can occur as well produce new analytics and comprehensive reporting, not previously possible, by pulling data from all of the above technology solutions with in the ecosystem. SR Rick Higgins, CEO and Founder of Risclarity Creative engineer, entrepreneur, thought leader and financial software expert to the nation’s wealthiest families seeking to leverage leadership and entrepreneurial experience to increase the prosperity of individuals, families and organizations. Rick Higgins founded Risclarity in 2010. Previously, he co-founded Wealth Touch in 2001 and is credited with creating the groundbreaking technology that served as the foundation for the firm. In the 1990’s, as Co-founder of Higgins-Knecht, a technology consulting firm, and Digital Partner, a financial technology firm. Higgins established himself as an innovator and leader in the field of family wealth management. In 1999, The sale of Digital Partner to My CFO Inc., a Silicon Valley-based online pioneer in the ultra-high-net-worth market, firmly placed Higgins at the heart of what became known as the technological renaissance in wealth management. Today, Higgins is regularly invited to speak to family offices, insurance companies and financial planning groups all over the U.S. and abroad. Rick Higgins, CEO & Founder 37