CircleBlack Appoints Alex Sauickie as CEO and President

NEW YORK, Sept. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CircleBlack, Inc. today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Alex Sauickie, a leading fintech executive with an extensive history of building successful Enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses, as Chief Executive Officer and President.  The appointment is the culmination of a search process following the sudden and tragic passing of CircleBlack's former CEO John Michel, the fintech visionary and founder of the wealth management technology firm.

Prior to joining CircleBlack, Alex served as President and Chief Operating Officer of financial technology firm Scivantage, Inc.  During his tenure at Scivantage, Mr. Sauickie was responsible for enterprise-wide P&L and operations in support of some of the largest banks and broker-dealers in the US, as well as helped oversee the successful sale and integration of Scivantage to Refinitiv, completed in March 2020.  

Alex joined Scivantage from SaaS billing platform Billtrust after serving as COO of Unified, an award-winning social media platform company.  Previously, Mr. Sauickie was Managing Director and Senior Vice President of Operations and Services of Albridge Solutions, where he saw it through nearly 10-fold growth, becoming the No. 1 performance reporting company in the U.S., utilized by hundreds of Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and broker-dealers.  He later oversaw its successful sale to a division of PNC Bank, and later Pershing, a BNY Mellon company.

Earlier in his career at The Island ECN, an electronic marketplace, Mr. Sauickie spearheaded the company's highly efficient operations and services, and contributed to its successful acquisition by Instinet Corporation and later NASDAQ.  Prior thereto, Alex held various operations and technology positions at online bill payment and presentment company Paytrust, as well as at Merrill Lynch, where he worked with John Michel in the creation of the group now known as MerrillEdge.

In June 2020, Long Arc Capital LP, through LAC Fund I, completed the acquisition of a majority equity interest in CircleBlack, providing the Company with significant growth capital for its continued product and market expansion.  Long Arc Capital targets technology companies with potential to become market leaders, and its investment in CircleBlack is premised on the belief that the technology enablement of financial advisors and clients is the future of wealth management.

"CircleBlack has developed a powerful value proposition addressing an important gap in the market, based on transparency, data integration and aggregation, and ease of use and implementation," said Tobin Whamond, Partner of Long Arc Capital.  "Alex is the right leader to take the torch lit by John Michel and lead the Company forward.  Alex has a track record of successfully building fintech companies and creating substantial shareholder value on multiple occasions in his career.  Alex's expertise, coupled with Long Arc's investment, will enable the firm to deepen integrations with industry partners, expand core functionalities for RIAs and invest in its growing institutional offering.  We are confident that CircleBlack is now firmly on the path to becoming the primary operating system and a preeminent interface for the wealth management industry."

"It's an honor to join the CircleBlack team and be part of a company that is dramatically enhancing the way advisors interact with their investors.  CircleBlack's highly innovative technology solves a problem for RIAs and broker-dealers by bringing full transparency and dynamic performance reporting of their clients' direct and held-away accounts, while also delivering a second-to-none user experience," said Alex Sauickie, CEO and President of CircleBlack.  "An advisor with CircleBlack has a competitive advantage, with the ability to attract more clients and assets, as it offers them insight into their households they won't get anywhere else, while also offering rebalancing, model marketplace, and integration into leading CRM, planning, and risk analysis tools.  It's an entirely open-architecture product in a space that frankly continues to be dominated by legacy closed-end products.  For RIAs in particular, CircleBlack is a solution that is quick to deploy and easy to use.  As more and more advisors leave large broker-dealers to become independents, it is serving a market that is poised to only continue to grow with a need for the best technology to support their clients."

"John was a powerful influence in driving the ongoing disruption of the wealth management space," said Marty Beaulieu, CircleBlack Director and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the leading technology-enabled investment firm Artivest, Inc. "We look forward to further executing on his vision and expanding CircleBlack's industry footprint.  The Board is confident that Alex's deep industry knowledge and proven experience leading and building high-growth fintech companies will drive CircleBlack and its talented team forward, delivering the continuous problem-solving innovation sought by our current clients.  We are thrilled by Alex's appointment as CircleBlack's CEO and President, as well as the substantial investment and strong endorsement of Long Arc Capital, and look forward to great things for the Company."

About Long Arc Capital

Long Arc Capital LP is a private equity firm based in New York City dedicated to building and scaling breakthrough technology and technology-enabled businesses.  Founded in 2016, Long Arc has six Partners collectively with over 150 years of investing and operating experience.  The firm has a philosophy of "active ownership", partnering with entrepreneurs and management teams by bringing to bear a comprehensive suite of resources that advance the human capital, strategic, product development, technology and financial strengths of its portfolio companies, successfully driving their profitable growth.  For more information about Long Arc Capital, visit https://www.longarc.com/.

About CircleBlack

CircleBlack, Inc. provides financial advisors with technology that aggregates data, integrates other financial applications seamlessly, provides actionable intelligence about client portfolios and helps advisors better manage clients' wealth which helps grow and deepen advisor-client relationships.  CircleBlack provides a leading platform built for the digital age, with a web-based and mobile application that can be taken anywhere and accessed anytime.  CircleBlack's solution leverages three pending patents that help sustain the Company's unique competitive advantages.  CircleBlack believes in making wealth management better, for both the investor and the advisor. For more information about CircleBlack, visit https://www.circleblack.com.

CONTACT:    
James Doyle
JConnelly 
973.944-8105 
[email protected]

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SOURCE CircleBlack