WEALTH MANAGEMENT SUPPORT

Four Eyes Financial

Changing the way compliance is done globally from Saint John

Four Eyes Financial CEO and cofounder Lori Weir

hen Lori Weir and her partner, Kendall McMenamon, set out in 2015 to establish a new venture to help investment advisors give timely, good advice to their clients that would meet increasingly complex regulations, the pair were certain about one thing: They would set up their fledgling firm—Four Eyes Financial—in their hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick, the home of Canada’s first charter bank.

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“No one expects Saint John to be a hotbed of wealth technology,” Four Eyes chief executive Weir says, adding, “but this is our home—it’s where we live, where our children attend school, and where we’ve built our network of connections. So why not build our company here?”

Almost a decade later, Weir is proud that all but three of her 59 employees live in New Brunswick. “Part of our recruiting process is hiring people who are interested in building the community,” she says. “This not only helps us retain our amazing employees; it also creates a level of commitment that’s unmatched.”

The idea behind Four Eyes was to make it easier for individual investors to make investment choices, confident that they had accurate information and that financial advisors could offer that advice knowing they were meeting the latest regulations. “When making important decisions about your finances, you should have a second set of eyes,” Weir says of the firm’s name.

After years working as a consultant within the wealth industry, Weir found that too many relied on outdated information, so that investors were often making decisions based on months-old information, whether that was risk ratings or product data. Regulations were changing rapidly, too, increasing compliance complexity and costs. “There was a lot of opportunity to let the sunshine in, so we set out to build a platform to enable that,” she says.

Canada seemed like a great home base, not least because its financial regulations were like those in the United States, the UK, and Australia. Globally, as regulations were added following the 2008–’09 global financial crisis, many wealth management firms were faced with having to make the most significant compliance and technology upgrades in more than six decades. Four Eyes made some decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight, were absolutely inspired. They built a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform on Amazon Web Services and leveraged machine learning and artificial intelligence to ensure clients received “the right information” with their data-first, end-to-end compliance solution.

Headquarters: Saint John, New Brunswick
Founded: 2015
No. of employees: 59+
Website: foureyes.financial

“When we started, I couldn’t understand why no one was doing this. People have been talking about AI since the 1940s, so it’s not like we were doing anything that wasn’t already conceived of. It’s just that we were actually doing it. We were the first cloud-based Canadian wealth-tech software company. That didn’t give us a secret sauce, but it certainly helped.”

Four Eyes Financial software now helps wealth firms overcome three discrete challenges: ensuring the suitability of investments, helping back offices open and manage client accounts, and creating an information-sharing and communication platform for advisors to head office and to their clients.

Building a software service that would appeal to investment and wealth management firms globally meant that Weir could build her firm anywhere. That meant at home, in New Brunswick, among her Atlantic Canada community. “Grit, a commitment to excellence, and not being afraid of hard work are the things that set us apart,” she says.