Smartleaf
Boston, MassachusettsFounded in 1999, Smartleaf was built on the conviction that personalized, tax-optimized financial care — once the exclusive preserve of the ultra-wealthy — should be available to every investor. The company's software automates portfolio management at scale, delivering a level of customization and tax management that would be impossible to achieve by hand.
The technology was genuinely transformative. Advisors, freed from the daily mechanics of portfolio management, could spend more time with their clients. Firms could extend high-quality, personalized care to people who had never had access to it before. But like many companies built around deep technical capability, Smartleaf described what it did in the language of the industry, not in terms of the human lives it changed.
Beginning shortly after the company’s founding, I worked with Smartleaf across two decades. I improved the interaction design of the product, prototyping and implementing new features and refining existing ones to make it more powerful and easier to use for the advisors who relied on it daily. And I refined the company’s brand and marketing, expressing what the technology meant for people in clear, human terms.
Smartleaf's platform is used by more than 3,500 advisors across 450,000 accounts to manage over $90 billion in assets worldwide — a level of personalized care that, a generation ago, would have been unimaginable.
