Robert Clare

For decades, the good stuff in wealth management - the credit lines, the securities-backed loans, the bespoke mortgages - lived behind the velvet rope of the wirehouses and private banks. If you advised clients independently, you watched it from the outside.

Robert Clare's company, Fispoke, exists to tear down that rope. It is not a bank. It is not a lender. It is the connective tissue - the plumbing - that lets an independent advisor offer cash management, credit, securities-based loans and mortgages under their own brand, inside the workflow they already use, without making clients change custodian.

Clare co-founded the company in 2023 with technologist Nathan Berk. The product is deliberately unglamorous: a white-labeled layer that snaps banking partners into an advisor's daily routine. The ambition behind it is not. Clare wants the independent channel - the RIAs and broker-dealers competing against the giants - to wield the same lending firepower as a Goldman or a Merrill.

Read the description twice and the cleverness sinks in. Fispoke isn't trying to out-bank the banks. It's trying to make the bank invisible - a utility humming behind the advisor's brand, so the client never has to leave the relationship they already trust to get the loan, the line of credit, or the high-yield account they want.

To understand why Fispoke exists, picture two advisors with identical clients. One works at a wirehouse - a big, vertically integrated firm. When their client needs to borrow against a portfolio rather than sell it, the advisor reaches for an in-house securities-based loan and books it in an afternoon. The other advisor is independent. Same client, same need, and yet the second advisor has historically had to send that business away, or watch the client wander off to a bank that then owns the relationship.

That asymmetry is the whole game. Independent advisors have won the war for assets - clients increasingly prefer fee-based, fiduciary advice - but they have been fighting it with one hand tied behind their back. They could manage money beautifully and still lose the client the moment a banking need surfaced.

Clare's read is that this gap is not a quirk. It is a structural hole worth a great deal of money, and it has stayed open mainly because building the connective infrastructure is tedious, regulated, relationship-heavy work. Exactly the kind of work a career operator finds interesting rather than off-putting.

Before Fispoke, Clare made a living understanding how banks actually work from the inside. He held a string of Chief Operating Officer roles at Bank of America, the kind of jobs where you learn which gears grind and which ones are missing entirely.

At Cognizant he ran a strategic business unit as a Managing Partner. In 2020 he joined consultancy JDX as Head of U.S. Consulting Services Sales, covering digital payments, consumer banking, wealth and investment management, and risk. The through-line across all of it: the machinery of modern finance, and where it leaves people out.

Somewhere in that long apprenticeship, a pattern hardened into a conviction. The independent advisor channel was booming, but it was being served day-old banking. Clare stopped diagnosing the gap for clients and decided to close it himself.

There's a particular kind of founder produced by long years inside big institutions. They are rarely the ones chasing the loudest trend. They are the ones who watched a specific, expensive inefficiency repeat itself across dozens of engagements until they could no longer not build the fix. Clare's resume - digital payments, consumer banking, wealth and investment management, risk, mergers and acquisitions - reads like a guided tour of exactly the seams where Fispoke now stitches.

He brought the playbook of a banker, the toolkit of a consultant, and - in a nice touch - kept it partly a family affair. Brendan Clare works on Fispoke's infrastructure, security and development engineering.

Plenty of fintech founders promise to “democratize” something. Most are outsiders guessing at an industry. Clare is the opposite - a man who ran operations inside the very institutions he is now routing around. He knows exactly which doors were locked, because he used to hold the keys.

That insider's eye shows up in the product choices. No new custodian. No new login. Fispoke embeds lending where advisors already work, rather than asking a busy practice to rip up its tooling. It is a small idea with a large consequence: adoption that doesn't require a leap of faith.

It is also a discipline most startups lack. The temptation in fintech is always to build the shiny new destination and then beg everyone to move there. Clare's instinct runs the other way - meet the advisor inside the software they already open every morning, and make the new capability feel like it was always supposed to be there. Boring, in the best sense. Boring is what gets used.

And the framing is fiduciary, not flashy. Clare talks about “holistic” advice as something you build with infrastructure, not slogans - banking and lending stitched into the advisory relationship so the advisor can actually act on the whole client picture.

There is one more tell, and it's the most telling of all. When Clare assembled his board and advisory bench, he didn't reach for fintech celebrities. He reached for the people who built and ran the very private banks Fispoke competes with - a former co-founder of Goldman Sachs' Global Private Bank, a former president of Wells Fargo Advisors, senior bank operators. You don't recruit that bench to look impressive. You recruit it because those are the only people who know precisely where the bodies are buried, and how to route around them.