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Randy Watts is the co-founder and head of business and product development at Advis Network, a financial technology company he started in 2022 that provides a platform offering data and analytics solutions to the investment management and wealth management industries. The Advis Network platform focuses on developing customized analytics and data sets covering traditional and defined outcome unit investment trusts and defined outcome exchange-traded funds. Advis Network is the second company co-founded by Randy, having previously cofounded UIT Investing, the first dedicated unit investment trust analytics platform. UIT Investing was founded in 2017 and acquired by Nasdaq in 2019. Randy continued to operate the platform under the Nasdaq brand through 2021.
Randy has spent most of his career building financial technology companies and holding business development roles in investment management. He has deep expertise in both the management level and operational details of the investment management business with an emphasis on product distribution and product development. Prior to taking the entrepreneurial route, Randy held senior positions with investment management firms including Van Kampen Investments (now Invesco) and Matrix Capital Group and was one of the original members of Incapital Asset Management, the investment management division of Incapital LLC, a unit investment trust division he helped start in 2011 that was acquired by Nuveen Investments in 2016. Randy is a regular speaker at investment industry events, a trusted industry consultant, and an innovator of financial technology. He has been featured in many popular financial industry media outlets, including wealthmanagement.com, ThinkAdvisor, and Financial Advisor Magazine. Randy earned a BS in Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA in finance from the University of Illinois at Chicago.