CutterCast: State of CAP Data

Cindy Castellano is the CEO of Cutter Associates and has over 30 years of experience in the investment management industry. She formerly led Cutter Associates’ Client-Facing and Wealth practices, advising asset and wealth management firms on their sales and distribution, marketing, product development, consultant relations, client service, and client reporting. Cindy has conducted system searches for CRM, marketing automation, portals, pitchbooks/client presentation, content management, client reporting, client onboarding, and RFP systems. Prior to joining Cutter, Cindy served as Vice President and Head of Operations for a division of Guggenheim Investments, where she led mutual fund accounting and administration; institutional accounting, billing, and client reporting; SMA operations, performance reporting (GIPS); and fixed income performance, attribution, and risk reporting. As Vice President and Head of Equities, Cindy led the firm’s investment team and supervised equity trading activities.

Cindy also spent 10 years as a Senior Portfolio Manager and Research Analyst, managing over USD 500 million in AUM for mutual funds and VITs using social awareness (ESG), large cap growth, and mid-cap growth investment strategies. She developed the investment process, directed research analysts’ day-to-day efforts, and created the firm’s social criteria and proxy voting guidelines. Cindy, a Chartered Financial Analyst, holds a bachelor’s of business administration from Washburn University. 

Dru Holmquist has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. He has developed expertise across asset management distribution, investment management, and wealth management technology and operations. Dru is a successful senior leader with a deep track record of collaboration initiation, strategy design, team building, program management and process innovation. He has conducted strategy programs for CRM, client mastering, data architecture, client reporting, client onboarding, trading, research, and portfolio management capabilities. His knowledge spans the equities, fixed income, municipals, commodities, private debt, private equity, real estate, farmland, agri-business, and timber management sectors, as well as the following vehicle types: Mutual Funds, Closed-end Funds, ETFs, UCITs, UITs, Institutional Separate Accounts, SMAs (traditional, dual contract and models), LPs, 529 Plans and REITs.

Prior to joining Cutter Associates, Dru served as Managing Director of Technology for Nuveen Advisory Services, the business organization responsible for delivering the investment and asset management expertise of Nuveen. Dru was responsible for all business applications and technology that supported the Sales, Client Service, Marketing, Product and Fund Administration business teams. He oversaw the deployment of Salesforce as a CRM application, that unified multiple investment manager affiliates by redesigning the lead generation process, sales pipeline stages, sales reporting, distribution analytics, marketing analytics, and client engagement model. In addition, Dru implemented a product and account master, and initiated the business case to begin a client master effort. He was the technology leader that owned the business transformation efforts for the advisory services organization.

Gina McCafferty has 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. She served at Cutter from 1999 to 2011 as Principal and Managing Director of CutterResearch, and she was instrumental in growing that business. Gina returned to Cutter in 2017, and established and ran the company’s Wealth Management research division. In 2019, she was appointed to Head of Research, responsible for Asset Management and Wealth Management product development and delivery to over 200 member firms around the globe. Gina was previously at Investit Ltd., where she served for six years as head of the company’s research service. Prior to that, she held senior positions at DST International with product responsibility for their global accounting and performance measurement systems, and at SunGard as Vice President of Client Services for their securities trading products.

As the chief architect for Hartford Funds, Mark led a multi-year transformation to move the organization from a siloed environment with multiple legacy technologies to a simplified environment with best of breed SaaS solutions and platforms. As the head of application development, Mark continues to lead the application teams to meet evolving business needs.

Mark Elliott is Data Steward Manager for American Century Investments, an independent, privately controlled, pure-play asset management firm founded in 1958.

As Data Steward Manager, Mr. Elliott leads the Client Data Management team responsible for mastering client data supporting Intermediary and Global Institutional sales, business and marketing teams and will soon include mastering client data for direct consumer lines of business to support a 360-degree view of clients. This includes data stewards on his team who are responsible for gathering requirements from internal business and sales partners and profiling transaction, company, contact and plan data to be leveraged in our client data warehouse.

Prior to American Century Investments, Mr. Elliott worked for Argus, where he managed a team of specialists maintaining prescription coverages for a leading health insurance company. Previously, he spent 20 years at SS&C, where he held various roles, including business analyst working with several financial services companies. He co­ authored a whitepaper articulating the need to develop a solution to help companies, which led to the product/ service known as SS&C SalesConnect. He also worked as a relationship manager for the firm.

A United States Navy veteran, Mr. Elliott completed extensive digital technology courses and an inaugural training for a newly developed sonar system. He also completed coursework through the University of Kansas and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

As the leader of American Century Investment’s Client Insights and Analysis team, John oversees all predictive modeling, customer segmentation modeling, and advanced analytical targeting that supports the sales and marketing efforts in intermediary, global institutional, and direct to consumer lines of business. Prior to joining American Century Investments in 2015, John led predictive modeling efforts and teams spanning higher education, nursing, allied health, retail, and restaurant industries. John has a Ph.D. in Industrial Organizational Psychology and Human Factors Psychology as well as master’s degrees in Industrial Organizational Psychology, and Counseling Psychology.