Bridging the Gap in NextGen Communications with Anthony Pastore of UBS

The Modern CFO

In the world of wealth and asset management, and the private markets in general, there is a noticeable communication gap between generations.

The next generation of owners–people between the ages of 18 and 25–are prolific consumers of digital content, from Reddit threads to Spotify podcasts. For many businesses, that means adopting new technologies, broadening offerings, and finding modern ways to effectively serve clients.

In this in-person episode of The Modern CFO, host Andrew Seski visits with Anthony Pastore, Head of Broadcast Communications at UBS, to chat about what his firm is doing to bridge that generation gap in communicating and investing, the role that social media and video plays in staying relevant and ahead of the competition, and the importance of having a digital approach to maintaining the massive amount of wealth transferring to the next generation in the decade to come.

Show Links

• Check out UBS
• Follow UBS on LinkedIn
• Listen to UBS Trending on YouTube or your preferred podcast app
• Connect with Anthony Pastore on LinkedIn
• Check out Nth Round
• Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn

Transcript
Please note that the transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. The content in the podcast is not intended as investment advice, and is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only.

[00:00:00] Andrew Seski: I'm Andrew Seski and this is The Modern CFO Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Anthony Pastore, head of broadcasting at UBS. We're in New York. We're here together. It's a rare opportunity for me and I'm thrilled about the conversation that we're gonna have today. Anthony, thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:25] Anthony Pastore: Andrew, I'm honored to be here with you and it's very rare for me to be on the other side of the table of, podcast and video interviews. Usually, I'm the one asking the questions so I actually said to my team today as I was preparing to sit with you, I was like, I'm a little nervous. I'm not used to being interviewed. I'm usually the interviewer so I wouldn't be surprised if at some point I start turning the microphone to you and saying, "Andrew, I have a few questions for you as well" so hopefully, you're prepped for that.

[00:00:49] Andrew Seski: I'm happy to.

[00:00:51] Anthony Pastore: Anyway, I'm really happy to be with you. This is great.

[00:00:53] Andrew Seski: Excellent. Well, I think the beginning of our conversation should probably start around your early career and why we're talking today. There's a huge gap in the wealth management and asset management world between generations. We are all consuming media in a different way, which is why I'm glad to be using this medium. And I'd love to learn from you as the head of broadcasting at UBS to explain what some of the brightest minds in the world are doing to bridge that gap. So, we have a ton to cover and I hope that it's a useful lesson for a bunch of CFOs who also have to communicate across a bunch of different cohorts of people. Whether they're investors or they're your C-suite or they're part of your team, having strong communication flows in a really technical way or a technical area like finance is just invaluable when it comes to senior leadership so.

[00:01:44] Anthony Pastore: Yeah, I agree with that, by the way. And it's interesting because, and once we get into it, I'll talk more about it, but I think one of the interesting things about a job like what you and I do is we have to always be thinking, you know, five steps ahead of everybody else but it's really hard to do considering the competition in the media space. But what I think is interesting is we're talking about it, like I'm sitting in a wealth management firm at UBS and that's unique to our industry specifically — to have content like podcasts and virtual events and videos and internally for our employees and externally for anybody who wants to get a glimpse of what's going on and the thought leadership from this the UBS side. But, yeah. I know I'm going off on tangents here but I know you and I are both thinking similarly like what how much competition there isn't. How do you keep on top of it and stay relevant, especially for somebody who's sitting in a CFO seat?

[00:02:37] Andrew Seski: Right. And the CFO doesn't typically get called upon for many any of the — I always say on the podcast, if you want to hear the vision of the company, you go watch the Bloomberg interview with the CEO. If you want to hear how finance is actually, you know, a key role in how that innovation is created, you come back to the podcast and listen to The Modern CFO and you listen to people like Anthony who are able to share insights from, you know, unique people who have a lot of sway into how companies are financed. So, strategic finance can take forms and a lot of different ways. We were just laughing about how both of us found ourselves in this building but neither came from purely financial roles like at wealth management firms.

[00:03:20] Anthony Pastore: That's right. Yeah. And I guess that's a sort of a good segue. So and as you were asking, my background is pretty colorful. I kind of came up and I say this to all the younger people who start now. I'm in my late forties. I consider myself a true Gen X-er listening to grunge music because I was depressed and sad wearing my flannels in the nineties. But coming out of college, I went to school for I was a bit of a Renaissance man, as I always say. I studied theater, I studied business administration, and I also studied speech and communications. And my father looked at me and said, "What are you gonna do with that?" I said, "I don't know but I'll figure it out." And back in those days, you know, I was starting to look for full-time work in, say, 1997. It was the tech boom was just starting. Companies were hiring and, as we know with Gen X, there were fewer of us on the planet so there were a lot more jobs than there were people to fill them. So, I got a job working early days at Smith Barney. RIP Smith Barney. What a great firm and I still obviously work with a lot of people from those days who are now here at UBS and other firms. But Smith Barney hired me to work on a stock plan services desk, and I was helping Bank of America employees exercise stock options that they were granted by being full-time employees. And I learned a lot about the business but somewhere along the way, I met a woman who said, "You'd be really good for our radio station." I said, "You have a radio station here?" And she said, "We do." And it was called at the time "Radio FCN," which stand stood for Radio Financial Consultant Network — before we started calling them financial advisors. I interviewed and the my guy who the gentleman who became my boss for the next decade said to me, "Do you have any experience with talking about finance on any kind of a medium like this?" and it was only internal content just to the employees. I said, "No." I said, "But I have a theater background and I can talk about anything." He sai...