Ken Golding, a technology pioneer built for registered investment advisors, died Sunday night. He is 62 years old.
Golding co-founded the venerable Junxure customer relationship management software with his longtime friend and collaborator Greg Friedman. The first iteration of the software was launched in 1994 to help Friedman streamline the operations of his growing RIA company.
The two later formed a CRM software company. In 2001, development of software for the consulting market continued, with Friedman as president and Golding as lead developer for the company (the business itself was later renamed Junxure).
The software company was spun out of Friedman’s consulting firm (then known as Friedman and Associates). It was later renamed Private Ocean and was acquired by Wealthspire in 2021.
The software was created specifically to meet the needs of growing RIA firms, and Friedman believed it was unavailable to independent financial advisors when it was created in the 1990s.
By the time version 7 of the application was released in February 2008, more than 6,000 consultants and 1,100 RIA firms had become users of the popular software.in 2012 financial plan and Investment information In their survey of thousands of consultants, the company’s CRM market share was 14 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Junxure has proven popular not only with consultants but also with third-party technology providers, gaining literally hundreds of integrations, including every major custodian and many other ISVs.
The software also changed ownership more than once, eventually being acquired by AdvisorEngine in 2018, which in turn was acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2020. Rebuilt and redesigned, AdvisorEngine retired as a Junxure-branded application in January 2022 after nearly 30 years in operation as a fully cloud-based technology.
Among other contributions, Golding was the founding principal of Your Silver Bullet LLC in 2007, a grassroots organization that aims to bring data standards to the consulting technology industry and support integration among its participants.
After the sale of Junxure was completed, Golding continued to serve as a technical advisor to the software for several years. In recent years he has devoted more of his time to his real estate investor interests and in 2015 he became a realtor. He also works on the development of real estate specific software.