Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Eric Pinto, Founder & CEO of Brookwell, which helps financial services firms automate complex workflows, take control of their data, and accelerate advisor transitions.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I spent five years in enterprise automation, building RPA and workflow systems for Fortune 500 companies. My cofounder Alex Thibault brought me on to help build Brookwell, and it was a natural fit. Working exclusively with broker-dealers and RIAs, we learned a ton about the industry: their tech stacks, their pain points, where the real friction lives. We realized that pairing that knowledge with our experience modernizing infrastructure and building automations would be a great fit for firms that had been underserved for years. That’s what we do now: we help financial services firms automate complex workflows, take control of their data, and get through advisor transitions without the mess.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

The wealth management industry is badly fragmented. Independent broker-dealers and RIAs run on dozens of disconnected systems, and high-volume work like new accounts, transitions, and NIGO cleanup still gets done by hand. That’s the pain we solve: we build the cloud infrastructure, integrations, and automations that let firms grow without drowning in manual work. What gets me up in the morning is taking a process that used to eat hours out of someone’s week and making it just run on its own.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

Landing those first clients. Financial services runs on trust and relationships, and when you’re new, nobody knows your name yet. We overcame it the slow, honest way: doing great work for our early clients, showing up at industry events, and building a referral network one warm introduction at a time. You’ve got to earn your way into the room.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Consulting is still core to what we do, but we’re now building a SaaS platform that makes advisor transitions dramatically easier. It’s approaching beta. The vision is a business that pairs hands-on consulting with software that scales the same expertise to firms we could never reach one at a time.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

Find a problem you can obsess over. Every molecule in your body should be oriented toward solving it, and eventually you will.

Why Florida?

St. Pete and Tampa have quietly become real hubs for financial services, and our target customers are right here. The Bay area tech ecosystem is growing fast and it’s genuinely collaborative, which makes it a great place to build. The weather doesn’t hurt either.

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