Barbara J. Parshall.LinkedIn

Wealth management · FinTech · Technology

Barbara J.
Parshall

Building businesses, relationships and technology at the intersection of wealth management and innovation.

I’ve spent my career helping financial-services businesses grow—inside leading wealth-management and custody organizations, as a technology entrepreneur, and working with emerging FinTech and AI companies.

Today, I bring those perspectives together to help organizations navigate growth, technology and transformation.

Explore my experienceConnect on LinkedIn
Barbara J. Parshall in a black blazer
Institutional perspective.
Entrepreneurial experience.
20+

Years in financial services
& technology

$50B+

Custody business led
at Pershing

$1.5B+

Financing supported through
client strategies

4

Leading institutional
financial firms

Fidelity InvestmentsCharles SchwabBNY Mellon PershingBear Stearns

A different perspective

I’ve worked on both sides of transformation.

I spent more than 15 years in senior sales, relationship management and leadership roles across the RIA and wealth-management ecosystem, including Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab Institutional, BNY Mellon Pershing and Bear Stearns.

My work centered on growing businesses: building executive relationships, leading teams, expanding custody platforms, helping advisors build stronger firms, and bringing together technology, investment and business solutions to solve complex client needs.

Then I changed sides of the table.

I co-founded and led an enterprise SaaS company from concept through product development, fundraising, commercialization and post-revenue operations. Building technology is difficult. Getting organizations to adopt it—and translating innovation into business value—is often even harder.

Today, my perspective combines both worlds. I understand the complexity, risk and organizational realities of large financial institutions. I also understand the speed, ambiguity and creativity required to build something new.

“The most interesting opportunities often sit between what established organizations already do well and what technology now makes possible.”

Experience

A career built around growth.

01

Institutional leadership

Growing businesses inside the industry’s leading financial institutions.

Across more than 15 years in RIA custody and wealth management, I built businesses, led sales and relationship-management teams, developed C-suite relationships and helped independent firms navigate technology, custody, investment solutions and growth.

Fidelity Institutional Clearing & Custody

Led Fidelity’s Southwest RIA business with responsibility for growth, new business, strategic relationships, retention and risk. Built and led cross-functional teams and helped transform an underperforming region into a top-performing organization.

Earlier Fidelity tenure: Jun 1996 – Jul 2004

Previously spent eight years in Fidelity’s RIA business, including as Vice President of Sales, serving strategic RIAs, wealth managers and breakaway advisors throughout New England.

02

Entrepreneur

From advising businesses
to building one.

BAARB

Co-founder & CEO

Feb 2016 – Nov 2020

After years of helping financial institutions and advisory firms grow, I became an entrepreneur myself.

As co-founder and CEO of BAARB, I took an enterprise SaaS business from idea through MVP, fundraising, commercialization and post-revenue operations.

I led company strategy, product direction, fundraising, partnerships and enterprise sales while navigating the challenges familiar to every founder: finding product-market fit, winning enterprise customers and building with limited resources.

A firsthand understanding of what it takes to turn an idea into a business—and convince established organizations to adopt something new.
  1. Concept
  2. MVP
  3. Capital
  4. Enterprise sales
  5. Commercialization
03

FinTech + AI

Where financial-services experience meets emerging technology.

LAZR Creative

Co-founder, Managing Director, Lead Strategist

Dec 2020 – Present

Through LAZR Creative, I work with founders and leadership teams across FinTech, enterprise software and AI on commercialization, positioning, go-to-market strategy and business growth.

My work includes clarifying complex propositions, strengthening enterprise sales narratives, developing strategic partnerships and communicating emerging technologies to executives and investors.

More recently, that work has increasingly focused on AI and agentic AI in regulated financial-services environments—particularly the challenge of moving beyond experimentation and into production where technology can generate measurable business value.

100+

Startups and growth
companies supported

$1.5B+

Equity and debt financing supported
through client strategies

The intersection

Three perspectives.
One career.

01

Financial services

  • RIA & wealth management
  • Custody & clearing
  • Advisor platforms
  • Practice management
  • Institutional relationships
  • Risk & regulation
02

Commercial leadership

  • Enterprise sales
  • Business development
  • Strategic partnerships
  • Relationship management
  • Team leadership
  • Go-to-market strategy
03

Technology & innovation

  • FinTech / WealthTech
  • Enterprise SaaS
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Agentic AI
  • Technology commercialization
  • Digital transformation

The intersection is where I do my best work.

What I bring

Strategy matters.
Execution creates value.

01

Build trusted relationships.

Complex financial-services businesses run on trust. I’ve spent my career building relationships with executives, advisors, partners and teams—and translating those relationships into long-term business growth.

02

Make complexity understandable.

Whether the subject is custody infrastructure, investment technology or AI, I enjoy taking something complicated and finding the story that makes its business value clear.

03

Connect strategy to execution.

I’m most energized by opportunities where the answer isn’t obvious—new businesses, underperforming organizations, emerging technologies and markets undergoing change.

04

Bring people together.

The most consequential initiatives rarely belong to one department. My career has required aligning sales, product, technology, operations, marketing, legal, risk and executive leadership around common outcomes.

Selected career highlights

A few things I’m proud of.

  1. Transformed underperforming regional businesses at both Fidelity and Schwab into stronger-performing organizations.

  2. Led national relationship management for a $50B+ custody business serving RIAs and institutional wealth managers.

  3. Built an RIA custody presence across 14 western states for Bear Stearns.

  4. Earned Fidelity President’s Club recognition for three years, consistently exceeding sales expectations.

  5. Built an enterprise technology company from concept through commercialization.

  6. Helped founders and leadership teams develop strategies supporting more than $1.5B in equity and debt financing.

Perspective

What I’m
thinking about.

Financial services is entering one of its more interesting periods of change. Technology is making things possible that weren’t practical even a few years ago—but technology alone rarely creates transformation.

I’m particularly interested in the questions that sit between innovation and execution.

01

AI beyond the pilot

How financial institutions move from experimenting with AI to deploying it responsibly at enterprise scale.

02

The changing wealth-management infrastructure

How private markets, data, technology and new operating models are reshaping the platforms behind modern advice.

03

Building technology people actually adopt

Why commercialization, workflow and organizational change can matter as much as the technology itself.

Follow my perspective on LinkedIn

Beyond work

Curiosity
travels well.

Outside of work, I’m an enthusiastic traveler and scuba diver.

Some of my favorite experiences have involved exploring parts of the world that require a little more effort to reach—often from a small boat somewhere very far from home.

Travel and diving satisfy the same curiosity that has shaped much of my career: I like learning how unfamiliar environments work, meeting interesting people and discovering what’s beneath the surface.

Let’s connect

The next chapter
should be interesting.

I’m always interested in meeting thoughtful people building, transforming or growing businesses across wealth management, financial services and technology.

Connect on LinkedInEmail Barbara