The chief of a Midwestern ETF strategist with about $8.9 billion in AUM is expanding his C-suite by two.

Ryan Beach, CEO of CLS Investments [profile], confirms that Chad Boyer recently joined the Omaha, Nebraska-based firm as chief technology officer and that Nick Arreola will join soon as chief behavioral scientist. Both positions are newly created and will report to Beach.

Since January 2017, Boyer has served as applications architect and founder of NEWA Enterprises, also in the Omaha area. Arreola serves as director of data engineering at Creighton University, a Jesuit Catholic school in the Omaha area.

"We've made a pretty big push in the behavioral finance area recently," Beach tells MFWire.

CLS already has "a great reputation in the marketplace" for managing financial risk, Beach says, and he sees a lot of value in "managing behavioral and psychological risk," too.

On the technology side, CLS has long relied on its sister company, Orion Advisor Services; Orion and CLS are both part of private-equity-backed NorthStar Financial Services Group, and they're based in the same building in Omaha.

"We never really had the need to have our own CTO," Beach says. "Given their and our growth, it made sense to invest."

Boyer has spent a year at NEWA. Prior to that he worked at Farm Credit Services of America for five years in a variety of roles, and before that at Securities America and none other than Orion Advisor Services.

Arreola, a three-time alumnus of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has worked at Creighton for two years. He previously worked at his alma mater, at Alorica, at Oriental Trading Company, and at the U.S. Strategic Command's Global Innovation and Strategy Center.

CLS now has about 90 employees, mostly in its home base in Omaha. The ETF strategist also offers its own mutual fund family, the AdvisorOne Funds. And in October CLS unveiled Smart ETF Models, a five-model series with zero overlay fee where investors only pay the expense ratios on the underlying ETFs (and the ETF providers, in turn, share part of their revenue with CLS). 

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