Here’s your RiskLise Fintech Five for February, focusing on what we think are the top five recent stories in wealth management technology.
1. AdvisorEngine beats Junxure
Our first story of this month is to say goodbye to the old and say hello to the new.
You could say that AdvisorEngine has arrived at a turning point for one of its acquisitions… and that includes leaving. Junxure behind. Four years after they acquired the company, they completed their overhaul and relaunched the product as AdvisorEngine CRM.
The update includes a complete visual upgrade, a much faster overall experience, and new features you’d expect from a modern CRM-like prospecting tool.
CRM is a mature market for consultants, however, companies such as Redtail and Wealthbox have overtaken Junxure in terms of market share over the past several years. This relaunch has been a long time coming; Let’s see if consultants will once again adopt the AdvisorEngine CRM and position it to reclaim a spot as one of the top advisory CRMs.
2. $1.4 billion trust vote in human advice
UBS has acquired automated advice platform Wealthfront and its assets for $27 billion.
Wealthfront now looks like a customer acquisition machine for UBS’s wealth management business. The firm is going to use Wealthfront as a profitable way to develop and build relationships with early-stage investors, hoping to convert many of them to UBS Financial Advice when they reach scale. Is.
It’s a good strategy, and sees UBS responding to similar offers from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and others. But ultimately, it is a vote of confidence of $1.4 billion in the value of humanitarian advice.
And this bodes well for every financial advisor in our profession – from wirehouse and national/regional firms, from independent or insurance BD affiliates, to boutique independents, all the way to scalping venture RIAs.
3. Assetmark Embraces Digital Marketing
Assetmark has launched two new tools that help advisors find and market prospects.
WealthBuilder Prospecting is designed to shuttle interested leads to its more than 8,500 consultants, while Marketing Advantage brings a content library and automated marketing platform.
These new features are a clear sign that CEO Natalie Wolfsen is investing in helping advisors build on top of classic growth methods like referrals and word of mouth to adopt digital prospecting to grow their businesses.
Marketing Advantage is built on the FMG Suite platform, which recently engaged in creating customized solutions for TAMP, RIA aggregators and others, which has its own automated marketing platform Foundation.
These tools are a good start, but it’s not enough for consultants to simply lay out the material for themselves; Marketing communications should be unique, compelling and above all relevant to each firm’s target customers.
It is difficult to scale this up but the most successful advisors will be those who take Assetmark’s tools as the launching point rather than the end point.
4. Investnet Invests in Automated Advice – Again
Envestnet has acquired a stake in Sallie Krawcheck’s Ellevest platform. The women-focused investment service has grown slowly since its founding in 2014, and now manages more than $1 billion in assets.
This is not the first time that Envestnet has shown an appetite for exploring the automated advice market, it has already invested in or acquired Upside in 2015 and Harvest Savings in 2021.
It is clear that Envestnet, led by CEO Bill Krieger, is looking for opportunities everywhere to expand its reach, expand its influence, and leverage emerging technologies that strengthen its ability to provide state-of-the-art solutions to over 100,000 advisors. Will do on its platform.
Will Envestnet eventually want more and take a bigger stake, or even acquire Elvest outright? We will all be watching what happens next.
5. Massive Expansion of Financial Advice Makes Huge Money
In case you missed this massive private equity announcement: Face Wealth just raised a monster $100 million dollar Series C round.
The firm is a lucrative play to create a vertically-integrated financial planning-focused firm that goes straight to the consumer for subscription flat fee advice and planning.
It again illustrates the art of digital marketing and the possible with the potential to grow businesses. To take advantage of this trend the average financial advisor needs to neither budget nor factor the resulting scale of money.
One of the most exciting parts of watching the Facet story take shape is how they are doing far less competition for clients with existing advisors, and instead, are widely expanding access to financial advice for new clients. There are those who have never experienced it before. Well done, aspect money.
