Welcome to a brand new monthly feature launched in collaboration with WealthManagement.com Called Fintech Five. It focuses on our take on the top five recent stories in wealth management technology. So, here are the top five that we looked at at Riskly for January 2022.
1. CAIS Went to Unicorn Status
We’ll kick things off with a unicorn—CAIS snagged a new $225M in a round funded by Apollo, Motive and Franklin Templeton, raising their valuation to over a billion.
CAIS is an alternative investment platform that has been making some great strides last year, including the hiring of Abby Salame as CMO.
CEO Matt Brown is on a mission to make Alt easily accessible to advisors, and this is a huge step forward in their growth.
2. Hershey Automates Video Reviews
Marketing consultants have been telling consultants to use more video content, while the compliance people working with those consultants are often less enthusiastic. This is because video content can often trigger the longest duration of compliance reviews. Hearsay is changing that with a new automated video compliance review tool that transcribes video and looks for images that may deserve special attention during review.
3. Victory plan begins to conquer plan
One of Naviplan’s original creators, Mark Evans, has returned to the planning technology world with a Canadian-based firm (as Naviplan originally was), now entering the US market.
And the planners out there know how competitive the market is for planning software. Evans is counting on what he calls an “intelligent assistant” to set it apart. Conquest will include all the goal and cash-based planning tools you’d expect, but then its software wants to take the next step and get advisors to create investment strategy suggestions to support financial planning.
Welcome to the States, Mark!
4. Redtail Opens Speak For All
RedTel, the purveyor of the popular CRM platform for consultants, is making its text messaging service – RedTel Speak – available for consulting firms that may not necessarily be using their CRM.
It is important for consultants to adapt to consumer communication preferences. And tools to automate text message marketing are cropping up, but what makes Redtail’s offering different is how easy it can make it easier for personal communication to connect with both prospects and customers.
5. Vanilla Adds Officers Who Are Anything But
Estate planning software Vanilla has added some key executives including Gene Farrell, who moves from Smartsheet to serve as CEO; Amjad Hussain, who joins Amazon Web Services to serve as CTO; and Robin Melnick, the new senior VP of revenue, joins Joe Adapper.
There’s a lot of innovation happening in the estate planning space, with former Risklys alumnus Matt Morris relaunching the Helios offering as EncoreEstate Planning, and Envestnet intensifying its efforts with Trusts and Estates Exchange.
It will be really interesting to see how it all pans out.
