Crazy week for financial advisers, right?
Interest rates are rising, inflation is still, ahem, inflating, the mortgage market is doing something quite honestly beyond what this humble renter understands, and now the markets are taking a sharp, red dive. The fintech world was a bit quieter than usual — a lot of companies may be gearing up for a glut of conferences coming in October — but I’m sure financial advisers have plenty else on their minds these days.
I’ve written before about how prolonged difficulties in the economy will test many adviser fintechs as they’ve never been tested before. Not only is funding tighter, but now is the time for many to prove that they can actually do the things they’ve sold to advisers. Will clients stick to their plan? Did that risk assessment tool correctly gauge how much loss a client can handle?
We will see. And if you like to share how your tech stack is helping or hurting your business, please send me an email or a tweet.
In the meantime, here are some of the adviser fintech news updates you may have missed this week.
Fidelity’s custody business for financial advisers has a new integration with customer relationship management giant Salesforce to link client financial accounts within Salesforce to their Fidelity accounts on Wealthscape. Advisers access account information and initiate actions directly within Salesforce. The integration was built on Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud and is currently being piloted with RIAs and family offices for a general launch in early 2023.
Many firms choose a CRM to serve as the hub of their technology stack, so it makes sense that Fidelity wants to integrate with the biggest name on the market. But what’s interesting here is that this is about making Fidelity accounts and workflows available on Salesforce, rather than bringing Salesforce capabilities over to Wealthscape. Perhaps the financial institution is realizing that a technology company can build a better digital experience?
Financial planning software RightCapital has a new tool called Blueprint to visualize and organize household financial data and goals. Advisers and clients can use Blueprint to identify missing items or changes in the household’s financial picture; add, update or delete financial inputs and see them automatically reflected in the financial plan; see which accounts are individually or jointly owned; and share visuals online for interactive discussions.
RightCapital showed some visualizations of the new layout, which include an easy-to-understand tree of accounts and a timeline of goals. RightCapital is one of the largest financial planning fintechs that hasn't yet been acquired by an asset management firm, something that's appealing to many independent advisers.
To help media companies increase diversity in their coverage, Choir, the company launched by Sonya Dreizler and Liv Gagnon, has a new feature called Voices: Search. Voices aims to be a directory of people of color, women and nonbinary professionals working in wealth management that journalists can use to find expert voices in their stories. The company has also added Envestnet executive Dani Fava to its board of directors.
Reporters are always trying to find new voices to highlight in our stories — not to tick diversity boxes, but to provide a greater range of viewpoints on subjects that matter to our readers. But it’s more difficult than many realize to find these voices, and I, for one, welcome any tool that makes my job easier and my stories more interesting. It’s also interesting to see that Choir, which is best known for its conference diversity certification (the company worked with Future Proof to make it one of the most diverse events in wealth management history), now branching into fintech.
Performance optimization fintech Practifi has a new data visualization tool called Propel for wealth management institutions, broker-dealers and registered investment advisers. Propel includes a data processing platform that organizes and snapshots Practifi’s data model, and a dashboard to turn that data into actionable insights for financial advisers.
You’ve probably heard before that “data is the new oil,” but just like oil, data is pretty useless unless you can use it to power something. “Actionable insights” is the name of the game now, and just about everyone across fintech is trying to find ways to turn the insane amounts of data available into things that actually help financial advisers.
Performance reporting fintech AssetBook released a new product, Valian, to give advisers detailed views of managed and held-away accounts. Valian is available via AssetBook’s portfolio management and reporting suite, Pulse.
The industry is packed with financial portals and data aggregations, and AssetBook seems to understand this. The company hoping it can win business with some cutting-edge features like biometric ID, video meeting capabilities and collaborative to-do lists. But with nearly everyone competing to be the core platform for client engagement, it remains to be seen whether Valian is enough to gain marketshare from other players.
Adviser fintech Skience will now bundle its products into three different tiers — Edge, Elite and Elite Plus — to serve differently sized advisory firms. All three tiers include CRM, digital account opening, risk profiling, compliance auditing and integrations with custodians, financial planning software and other advisor fintechs. Elite includes custom forms mapping and data consolidation feeds, while Elite Plus offers tools for adviser transitions and digital document storage.
Pricing tiers like this are ubiquitous now in consumer software, and it makes a lot of sense for advisory firms as well. Especially under current market conditions, advisers are looking at tech budgets as an area where they can cut back on spending, and no one wants to spend money on features they don’t need.
Venn, a portfolio analytics software from Two Sigma, has partnered with Coin Metrics to bring aboard data about cryptocurrency returns. Coin Metrics calculates data on more than 475 digital assets in both U.S. dollars and euros, and the integration with Venn aims to help advisers and institutional investors incorporate crypto into a multi-asset portfolio.
Have you seen the digital asset markets lately? Not sure people want to be reminded of their bitcoin returns right now, and amid the broader market sell-off, not sure how many advisers are currently looking to spend their budgets on new crypto fintech.
Elements, which describes itself as a mobile-first financial monitoring platform, has revamped its one-page financial plans. The fintech uses 12 financial “vital signs,” each a key part of personal finance, to make financial planning more relatable to investors regardless of their net worth.
Elements doesn’t say what exactly is new or different about its “fresh approach” to one-page financial plans or how this will start to attract financial advisers if the previous approach wasn’t working. I would just recommend ditching the “OPP” acronym. If you’re familiar with the hip-hop group Naughty By Nature, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, I’ll let you Google it on your own.
Tiger Global has led a $145 million Series A funding round in Opto Investments, a fintech startup aiming to help financial advisers invest in private markets. The company says it has partnered with 80 RIAs and will use the funding to grow its business, add to its team and secure more investment opportunities.
Even as venture capital investments in technology are down across the board, it's interesting to see a startup that had been operating in stealth secure such a large bag of funding. I’m just wondering how many more alternative investing platforms the industry really needs.
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