Here’s your Riskalyze Fintech Five for November, a focused take on what we think are the last five best stories in wealth management technology.
Our first story comes to you through tax planning startup Holistiplan and LPL, the largest independent broker-dealer.
Holistiplan has joined LPL’s Vendor Affinity Program, giving it access to the 20,000 advisors who call LPL home.
As financial planning has increasingly been at the center of attention for advisers, the sub-competence of tax planning has also been put in the spotlight. Holistiplan’s software doesn’t turn advisors into tax pros overnight, but it does make the process of reviewing a tax return and identifying potential advice opportunities much easier.
For planning-focused LPL advisors who are mindful of the multiple ways they can add value to their client relationships, this is big news.
In more software news, advisor marketing platform Snappy Kraken has announced that it has expanded its text messaging platform, Convos, to broker-dealers.
Originally released only for RIAs, Convos allows advisors to send text messages to individual clients or groups of clients as yet another way to stay in touch and communicate with clients on their own terms.
And I’m not just covering this story as a proud Snappy board member – for independent brokers/dealers to approve and add this kind of technology is big news. One of the reasons advisers cite for breaking away to the RIA channel is the ability to make their own technology choices. By making cutting-edge technology more readily available, independent broker/dealers are expanding their competitive edge when it comes to keeping advisors in the tent.
Next up, fresh from the appointment of Lori Hardwick as Chairman, Docupace has announced its new product line RIA Productivity Suite. This toolkit is designed to remove barriers around client onboarding, integrating systems and lowering the administrative costs faced by RIAs.
Essentially, what David Knoch and his team have done is take back office productivity tools only available to large enterprises and deliver them to the advisory firm and RIA market, in a unified solution at a much lower price point than it would cost to take on itself something of this size internally.
Docuspace has been leading the way in reducing these clunky operational processes for years now, and this announcement couldn’t be better timed as consulting firms head into the new year.
Another startup, Bento Engine, tackles a problem that has long confronted advisors: How do you educate your clients’ children and get them engaged in building wealth?
The Children and Wealth program will use event-based triggers to send appropriate financial content to clients, targeted specifically for the age of their children.
The content of the program was created by Susan Doty, director of the Center for Economic Education and Financial Literacy at the University of Texas at Tyler, and Mac Gardner, CEO of FinLit Tech, a financial literacy platform.
With somewhere around $70 trillion to be transferred from older to younger generations in the coming decades, the advisors who get ahead and establish themselves as trusted advisors for the whole family are the ones who will be best positioned to win.
And the final story – not just for today, but for the year! – is about Savvy Wealth. Savvy is an RIA that has built its own proprietary technology stack, and the firm has now achieved an unusual feat – raising $11 million in Series A venture capital funding.
It’s not too often that you see RIA firms develop their own technology, or raise venture capital funding, and for good reason: there aren’t easy roads to go down either.
Building unique technology that you vertically integrate and deliver right to consumers is a powerful path to value creation that has worked for some companies like Amazon, Uber, Doordash, but has been a dead end for others. Is this a powerful new way to extend the impact of good advice to more people? We can only hope. I’m sure a rising tide of advice will lift all boats.
So there you have it. Those are the five big stories in advisor fintech right now.
I hope that you and yours have an absolutely magical holiday season. When you check in at WealthManagement.com again, we bring you the first big stories of 2023.
