Here’s your Riskalyze Fintech Five for February, a focused take on what we think are the last five best stories in wealth management technology.
FNZ acquires YieldX
Our first story is FNZ’s acquisition of fast-growing digital fixed income platform YieldX.
This acquisition provides FNZ with a powerful set of tools for building, optimizing and managing fixed income portfolios, while bringing with it a deep bench of wealth management talent. As part of the acquisition, YieldX CEO Adam Green will join FNZ as Managing Director of Asset Management, and YieldX President Steve Gross will become Head of Asset Management Strategy.
With FNZ’s new global partnership with Envestnet, their acquisition of State Street’s US custody business, and now YieldX’s fixed income technology, this is a very interesting company to watch.
Asset-Map collaborates with Cetera
In fantastic news for our friends and partners at both Asset-Map and Cetera, the two companies have announced an agreement to open Asset-Map’s visual mapping tool to Cetera’s 8,000 advisors (Asset-Map also just announced $6 million in funding too! ). And by the way – breaking news – Cetera just bought Securian’s wealth management business, so get over 9,000 advisors!
Many congratulations to Cetera CEO Adam Antoniades, who has been at the forefront of making the firm one of the industry’s most prolific acquirers, and a focused partner for major technology firms.
Elements raises $5 million in funding from Flyover Capital
Elements, the next-generation financial monitoring and planning software, announced a $5 million funding round. The round was led by Flyover Capital, the venture capital firm closely associated with prolific wealth management entrepreneur Marty Bicknell, and a backer of other wealth technology firms such as Snappy Kraken.
Elements now counts over 260 firms as customers, and this new capital brings the company’s total funding to more than $9 million.
ChatGPT as your financial advisor?
Artificial intelligence has taken the Internet by storm in recent weeks as OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a natural language conversational chatbot that is trained on a wide range of Internet knowledge and is capable of creatively expressing a variety of knowledge.
While some are calling ChatGPT a potential Google killer, others have begun to speculate whether it could put financial advisors out of business. But fear not – despite a decade or two of the financial advisory industry telling itself that portfolio construction is commoditized, when ChatGPT was recently asked to build one, it replied that it was impossible due to too many unpredictable variables.
I think smart people have a long future in financial advice for some time to come.
Gavin, you will be missed
Today’s final story will end this Fintech 5 on a somber note. Longtime president of Wealth Consulting Partners and advisor technology expert, Gavin Spitzner, died on January 30 after a courageous battle with cancer.
The news of his diagnosis shocked the profession last summer and we all had such high hopes for Gavin’s complete and full recovery. Our profession will not soon forget his kindness, his intelligence and the courage with which he fought this disease.
I hope his wife and children know what a profound impact he made on so many people in our profession. May his memory be a blessing to us all.
