Here’s your Riskalyze Fintech Five for June, a focused version of what we believe are the last five best stories in asset management technology.
Our first story today is about celebrating innovation in wealth management. That’s right, we’re talking about the recently announced 2022 nominees for Wealthies, WealthManagement.com’s annual awards recognizing leaders and organizations making waves in fintech.
This year, 225 different organizations were selected as finalists, including 92 companies recognized for outstanding achievements across several categories.
Leading with the most nominations were Orion, Carson Group, TIFIN and Riskalyze – What a great opportunity to celebrate and recognize great innovation in our room.
The winners will be announced at the September 8 award ceremony in New York City.
Next up is a big announcement from Envestnet. The technology company will streamline the organization in the coming months, with President and former Tamarac chief Stuart DePina resigning. Three new units will form the core structure of the company in the future: Solutions, Data and Analytics and WealthTech.
Dana D’Auria becomes CEO of Envestnet Solutions, which has the core Envestnet platform for broker-dealers and their many TAMP offerings; Farouk Ferchichi will lead Data and Analytics; and Tony Leal becomes head of Envestnet Wealthtech, which brings Tamarac under his responsibility. Tom Sipp will be the EVP for Business Lines and tie it all together under CEO Bill Crager.
Congratulations to each of these great leaders – the industry is excited to see the impact of these major changes in the coming months.
One of the biggest stories that rocked the fintech sphere so far this year was Orion’s acquisition of industrial giant Redtail. And now the integration is officially underway.
According to last year’s T3 technology survey, Redtail has 62% of the market in the CRM advisor area. With this news, Orion has massively increased its scope with insight into over $ 3 trillion in assets under administration. For the time being, Redtail will continue to operate as it has always done, as an independent subsidiary of Orion.
Speaking of Orion, Dr. Daniel Crosby, Orion’s Chief Behavioral Officer has always been a Twitter sensation for us, and now the world has the industry’s best kept secret.
June 8, he tweeted about the love of Diet Coke, which went viral and received over half a million likes and a shout from Elon Musk. Congratulations Daniel – we look forward to finding out which brand you are going to give millions of dollars in free advertising for next time.
And in other acquisition news, archival giant Smarsh continues its acquisition round with its latest deal: Telemessage – a mobile messaging, voice recording and archiving company that will help users keep track of text conversations.
Smarsh can now expand its communication and archiving capabilities to better serve customers across multiple industries, especially financial services. Now their employees’ monitoring features include popular apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and Telegram.
As the communication channels seem to be expanding endlessly, this is welcome news for advisors who want to offer customers the flexibility to use whichever platform they prefer – and it is news that drives home Smarsh’s status as a leader in archiving for fineserv.
Finally, we have the latest from Lumiant, an Australia-based council and client engagement platform that is just over 1 year old. Founded in February 2021, they have recently announced their plans to enter the US market.
Blake Wood takes the lead in the state, which joins Lumiant from his last role as SVP for Corporate Strategy at Envestnet.
Just in April, Lumiant was named the Fintech Global’s Wealth 100 List as one of the world’s most innovative wealthtech solutions. It will be interesting to see what this fresh, client-centric company will bring to the states, and how it will shape the fineserv community’s approach to building strong customer relationships.
