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.
Some have referred to Envestnet as a financial services supermarket. Whatever you need, they have it.
Now they might just become Walmart Supercenter—Envestnet is once again stepping up to add more features, and this time it’s custody.
To do so, they are partnering with FNZ, a digital custodian bank based in New Zealand that recently acquired State Street’s US institutional custody business.
With the absorption of TD Ameritrade into Schwab, there is likely room for competition among managers, but as many already know, gaining traction is an uphill battle.
Envestnet may just have the user base and infrastructure to make it work. What advisers want from their custodians is more innovation, and rolling custodian right into the existing Envestnet suite of services can be a compelling proposition.
The biggest question I have is, how will this affect Envestnet’s relationship with existing custodians? Will it create new excitement? Will everyone continue to get along? It will be interesting for sure.
It’s always good to see friends team up, and it’s even better when it results in advisors accessing a constellation of marketing capabilities at the snap of a finger.
I’m talking, of course, about Orion’s newly acquired CRM, Redtail, which is launching a new offering called Redtail Campaigns, built on top of Snappy Kraken’s marketing automation engine.
Marketing is at its best when you can use data to inform your next communication. By embedding Snappy Kraken’s automated marketing campaigns into Redtail, advisors can gain a clear view of which leads are interacting with their content, allowing them to use workflows effectively.
This integration connects Snappy’s vast library of automated marketing campaigns with Redtail, allowing advisors to launch new campaigns to highly engaged prospects, all without leaving Redtail CRM.
As a board member of Snappy and a fan of what Orion and Redtail are doing with their CRM and asset platform, this new offering gets a big thumbs up from me.
Scam has a new storyline – when a 30-year-old multi-billionaire in dire need of a haircut claims to be giving away all his money while actually living in a penthouse in the Bahamas – runs out of the room screaming.
FTX is a name known to many outside of financial services thanks to their Super Bowl advertising, ubiquitous sponsorship of things like MLB umpire uniforms and the Miami Heat basketball arena.
And now FTX is how you spell FRAUD. Some have compared it to Lehman Brothers or Enron, but a far better analogy is MF Global, which former governor Jon Corzine bankrupted in 2011.
Here again we have an unethical manager who stole customer deposits and invested them in a massive gambling game to make money for himself. The wreckage could include close to $20 billion in customer assets, not to mention trust in the entire digital asset space.
Political giving shouldn’t get you off the hook. That’s what they build prisons for. I hope the prosecution has this scammer behind bars soon.
The trend towards personalized services is everywhere. You see it in your Netflix queue, Amazon’s suggested searches and even in investment portfolios.
Direct indexing has been a hot trend for several years among WealthTech vendors, TAMPs and others, and now Fidelity is jumping into the fray with the announcement of its Custom Separately Managed Accounts for institutional clients.
But while there has been a trend toward offering direct indexing, it’s still early days for most advisory firms to embrace the capability and extend it to clients—primarily because there are some serious client experiences like complex statements and super-long 1099s that not all customers want to sign up.
Will a custody-level offering from Fidelity bend that curve? We are watching closely.
It may not be certain that advisors will embrace direct indexing, but one thing that is certain is that busy advisors need help managing a seemingly endless list of tasks.
That’s where Hubly comes into the conversation. The technical solution overlays Redtail or Wealthbox to create automated workflows. And get this: It can even automatically assign tasks to specific team members based on their role and type of task, and it looks for ways to intelligently balance workloads across your team.
Michael Kitces’ Fintech map may be getting bigger every year, but I love seeing new, innovative companies like this add value to the advisor’s workday.
I conclude today’s Fintech Five with a special bonus story.
When Riskalyze entered the arena in 2011, Risk Number revolutionized the way advisors measured and talked about true risk tolerance with their clients.
Since this start, we have developed far beyond risk questionnaires. We’ve added deep portfolio analyses, research tools, stress tests, investment policy statements, pension maps, scenario modeling and compliance analysis.
With all of these changes, I recently shared that while our product will continue to be known as Riskalyze, we plan to adopt a new corporate brand in early 2023 to tell our story more broadly.
That’s all I can share for now, but stay tuned for news. You can even find out about our new name here in Fintech Five.
