While many an independent RIA could be forgiven for thinking SigFig had ceased to exist, the reality is that the firm has continued to create digital wealth management tools and technology for financial institutions and their advisors.
This week, the company announced it is rebranding to Tandems and will launch what co-founder and CEO Mike Sha and the company are referring to as an AI-native wealth operating system; for now, focusing on the financial advisors at its institutional clients, though the more general RIAs are not entirely off the table in the future as prospective customers.
“Really, the story starts probably a decade ago—there are a lot of institutions with a lot of old technology,” Sha said.
“Some people may think robo [when they think of us], but really we’re a tech company,” he said, noting that his company’s technology is being used across 2 million accounts, and represents $60 billion in assets managed by 6,000 advisors at firms that include Wells Fargo and Citizens Financial, Scotia Bank in Canada, and New York Life, among others.
Sha has said this in different ways many times before: “It’s a lot less about robo advice, today, and more about using modern technology in the business of wealth management,” he told WealthManagement.com in a 2018 interview announcing SigFig’s $50 million in funding (the company has raised almost $120 million in capital over six funding rounds).
It should be pointed out that among the firms and investors no longer using Sigfig is UBS, which pulled the plug on its automated investing service in May, as first reported by RIABiz.
When it comes to the new technology and ecosystem, Sha described it as open architecture in three layers, with embedded verticalized AI and “a huge amount of software on top of it.”
“The middle layer may sound the least sexy, but is the most powerful,” he said. The companies and services it connects to run the gamut, from Fidelity’s NFS to Microsoft. “We want to build the AI to allow advisors to get past all the administrative burden and focus on building relationships,” Sha said.
The first piece of the new ecosystem will sound familiar to advisors who have followed the rollout of more than a dozen AI-powered notetakers that have come to market over the last couple of years.
Called TandemsMeet, this first component in the announced triumvirate handles scheduling, records client input in meetings and provides summaries, which it then syncs directly with a firm’s CRM. It will then create document workflows (if needed) following a client meeting and has an integrated DocuSign extension.
Next is TandemsGrow, a portfolio analysis tool trained to proactively identify gaps and opportunities in a client’s holdings. It provides advisors with alerts or pre-alerts on client life events or upcoming events and offers a new, more streamlined account opening and digital onboarding process.
Finally, for now, is TandemsInvest, an automated tool that generates recommendations and has features that include goals-based portfolio construction and ongoing tracking, with real-time rebalancing and other automated portfolio operations that include model support and tax optimization, as well as new self-service tools.
“Our concept in developing these new tools is to meet advisors where they are at and we spent a lot of time with them to understand how they work and the first thing we noticed is that most advisors generally most like meeting with clients,” which is not their reality he said, referring to the heavy administrative burden that the new ecosystem is intended to reduce.
When asked about the future roadmap, and in particular agentic AI, Sha said that most advisors are probably not quite there, but the tools in the new Tandems ecosystem will help them visualize that future.
“We want to build a clear path to helping them realize just how helpful software can be.”
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