May’s wealth management headlines were filled with investments in technology platforms and providers as well as new partnerships between advisory firms and technology providers. Here are the stories and announcements that stood out to us this month:
Addepar’s ability to court amazing investors to propel its growth journey has been legendary. Addepar continues to invest in the platform, expanding beyond performance reporting into data and workflow and trading by using their reputation, hard data, and calculation capabilities to go much deeper. We see Addepar adding capabilities to build something modern and scalable for their clients—not always easy for a firm that has focused on doing one thing really well. All our Addepar clients are excited about the ability to expand and deepen their relationship with Addepar.
Altruist excites us because, of all the newer custodians out there, they have the right vision for supporting advisors with clearing and custody services in a truly comprehensive way. Most new custodian platforms grew out of the nontaxable retirement robo world and have struggled to meet the complexities of modern wealth management (not able to replace or compete with Fidelity, Schwab, or Pershing). Altruist seems on-track to do just that. Also hiring one of the top CTOs in wealth management, Namesh Patel, is a really good signal as to how serious they are on this journey.
Four years ago, iCapital was a great Alts platform that firms used to scale quickly, but the investment options were more mass-market-focused than many MFO clients demanded. The industry didn’t consider it a bespoke mechanism to access alts that firms like MAI expected to deliver to their clients. That’s changed entirely. It’s symbolic that MAI, a multifamily office focused on innovative wealth generators, chooses to build on top of iCapital today. The research we conducted in February on the state of alts also highlighted the advisor shift from going to bespoke managers directly and taking on all the operational cost and complexity themselves to going to cost-effective platforms like iCapital where they can access a competitive set of alts managers that they couldn’t have before. We are advising our clients to take iCapital more seriously as a manager of their alts business.
Integrated Partners takes technology and its role in building their business more seriously than nearly anyone else in the industry. Because they think about how tools can help them build and scale their business so well, these partnerships say a lot about RISR and Carefull. Both are really good tools to help advisors plan work outside of the normal asset allocation, security selection, and portfolio management. It’s a high value add for courting and winning mandates for wealth creators. They will help Integrated Partners move their platform forward.
Jump is one of a small number of highly adopted, incredibly valuable AI task tools in wealth management right now. Our clients that have moved onto its platform report as high as 90 minutes of time saved per client meeting in terms of preparation and post-call note and task creation. For Cetera’s advisors, who typically have more clients in their portfolio than an average wealth management firm, that level of time savings will be a game changer. If a Cetera advisor can save herself 60-90 minutes per client conversation, it will generate a massive return on investment to Cetera.
It’s always fun when we are in the headlines ourselves, so we’ll throw in a sixth article this month. F2’s acquisition of MD Solutions continues our pattern of building and acquiring businesses that deepen our capabilities to support wealth management firms. The MD team and the launch of their Pulse product is a shift in our strategy to partner with software firms on implementation. For software firms, having the industry’s largest stable of technology experts use their reputations and capabilities to deploy their software should be a win. For advisors, we hope this is another way for us to deliver more value to your firm.
Thanks for hanging with us through another round up of tech news in our industry. We expect to see the level of innovation continue for both technology providers and firms throughout the summer as we all strive to exceed investors’ expectations of their client-advisor relationships.
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