In the increasingly fierce battle for supremacy of the robo advisor arena, one newcomer just received some new firepower.
Creative Planning’s Peter Mallouk, ranked by Barron’s as the top independent advisor with $12 billion in assets under management, said Monday that he was personally investing an undisclosed amount in Trizic, a FinTech firm from Silicon Valley behind a new digital advisory platform.
“Digital technology is a way advisors can bring scalability to their business, extend their current reach, and develop organizational efficiency in their practice,” Mallouk said in a statement.
Trizic, which just launched its Accelerator platform in September during the Findevr conference in San Francisco, called the investment a “huge endorsement.”
“Peter’s investment in our technology and team is a confirmation of the work we are doing at Trizic to build the backbone of advisors’ online wealth management platform," said Brad Matthews, the CEO and founder of Trizic.
Trizic, which comes from a Russian acronym for a theory of inventive problem solving, doesn’t aim to compete with or replace traditional financial advisors. Instead, the emphasis is on building technology to make advisors' jobs more efficient.
“I chose to invest in Trizic because they’re not a competitive RIA, broker/dealer, or sub-advisor like other providers,” Mallouk said.
Trizic automatically handles some of the busy work that advisors traditionally do manually, like calculate drift percentages, handle compliance reporting and fill out client spreadsheets. Unlike programs like Betterment and Wealthfront, which rely on algorithms to automatically allocate a client’s money towards a pre-packaged set of ETFs and mutual funds, Trizic said its “investment-agnostic” Accelerator platform allows advisors to pick whatever investments they feel are right for clients.
The software is also designed to be customizable, so advisors can build their own client-facing interface and simply plug in Trizic’s Accelerator engine.
“We encourage advisors to look behind the curtain at the technology underpinning the numerous digital advisory services in the market and select the companies that are truly developing innovative technology that is responsive to their unique needs,” Matthews said.
For clients, it allows them to check their portfolio from a computer or mobile device the same way they would access their bank accounts online.
A spokesperson for Trizic said the company could not disclose information about clients using the platform, including whether or not Mallouk himself used Trizic, but said interest in signing up is in the 100s of advisors.
Trizic is integrated with TD Ameritrade Institutional's Veo, the interface of the firm's advisor workstation, which allows a multitude of outside technology companies to develop tools and products that plug right in.