SEI has made its first strategic investment in the AI developer and startup incubator TIFIN. The investment is meant to foster rapid iteration of new ideas between the two. This will also give SEI access to the artificial intelligence technology developed by TIFIN.
SEI manages, advises or administers about $1.4 trillion in assets across its platform, which several thousand advisors use.
“Working with the right strategic partners during times of intense change can increase speed, confidence, and agility,” wrote Sneha Shah, the head of new business ventures at SEI in a statement.
In July 2023, as part of the launch of TIFIN.AI, a subsidiary within TIFIN, previous investor J.P. Morgan made an additional investment in the firm. The terms of J.P. Morgan's investment, or the involvement of any other investors, were not disclosed.
TIFIN’s last major capital raise was the close of its $109 million Series D funding round in May 2022. Franklin Templeton and Motive Partners joined investors Hamilton Lane, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Morningstar and Broadridge.
Apex And Advyzon Launch New Integrations
It has been a busy few weeks for both Advyzon And Apex.
Most recently, the two announced new custody and integration features this week during Advyzon’s inaugural conference in Phoenix, Ariz.
These integrations cover several processes and areas, from new account opening workflows to account funding, money movement, custodian fee file submission and FIX trading support.
In a nutshell, Apex has streamlined these processes, allowing straight-through processing where possible and enabling advisors on Advyzon’s cloud-based platform (which combines portfolio management, performance reporting, trading and rebalancing, client web portals, CRM, client billing and document storage) to initiate, say, a new account opening for a client from directly within Advyzon.
All the client data residing within Advyzon’s CRM will pre-populate the account opening form and can then be sent directly to the client through the company’s portal for review, along with any additional information needed, as well as a signature.
Similar efficiencies have been built to support the other features as well.
Only a week ago, Advyzon Investment Management, the firm’s TAMP, announced an integration with Nebo Wealth. One month ago, Apex launched its new Astra user interface during the annual T3 conference.
AssetMark To Spend $60 Million On Tech In 2024
The turnkey asset management platform AssetMark held its fourth-quarter earnings call this week.
During a recent WealthManagement.com interview and again on this week’s earnings call, Assetmark CEO Michael Kim was asked about a December Bloomberg story stating that majority shareholder Huatai Securities Co. was exploring a sale.
Mum remains the word on that as Kim said the company does not comment on rumors or stories of this kind. In response to Raymond James equity and capital markets analyst Patrick J. O’Shaughnessy about Huatai, Kim said that the investor remained “very, very supportive of the business and the entire management team.”
From a technology perspective, Kim said he was excited about 2024.
“We are going to have over $60 million in our capital budget this year, last year it was about $45 million we spent on tech and that is a meaningful increase and we are committed to it,” he told WealthManagement.com.
The TAMP supports over 9,300 individual financial advisors, serves over 250,000 households and has $108.9 billion in platform assets.
