HedgeCoVest is pivoting away from being a platform to help investors access hedge funds in favor of being a turnkey asset management platform. To reflect the change, the company is rebranding as SmartX Advisory Solutions.
And as part of the change, SmartX is bringing on 27 new investment strategies from firms like Blackrock, Morningstar Investment Management and Nasdaq Dorsey Wright. The models will cover strategies including ETFs, income portfolios, international equities, global/macro investing and U.S. equity strategies.
SmartX CEO Evan Rapoport said that the growth of TAMPs is pushing asset management firms to look for new distribution platforms, and that SmartX’s partnership with SS&C Advent provides the opportunity for asset managers to reach a large number of wealth advisors.
Totum Wealth Hires New CEO
Speaking of rebrands, Totum Wealth is rebranding itself as Totum Risk, in order to focus on the company’s efforts to find data-driven ways of evaluating client risk tolerance and exposure. The company also announced plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles to Atlanta, and that Larry Shumbres would be taking over as CEO.
Cofounder and former CEO Min Zhang is remaining with the company as a member of the board. A company spokesperson said she stepped down as chief executive to pursue new opportunities and interests.
RIA in a Box Introduces Trade Monitoring
The technology company has a new employee trade-monitoring tool for its MyRIACompliance software platform that RIA in a Box says will help firms comply with Rule 204A-11, which requires the submission of securities holdings and transaction reports. The new tool digitizes the process, provides an interface for employees to electronically link applicable personal brokerage accounts, and provides chief compliance officers with supervision, administration and reporting capabilities.
"For many RIA firms, the tracking of employee transactions and holdings—a key area of regulator focus—is an antiquated, paper-driven process," said G.J. King, president of RIA in a Box. "This new tool applies the latest in financial-technology innovation to help RIA firms of all sizes automate employee-trade submission, pre-clearance, review and monitoring."
The tool will be available later this month for an extra $10 per user, per month.
Cryptocurrency IRAs
CoinIRA, a subsidiary of Goldco focused on digital currencies, is launching Digital IRA Bundles, new investment products that come prepackaged with combinations of popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. Bundles will be categorized as conservative, moderate or aggressive, which will determine the percentage of each cryptocurrency held. The bundles will come in amounts of $25,000, $50,000 and $100,000, and can be funded like any other self-directed IRA product. Trevor Gerszt, Goldco’s CEO, says the bundles will allow clients to take advantage of the rapidly soaring values of digital currencies.
Commonwealth Selects Quovo for Aggregation
Commonwealth Financial Network announced the completion of an upgrade to the account-aggregation features within Investor360 using Quovo. The firm said advisors and clients can expect more-reliable connections with held-away accounts, faster turnaround times, new functionality for clients to manually enter in assets, a streamlined client-set-up process, and the ability for advisors to customize the names of linked accounts. Darren Tedesco, Commonwealth’s managing principal of innovation and strategy, called Quovo’s technology “the most frictionless implementation of aggregation available.”
LendingTree Sponsors Benzinga Fintech Competition
The winner of the fintech demo competition at Benzinga’s first Fintech Summit in San Francisco will take home $10,000 thanks to a new partnership with online-loan marketplace LendingTree. The companies said the award will go to the company whose product best demonstrates a “scalable, material innovation” to the audience.
RiXTrema Adds Plan Monitoring
In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that a fiduciary must monitor “at regular intervals,” RiXtrema is launching a new plan-monitor feature to its 401kFiduciaryOptimizer product. The tool monitors retirement plans every day and sends plan advisors a report whenever potential changes are found, on subjects such as the availability of better share classes and the availability of lower-cost investments.
