BNY Mellon’s Pershing X announced partnerships with Salesforce, PureFacts and Pontera to provide more functionality for advisors on its new wealth management platform, Wove.
The announcement Wednesday came one day after the new platform was unveiled during Pershing’s annual INSITE conference in Orlando, Fla., built in partnership with other technology providers, including cloud-native data warehouse company Snowflake and AI-enabled financial planning startup Conquest. Wove also leverages technology from Albridge Wealth Reporting—acquired by Pershing in 2011 and now run as an affiliate—to offer a cloud-based data “superset.”
“We’re really excited about these ones,” Pershing X President Ainslie Simmonds said of the latest announcement. “I think they’re all game-changing tech and they’re going to get the deepest integration on Wove.”
Salesforce will be used for client relationship management, selected for its widespread use and familiarity among advisors, as well as its extensive capabilities and innovative model. Pontera will be integrated into Wove’s wealth reporting tool, allowing advisors to manage held-away retirement accounts. And PureFacts will become Wove’s primary billing application, offering daily fee reporting, advanced revenue management and sales performance analytics.
“Collaborations of this level are why Wove stands out in the market,” Pershing X Head of Revenue Noam Tasch said in a statement. “The capabilities that Salesforce, PureFacts and Pontera bring to the platform help support Pershing X’s goal of simplifying, scaling and revolutionizing the wealth management experience for advisors.”
“This isn't about having a giant marketplace of strategic partners,” Simmonds said. “We really want thoughtful, really cutting-edge, future-focused partners on Wove that are going to make a difference.”
All Pershing X partners are essentially embedded into the Wove platform, she explained. Simmonds isn’t sure, but she said she believes Pershing might be the first company with which Salesforce has agreed to a two-way integration, allowing data to flow in both directions for a more seamless experience. The companies also have plans to work together to create some new and innovative products.
The Wove platform is continuing to evolve, according to Simmonds, including upcoming upgrades to the portfolio construction and reporting tools and the addition of an intra-custody investor site.
“So that, if you had your 401(k) at Fidelity, but you had your brokerage at Schwab and you had another broker's account at Pershing, you’ll be able to see all your money in one place, which really doesn't exist for consumers at this point,” she said.
Simmonds said Pershing has gotten good feedback from other custodians with which they’re working to establish API connectivity and provide multicustodial support.
“We are so pleasantly surprised by the willingness to connect,” she said. “We have one almost finished. We're going to go live with that and then we have another one toward the end of the year—two of the big ones you would imagine. They’re both going really well.”
“Open architecture is always the best strategic decision to go to market with, as most advisors have already created their own tech stacks,” noted Tim Welsh, president at Nexus Strategy. “But it does bring back friction into the system that a unified experience is designed to eliminate," he said.
“Ultimately, Wove needs to decide what actual business it is in,” he said. “Are they just replicating TD Ameritrade’s Veo, or truly doing something different? That’s the $500 million question.”
According to Simmonds, the platform was created with advisors in mind—"what they were trying to achieve, what their workflows are, what their relationships were, rather than just looking at it through the lens of a custodian organization”—and optionality is something they’re looking for. But she seems confident that they’ll ultimately choose Pershing to provide most tools and services.
“Everyone is intrigued about how we got to the decision to be open architecture on custody as well,” she said. “A lot of our clients aren't single custody, so we need to be where they are—being, again, client centered—but also our custody platform stands on its own. It can do things that others can't.”
“We’re confident in doing that because we believe that we're going to be able to help our clients also scale their business differently,” added BNY Mellon | Pershing CEO Jim Crowley. “And we believe that we're going to be able to serve them differently and distinguish ourselves on those two points as well.”
