This month’s headlines have us pretty optimistic about the direction of the WealthTech industry. Here are the five stories we wanted to cover for September’s Word on WealthTech.
Former InvestCloud CEO John Wise’s Firm Acquires Fincentric
Having a lot of digitally savvy, future-thinking people running a legacy but highly scalable, ubiquitous technology opens up some really interesting doors for the industry. If done right, there could be deeper levels of market commentary, content, intelligence, and thoughtfulness about how people engage with information about our markets. And it could be deployed in a very high-scale way, fairly quickly. So we’re excited about it.
Innovayte, Advyzon Partner on a New Model Marketplace
We’ve been really impressed with Advyzon in the last few months. And we love seeing four Morningstar executives who built out a very scalable, well-used Morningstar advisor technology build something new in a modern direction on their own (breaking away from the big company to start a new cool company is similar to F2’s origin story). Plus, it’s an interesting time—Morningstar recently announced the layoffs of some of their integration staff, while people who left to start Advyzon seem to be growing really fast. So, if you don’t know them right now, you should put them on your radar for rebalancing and portfolio construction for independent firms because we’re likely to see Advyzon grow and become more relevant in the market.
Arch Surpasses $100 Billion in Platform Assets, Expands Team and Product Capabilities to Meet Growing Demand
Arch is a firm we didn’t have on our radar as much two years ago, but it’s become very attractive to RIAs that are drowning in data and alts data organization. Their technology, approach to it, and client service lead them to be highly regarded among some of the most well-thought-of RIAs in the country. We expect Arch to become a large competitor to other alts data aggregation platforms.
LPL
We’ve noticed the trend of game-changing moves by LPL. The most tech-forward of the IBDs and a leader in aiding independent-minded advisors to grow, they are now expanding capabilities of their tech platform to broader uses. LPL has been acquiring advisory businesses into their platform coupled with interesting innovations aimed at supporting hybrid advisors through a seamless and unified RIA custody offering and newer high-net-worth services that could possibly shake up the RIA custody business. These moves are likely to mean that for LPL’s growth-minded advisor base, growing and scaling on the LPL platform is more attractive than leaving to join other traditional RIA custodians. We've always been impressed by LPL's ability to be scalable and innovative. It seems to be getting this right where a lot of its traditional IBD peers are stuck in the past.
