By Christopher Robbins
It’s been a tough year for big tech—but fintech still seems very active.
Maybe there’s benefit to being small and flying under most people’s radars. As assets poured into large-cap technology, particularly “mega-cap” companies, valuations took a huge ride upward. Despite the volatility and declines of the last six months, they’re likely still not down to earth
Reverberations are being felt. While writing this feature, I received news of Klarna’s latest fundraising announcement that dropped its value to $6.7 billion—an 85% decline for the tech-driven consumer credit company, which was valued at $45.6 billion a year ago, according to TechCrunch.
Ouch.
Let’s get to some more constructive fintech news.
Envestnet — Envestnet announced that it has acquired Redi2 Technologies, Inc. (Redi2), a provider of revenue management and hosted fee-billing solutions in the global financial services industry. The deal creates more connections across the Envestnet financial wellness ecosystem for asset managers, wealth managers, and registered investment advisors (RIAs). Redi2’s platform enables fee calculation, invoice creation, payouts and accounting, and billing compliance.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Key Banc Capital Markets acted as financial advisor to Redi2, and Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP acted as legal counsel to Redi2. Mayer Brown LLP acted as legal counsel to Envestnet.
Crossover Markets Group — Crossover Markets Group took a see-round investment from Gate Ventures, the venture capital arm of crypto exchange Gate.io. Gate Ventures believes that the Crossover Markets Group is addressing the technology gaps necessary to aid in widespread institutional crypto adoption.
Crossover Markets Group is a digital asset marketplace for institutional clients. Crossover’s matching technology is built to provide customizable interactions between maker and taker in disclosed, semi-disclosed and anonymous environments. This flexible and low-cost ecosystem provides taker clients with a tailored liquidity experience based on their desired conditions while protecting market makers from the toxic flow.
Gate.io — Speaking of Gate.io, the company announced it is expanding into Turkey, Brazil, and Vietnam last week.
Holistiplan — Holistiplan, tax planning software for financial advisors built to systematize and automate the process of reviewing a client’s tax return to find potential planning opportunities, announced a strategic partnership with SEI’s advisor business, which delivers technology and investment solutions that provide a unified, digital wealth management experience for independent financial advisors and their clients. The strategic partnership provides SEI’s 7,500 advisors access to the Holistiplan platform.
SMArtX — SMArtX Advisory Solutions (“SMArtX”), a creator of unified managed accounts (UMA) technology and architect of the SMArtX turnkey asset management platform (‘TAMP’), announced the addition of 12 new investment strategies to its platform. The SMArtX platform now supports 1,086 model-traded and manager-traded separate account strategies offered from a diverse group of 266 asset managers.
SMArtX has added five new asset management firms — Exencial Wealth Advisors, Glovista Investments, Hazelview Securities, Sandhill Investment Management, and SSI Investment Management— to give advisors more strategies for advisors to build and offer tailored portfolios to clients. These new offerings are distributed and traded by SMArtX through its cloud-based solution across seven custodial platforms.
Tata Consultancy Services — Tata Consultancy Services launched an ESG Integration Solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform to help financial institutions more easily and accurately measure the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in their investment analysis. Consisting of a cloud-native ESG data ingestion platform and custom ESG scoring model, the solution is integrated with AWS Data Exchange and allows more transparency and flexibility to align investment portfolios with ESG criteria and measure them against quantifiable and standardized sustainability benchmarks.
