There was quite a bit of financial advisor-related wealth tech news this week, but to start out this edition of Advisor Tech Talk, we’d like to revisit the concept of technological disruption and what it could mean for the future of the financial services industry.
To help visualize what’s coming in financial services, we might want to take a look at another professionally oriented industry in the midst of a radical technological transformation: Dentistry and orthodontics.
Dentists and orthodontists aren’t going way. In fact, the global demand for dentistry and orthodontic services will probably continue to rise if incomes and standards of living increase or gradually even out over time.
But there will be far fewer people working in the industry, and technology is the big reason why. Behind the scenes in dentistry are a whole host of ancillary, support jobs and professions, from front-office clerks to x-ray technicians to hygeineists, dental assistants and orthodontic assistants to dental lab technicians and radiologists, right down to the janitorial staff.
Digital imaging has reduced the need for many of these jobs—we’re many years past printing out physical x-rays, and comparing current x-rays to past films is as easy as a click of a button. Communications technology has made it easier to keep track of a busy office’s schedule with less staff.
Artificial intelligence is going to take more of the burden of those front-line communications. Artificial intelligence is also starting to do more of the “clicks” between current and historical x-ray studies to conduct comparisons, and artificial intelligence is shouldering more of the diagnostic burden, as well, contributing to early detection of periodontal disease, cavities and oral cancers. AI is also now reading orthodontic scans to determine the best sequence of moves to bring someone’s teeth into alignment over time and automated 3-D printing is creating the dental devices and appliances to move teeth and jaws. The same technology is replacing the traditional dental lab to create crowns, dentures and implants.
While dentists, orthodontists and their assistants are still essential to supervise and conduct the actual work in the patient’s mouth, their ability to provide more in-depth services—or to serve a broader clientele—is enhanced by their industry’s progressing technology. Dental offices are generally smaller and more efficient. For many patients, orthodontic care won’t require an office visit at all. There are already patients who never see their orthodontist in person throughout the duration of their care.
Moving forward, AI and gene editing technology may lead to more automated, proactive and personalized preventative care to stop tooth decay long before it starts.
This is where the dentistry and orthodontics industry already is, thanks to technology, and it’s probably where wealth management is rapidly heading.
Are advisors ready to be more hands-on with their technology and more hands-off with their clients?
Let’s get to some headlines.
Advisor360°
Advisor360°, a provider of integrated technology for enterprise wealth management firms, has launched Account Transitions, its newest Digital Onboarding capability that allows firms to easily repaper thousands of client accounts in seconds in support of advisors in transition. Debuting on the heels of its recent research revealing that nine out of 10 financial advisors would switch firms over bad technology, Advisor360°’s new capability facilitates a best first impression when advisors make a move.
Account Transitions accelerates the collection and transfer of data during the onboarding of client accounts, supporting the setup of up to 6,000 accounts in 90 seconds. The new capability collects and standardizes client and account data en masse by automating error detection, creating contacts and households for the CRM, and drafting new account information. By facilitating a seamless and efficient bulk account transfer and repapering process, the Account Transitions capability is a force-multiplier for advisors moving entire books of business from one firm to another.
Advisor360°’s award-winning Digital Onboarding solution is already used by advisors to open approximately 400,000 new accounts per year. The company has integrated Envestnet’s managed accounts platform into its Digital Onboarding offering, resulting in an average of 6,500 new Envestnet account openings per month.
DXtrade
DXtrade, a multi-asset trading platform for FX/CFD brokers developed and maintained by Devexperts, has partnered with TipRanks, a fintech company that provides data and tools to help investors make informed decisions. DXtrade will integrate TipRanks’ data-driven insights for stock screening and research into its platform.
With the addition of TipRanks’ vast datasets and research tools, DXtrade is upgrading its platforms to offer new analytical tools. TipRanks is currently available in DXtrade’s demo environment as an option that brokers can integrate into their services. DXtrade’s customers will be able to access TipRanks’ Trending Stocks Screener, Analyst Insights, and Breaking News, among other features, allowing them to see real-time updates impacting the markets.
DXtrade’s offerings include a web trader, Android and iOS apps, and broker-dealing and client management tools. The platform provides advanced risk management functionality for FX dealers, allowing them to configure limits or exposure on instrument, group, and/or account level without the need to restart the platform. Traders benefit from flexible risk management settings with stop-loss and take profit settings in the order entry and on chart; and an embedded trading journal and dashboard to track their performance and strategies. Other features include alerts, responsive charting with 100+ studies and 40 drawings for technical analysis tools, market news, and economic calendars.
Fintova Partners
Fintova Partners, a technology and operations consultancy to investment management organizations, announced a partnership with Cogendi, a renowned Fintech solution provider headquartered in Paris, France that caters to Family Office and Ultra High Net Worth Individual (UHNWI) clients. Through this agreement, Fintova Partners becomes the exclusive distributor of Cogendi’s innovative portfolio reporting platform in the Americas.
Cogendi’s platform offers a comprehensive suite of features that covers all asset classes and portfolio structures, enables agile portfolio engineering, including aggregations and carve-outs, provides robust investment analytics, including modeling, forecasting, and AI enhancements, creates amazing dashboards and rich reporting, including for fully branded client portals, facilitates seamless data integration, and delivers a fully personalized web solution accessible from anywhere.
iCapital
iCapital, the global fintech platform driving access to alternative investments for the wealth management industry, announced a strategic relationship with Ashton Thomas Private Wealth (“Ashton Thomas”), part of Arax Investment Partners (“Arax”), to provide financial advisors and their high-net-worth clients with streamlined data management and simplified access to a diversified range of alternative and structured investment opportunities.
This collaboration reflects Arax’s broader commitment to opening access to alternative investments across its entire platform, and to delivering top-tier, technology-driven solutions that enhance their advisory capabilities and client service.
The offering includes customized technology tailored for Ashton Thomas advisors that provides a curated menu of alternative investment strategies, including private equity, private credit, real estate, and hedge funds, as well as structured investment opportunities. Leveraging iCapital’s continuous investment in technology, including capabilities from the acquisition of Mirador, Ashton Thomas advisors will benefit from enhanced data aggregation, financial reporting, and data management. This integrated platform simplifies the management of multiple asset classes and enhances overall efficiency.
Intelligize
Intelligize announced the launch of Intelligize+ AI, the next generation of its SEC compliance analytics and research platform. The reimagined platform includes generative artificial intelligence-driven capabilities and new search technologies that enable users to quickly and easily find, analyze, and compare documents using natural language processing.
Intelligize+ AI offers new search technologies, including a new Expand Keywords feature to make Boolean searching even more robust with variations and high-confidence substitutes. Advanced conceptual search technology also enables users to go beyond traditional keyword searches for more intuitive discovery of the most relevant documents based on the concepts of underlying queries.
The platform’s “Ask AI” feature enables users to ask questions in plain English about their search results to speed document review and pinpoint the most relevant examples. Two additional AI-driven features, “AI Compare” and “AI Summarize,” help users highlight similarities and differences between documents for faster review, and provide condensed explanations of sections within documents, reducing the time spent manually synthesizing information. Using these three features, painstaking tasks like benchmarking peer filings – critical to avoiding SEC Comment Letters – become dramatically easier.
InvestCloud
InvestCloud, a global provider of wealth and asset management solutions, announced a partnership with Buckingham Strategic Wealth and Buckingham Strategic Partners (“Buckingham”), SEC-registered investment firms, to transform their financial advisor experience. With InvestCloud’s Advisor Experience, Buckingham advisors will benefit from differentiated digital capabilities, including the seamless integration of multiple systems, that will drive dramatic increases in advisor productivity and elevate the experience they deliver for clients.
Supporting Buckingham in managing or administering more than $70 billion of collective assets (as of March 31, 2024), the Advisor Experience from InvestCloud takes the advisor out of the business of managing administrative operations and into the role of advising clients and engaging in greater value-add opportunities. With cloud-native, modular technology, InvestCloud brings together multiple and disparate systems and data sources, such as CRM and financial planning, in a single, integrated dashboard, enabling advisors to access all the information they need to efficiently respond to a client’s request, review and execute scenario-planning and prepare for client meetings. This means advisors will be able to spend more time interacting and collaborating seamlessly with their clients, and less time navigating through and toggling between various data sources and systems of record. The new Advisor Experience is highly configurable, which allows Buckingham to tailor a differentiated advisor experience that capitalizes on their unique advice philosophy.
Until now, servicing clients required advisors to log in to more than half a dozen applications to gather the various data points and information they need for a client. Multiply that by multiple clients and the amount of time advisors spend on these actions results in a significant drain on productivity. InvestCloud’s Advisor Experience provides Buckingham advisors with the flexibility and productivity they need to engage more efficiently and better serve their clients through advanced features such as proactive and reactive alerting, easy access to multiple data sources, including CRM, portfolio, and financial planning data, as well as effective data visualization and secure messaging via alerts and email—all accessible from a single, integrated dashboard for advisors.
Liquidnet
Liquidnet, a leading technology-driven agency execution specialist, announced its partnership with cutting-edge, Gen-AI startup Boltzbit to optimize its Fixed Income primary markets workflow.
Leveraging Boltzbit’s unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning solutions and its bespoke workflow model, Liquidnet is now able to receive, process, and display newly announced bond deals at a rate which significantly surpasses its prior parsing technology. As a result, bonds are more readily available through Liquidnet’s deal announcement dashboard and subsequently into its new issue orderbook.
The application of this custom AI model provides Liquidnet’s Members and partner syndicate banks with the distinct advantage of faster access to trading and information distribution. Liquidnet estimates the enhancement improves the time from when they receive unstructured deal data to the bonds being ready by 90%.
The Oasis Group
The Oasis Group, a consultancy for the wealth management industry, released their AI WealthTech Map, a resource that financial advisors and wealth management firms can use to discover leading artificial intelligence solutions and AI-focused firms serving the wealth management industry.
The Oasis Group identified 55 leading technology firms that specifically serve the financial services industry for inclusion in the map. The firms are not existing wealthtech solutions that are developing AI capabilities – these firms are AI first and were built to support the wealth management industry. The map follows the sales cycle of a wealth manager by starting with prospecting, followed by writing assistants, note takers, proposal generation, AI assistants, investment research, next best action, and compliance solutions – categorizing each of the solutions and providing all the tools that a financial advisor would need to convert a prospect into a client as efficiently as possible.
Osaic
Osaic, Inc. (“Osaic”), one of the nation’s largest providers of wealth management solutions, in partnership with IncomeConductor, toay announced the availability of NextPhase Pro and NextPhase Plus, enhanced versions of its retirement income planning tool, NextPhase. The NextPhase platform calculates easy to read, personalized retirement income plans based on simple user input.
Approximately 600 advisors currently use NextPhase Original with their clients, with more than $4 billion in retirement assets planned though the platform each year. NextPhase Plus will offer advisors and their clients the automatic retirement income plan calculations provided by the original NextPhase platform, as well as advanced features including social security optimization and derisking alerts.
NextPhase Pro will offer the same features as NextPhase and NextPhase Plus, with added Roth conversion modeling, required minimum distribution (“RMD”) projections and tax overlay, making it the first and only time-segmented income planning tool in the market with advanced tax overlay. NextPhase Pro will also uniquely provide personalized health care cost projections and calculate income-related monthly adjusted (“IRMAA”) surcharges to Medicare premiums.
Seibert Financial
Siebert Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: SIEB), a brokerage and wealth management firm, announced the appointment of Raakhee Miller as the company’s President of Siebert Technologies, LLC.
Raakhee brings over 25 years of experience in technology leadership and innovation, having previously held senior positions at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Macquarie and tech giants FIS and Broadridge.
In her new role, Miller will be responsible for leading Siebert’s efforts to integrate advanced technologies and enhance Siebert’s digital platforms, ensuring that clients receive the best possible experience and support.
TIFIN
TIFIN, an AI and innovation platform for wealth, announcced the launch of TIFIN India. The launch of TIFIN India represents an important milestone in TIFIN’s vision to take its expertise in both direct-to-consumer (DTC) and business-to-business (B2B) AI for wealth applications to global markets.
The Indian market is unique in its potential for impact. As it stands today, the penetration of wealth management in India is only 8% (compared to 72% in the U.S. and 44% in China). With a population of more than 1.4B individuals, TIFIN expects over 500M individuals to access wealth and asset management services in the next 7 years. TIFIN India will be organized into two main verticals, MyFi, an AI assistant to help individuals towards better wealth outcomes, and TIFIN India Enterprise, which will build AI native products for financial services firms.
TIFIN India Enterprise was launched in partnership with the DSP family group, one of the oldest and most respected financial services firms in India. In addition to an investment from the DSP family group, Aditi Kothari Desai, vice chairperson of the DSP Mutual Fund company, will serve on the board of directors for TIFIN India Enterprise with TIFIN Founder & CEO Dr. Vinay Nair.
TradePMR
Continuing its ongoing platform innovation in support of independent advisors, TradePMR announced several enhancements to its integration with Advyzon, the comprehensive wealth management technology and investment management platform for advisors. With a continuous focus on product innovation, Advyzon’s integration with TradePMR provides advisors with increased efficiencies and functions as an integral component designed to help with organic growth.
The integration enhancements announced today include single sign-on (SSO) capabilities that allow users to quickly and seamlessly access the Advyzon platform from TradePMR’s Fusion platform. Advisors can also now directly access client statements and tax documents, Advyzon’s Quantum Rebalancer system for Financial Information eXchange (FIX) trading, Trade File to submit trade orders, and a more seamless client billing process via the Custodian Fee File.
Advyzon has a history of success supporting the wealth management industry. Serving more than 1,500 advisory firms, the Chicago-based company provides a cloud-based platform combining portfolio management, customizable performance reporting, trading and rebalancing, client web portals, client relationship management (CRM), client billing, and document storage, as well as turnkey asset management.
Wealth.com
Integrated Partners (“Integrated”), a national financial planning and registered investment advisory (RIA) firm announced a strategic partnership with estate planning platform Wealth.com. This integration bolsters an already robust technology offering, equipping Integrated’s advisors with access to next-gen estate planning tools and allowing for an even more holistic view of clients’ increasingly complex financial lives.
Integrated recognizes the critical importance of comprehensive estate and succession planning, particularly in light of the estimated $84.4 trillion in assets that’s projected to transfer to the next generation by 2045. The firm is dedicated to providing holistic solutions to address the growing complexity of clients’ financial lives. This commitment is evident in the success of Integrated’s CPA Alliance program, fostering relationships between certified public accountants (CPAs) and advisory firms. Recently, Integrated has expanded advisor access to specialized services through strategic partnerships, new hires and innovative technology implementation.
Wealth.com enhances the estate planning capabilities of partner firms through scalable onboarding guided plan creation, elegant visualizations and proactive insights. The platform boasts a design that is both intuitive and user-friendly, ensuring it is easily navigable by advisors and their clients, irrespective of their level of technological expertise. Integrated’s advisors can now leverage this one-stop platform for clients’ estate planning needs. wealth.com drives efficiency in crafting simple wills and complex advanced directives alike by summarizing existing documents, visually mapping complex plans for ultra-high net worth clients and by crafting core documents like revocable trusts and advanced directives.
9Spokes
9Spokes, a global data platform, announced the launch of its new Cashflow forecasting product, an advanced tool designed for integration within the digital platforms of financial organizations. This new offering provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with automated, predictive cashflow management and forecasting capabilities.
A recent study highlighted that 70% of SMBs operate with less than four months of cash reserves, with 60% spending upwards of five hours weekly managing multiple cash flow tools. 9Spokes’ Cashflow product not only simplifies this crucial task but also aligns with global trends towards open banking and open data, providing SMBs a comprehensive view of their financial standings across multiple bank accounts and various providers.
Unlike traditional tools that require manual input and provide only historical data, the 9Spokes’ Cashflow product leverages advanced machine-learning algorithms to automatically pull historical cash balance data. It aggregates data from multiple sources, including cash balance history and forecasts from various bank accounts—even those held across different financial institutions—giving SMBs a complete view of their current and future cashflow.
