This past week was, relative to the first six weeks of the year, a relatively slow one for wealth management news—but wealthtech remained busy.
Those one-week trends most likely signify nothing—it’s not unusual for there to be a dip in the news early in the year, after the winter holidays’ dust settles.
However, moving forward, we wouldn’t be surprised if there are long-term trends towards more activity in fintech and wealthtech and less activity in the traditional financial services and wealth management, because we believe the entire financial services industry is going to converge with the technologies that make it function: in the future, most if not all of the surviving wealth management firms will be in reality wealthtechs, just as most if not all financial services will be performed by financial technologies.
As technology erodes the functions of human financial and wealth practitioners, these traditional service providers will continue to try to evolve and progress their value propositions until they run out of different kinds of value that they can demonstrate.
Then it’s checkmate for the industry.
You can tune into our weekly AI & Finance column to read about the pressures being put on the greater financial services by emerging technologies like generative AI, but the movement away from traditional finance and towards fintech and wealthtech is being driven by more than AI. Embedded finance is putting more wealth management tools into individual hands, and changing how consumers first encounter services like retirement and financial planning.
Not only is technology where more consumers have their first investing, planning and wealth management experience, it’s also beating human advisors at the communications game.
Don’t believe me? Let me give you an example. Even with the gallons of ink spilled about the problem, we still know that most heirs don’t have a relationship with their parents’ financial advisor and most do not retain their family’s financial services relationships upon wealth transfer.
More often, young heirs-to-be are instead building relationships with digitally oriented discount brokerages. Fintech investing and financial planning apps. Online tax-prep services. Challenger banks offering high-yield savings accounts.
Not only are tomorrow’s heirs turning to these tech providers for solutions in their youth, but they’re also receiving daily emails from them and text message updates. These communications are usually more than advertising, they’re also informative and educational, offering a smattering of global news, market analysis and personalized recommendations. What’s more, fintech providers have become very good at pushing quality content to their users.
This isn’t even getting into the talent shortage in wealth management—advisors in particular can’t keep pace when it comes to client prospecting and retention because there aren’t as many people available to manage the work, so technology has to shoulder more of the burden—which means the automated communications from fintech providers is now really no worse in quality than what the average wealth manager sends to clients. In fact, thanks to AI, technology will exceed humans at providing optimal personalized messages and recommendations.
The average young person is hearing more from fintech providers than they do from traditional finance. Most are more in touch with their apps than their family’s financial advisor. Financial technology is establishing trust and credibility with these consumers and it can vastly outgun traditional banks and wealth managers on prospecting and retention over time.
I don’t see that genie going back into the bottle no matter what traditional finance tries to do in response.
Let’s get to your headlines.
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Adams Street Partners
Adams Street Partners, LLC, a leading private markets investment management firm with more than $62 billion in assets under management, today announced the launch of the Adams Street Advisor Academy, a private markets educational resource for wealth advisors. The library provides diverse content, including a guide to navigating private investing and access to our thought leadership across strategies equipping financial advisors with useful and timely information for their clients.
The Advisor Academy is located within Adams Street’s Private Wealth Solutions website, and provides in-depth insights into foundational private market concepts, common private markets investment strategies, and essential industry terminology. The educational platform enriches Adams Street’s current suite of private wealth services by offering high-caliber, easily accessible resources deeply rooted in the firm’s extensive experience in data-driven private markets investing.
Addepar
Addepar, a leading global technology and data platform for investment professionals, today announced the launch of Alts Data Management, Private Fund Benchmarks, and cash flow forecasts in Navigator. These capabilities are purpose built to enhance data-driven decision-making and boost operational efficiency for advisors and institutions managing complex portfolios with alternative investments.
With the global market for alternatives rapidly growing, Addepar equips its clients to navigate this complex landscape of strategies, managers and vehicles with precision. Supporting over 1,200 client firms managing and advising on more than $7 trillion in assets—40% of which are alternative investments—Addepar continues to deliver unmatched visibility into diverse multi-asset portfolios for the world’s most demanding family offices, RIAs, private banks, wealth management franchises and institutions.
Addepar Alts Data Management simplifies the complexities of managing alternatives by collecting and extracting key information from a range of alternatives documents including capital account statements, distribution notices, and capital calls. Combining AI technology with human verification by trained analysts, it automates workflows to increase efficiency, ensure high data accuracy, and provide a timely view of private fund investments within the Addepar platform.
Apex Fintech Solutions
Apex Fintech Solutions Inc. (“Apex”), an innovation launchpad for the global investment ecosystem, is excited to announce the upcoming launch of Apex Alts, a groundbreaking solution designed to democratize access to alternative investments for customers of broker dealers, advisory firms, and other wealth management companies.
Apex Alts will provide eligible investors with seamless access to a wide range of alternative asset classes — such as private credit, limited partnerships, private equity, non-traded REITs, bespoke funds, and more — all directly through traditional brokerage accounts. With Apex Alts, investors can explore and diversify into alternatives, using a purchasing process similar to trading equities, mutual funds, or ETFs.
By embedding alternative investments into the standard brokerage infrastructure, Apex Alts helps firms offer more diversified portfolio options to their investors. Historically, alternative investments have been limited to institutional players or ultra-high-net-worth individuals due to accessibility, cost, and operational complexity.
Arta Finance
Arta Finance (“Arta”), a digital wealth platform transforming the way people grow, protect, and enjoy their wealth, today announced the launch of tailored features and use cases for finance professionals to manage their personal investments. With these features, Arta enables finance professionals to manage their personal wealth with the same sophistication they bring to high-net-worth clients and institutions.
Finance professionals including advisors, analysts, portfolio managers and brokers face unique challenges in managing their personal investments, from strict compliance requirements to avoiding conflicts of interest. Arta addresses these challenges with tailored features that seamlessly align with their professional requirements. Discretionary accounts ensure investment decisions are managed on behalf of members, maintaining compliance by limiting direct involvement. Additionally, the platform’s custom index creator enables easy exclusion of restricted companies, while seamless reporting integration with systems like BNY Pershing streamlines compliance tracking.
Finance professionals understand the importance of diversification, yet access to private market investments like private equity and venture capital has long been restricted by high capital requirements. Arta is changing that by making these high-growth opportunities more accessible, empowering professionals to expand beyond traditional investments. By bridging the gap between aspiration and action, Arta provides the tools needed to build more diversified and sophisticated portfolios.
Bitwise Asset Management
Bitwise Asset Management, a premier crypto-specialist asset manager with over $12 billion in client assets, today announced the addition of Jonathan Bier as an advisor. The step follows the firm’s first annual donation of 10% of gross profits from its Bitcoin ETP to Bitcoin open-source developers. Bier will advise Bitwise on its contributions to the stewardship and development of the Bitcoin network.
A long-time member of the Bitcoin technical community, Bier is the author of The Blocksize War: The Battle for Control Over Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules, the canonical story of an important chapter in Bitcoin’s history. Bier serves as a board member of Brink, a leading non-profit supporting the Bitcoin protocol and network through fundamental research and development, and he is the Bitcoin Grant Program Administrator for Arthur Hayes’ Maelstrom Fund. Based in London, Bier’s early career included working as an equity analyst on the Ruffer Japan Fund and the Ruffer Gold Fund. Later, Bier launched and managed the index behind a blockchain equity ETF at Brevan Howard’s former cryptocurrency subsidiary Elwood Asset Management. Today, Bier serves as CIO of Farside Investors.
Founded in 2017, Bitwise is a team of over 100 technology and investment professionals with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London. The firm serves as a crypto-specialist asset management partner to thousands of wealth teams, RIAs, family offices, and institutional clients in the U.S. and Europe.
CAIS
CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, today announced the launch of an enterprise solution designed to integrate alternative investments within Turnkey Asset Management Platforms (TAMPs) and managed account platforms. This new technology enables advisors to seamlessly manage both traditional and alternative investments directly within these platforms, creating more efficiency.
TAMPs and managed account platforms that integrate with CAIS will benefit from the full suite of CAIS’ pre-trade, trade, and post-trade technology capabilities to manage the full lifecycle of subscription-based and ticker-traded alternative investment funds and products. Additionally, CAIS’ modular platform design allows tailored integrations and customizable user experiences.
The CAIS enterprise solution also benefits the alternative asset managers who list funds and products on the CAIS platform by expanding their reach into wealth management. CAIS makes available approximately 200 funds on the CAIS Marketplace, with independent due diligence and monitoring by Mercer.
Compound Planning
Compound Planning, the digital family office reimagining wealth management, makes tax season easier with fully integrated tax filing and planning services. Powered by april, the new tax filing options let clients manage their taxes directly from the Compound dashboard—whether they choose self-service or a guided digital experience through april, or full-service tax filing with a vetted CPA partner.
Tax filing has historically been a fragmented process disconnected from broader financial planning, forcing clients to pursue standalone tax services. Compound is changing that by embedding tax solutions directly into its wealth management platform, ensuring clients can manage every aspect of their financial lives from one location.
Whether a client has a single W2 or needs help managing rental income, equity compensation, private foundations, or multiple legal entities, Compound now offers options for every level of tax complexity. Clients can choose from three service levels based on their specific needs—ranging from self-service filing to full-service support.
Fidelity
Fidelity Investments® today announced the expansion of its model portfolio lineup for wealth management firms with the launch of two new all-ETF model portfolio suites. According to Fidelity’s Portfolio Construction Insights, advisors continue to increase their ETF allocations with 53% of advisors’ portfolios leveraging the vehicle as of Q4 2024, up from 44% in 2023. In fact, the number of investments in unique ETFs within Fidelity Custom Model Portfolios more than doubled between 2022 and 2024, further signaling amplified interest from advisors.
Fidelity® Target Allocation ETF Model Portfolios and Fidelity® Target Risk ETF Model Portfolios are designed for various risk profiles with goals ranging from capital preservation to aggressive growth. They are available on a variety of platforms, including zero cost options such as Fidelity Managed Account Xchange® Essentials (FMAX Essentials), Envestnet’s RIA Marketplace, 55ip, and SMArtY.
Aligned with Fidelity’s commitment to open architecture, these model portfolios offer exposure to a mix of active and passive proprietary and third-party ETFs as well as exposure to a variety of domestic equity, international equity, and fixed income strategies. The Target Risk ETF model also incorporates liquid alternative ETFs for added diversification.
Fin.Link
Fin.Link, the premier platform for financial professionals to connect, grow, and engage, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Republic Capital Group, the leading investment bank specializing in wealth management and financial services. This collaboration is one of many soon-to-be-announced steps Fin.Link is taking as it evolves into an engagement-rich community of service offerings and business solutions.
The alignment with Republic immediately enhances the tools and solutions available to Fin.Link users, providing unprecedented access to valuation insights, and top-tier advisory services. This new feature leverages comparative transaction data to deliver comprehensive, real-time valuation insights for financial professionals. Included in all Fin.Link subscriptions, the tool provides users with a powerful resource for assessing the value of their practices. For those seeking deeper analysis and practice management insights, Republic Capital Group offers direct engagement opportunities alongside the valuation tool.
Foundation Source
Northern Trust is partnering with Foundation Source, a leading provider of cloud-based charitable giving solutions, to help streamline the operational and grantmaking needs of private foundations. The collaboration enhances Northern Trust’s ability to serve private foundations through sophisticated investment and advisory services – all enabled by purpose-built technology.
Northern Trust is a longstanding, trusted partner for private foundations, helping them fulfill their missions with expert guidance and tailored solutions to navigate financial, regulatory and operational challenges. Northern Trust’s clients will now have access to Foundation Source’s best-in-class foundation management platform that includes tracking for minimum distribution requirements, streamlined grant processing and robust reporting, as well as configurable workflows to support the grant application process and impact measurement. The software will be complemented with technology-enabled professional services from Foundation Source that support due diligence on charities and foundation compliance with IRS regulations.
The partnership with Foundation Source builds on other recent moves by Northern Trust to accelerate the growth of its Donor Advised Fund and Private Foundation Administration solutions. In October 2024, Srilatha Lakkaraju joined as Director of Charitable Giving Solutions within the FIA practice, which provides investment advice, asset servicing and related services to nonprofit organizations.
Franklin Templeton
Franklin Templeton today launched the Franklin Crypto Index ETF (EZPZ), an innovative exchange-traded product (ETP) providing exposure to the price movements of the two most prominent cryptocurrencies – bitcoin and ether. EZPZ’s sponsor fee of 0.19 percent will be waived for investors until August 31, 20251.
EZPZ offers investors indirect exposure to the two largest digital assets—bitcoin and ether—through a single investment vehicle. The ETP seeks to track the CF Institutional Digital Asset Index, which is composed of the largest digital assets that comply with the regulations and standards of major financial jurisdictions and capital markets. The index weights by market capitalization and is currently approximately 82 percent to bitcoin and 18 percent to ether. The ETP is managed with secure custody by Coinbase, a trusted leader in digital asset custody.
Building on Franklin Templeton’s legacy of innovation, EZPZ is the firm’s third digital asset ETP launch in just over a year. The first ETP, Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC),was launched on January 11, 2024 and the Franklin Ethereum ETF (EZET) launched on July 23, 2024. This expanding suite of digital assets ETPs highlights Franklin Templeton’s ongoing commitment to providing secure, transparent, and modern investment solutions that address the evolving needs of clients.
InvestCloud
InvestCloud, a global leader in wealth technology, today announced a founding partnership with Apollo (NYSE: APO) to activate the Private Markets Account Network (PMA Network), which was launched with the first-of-its-kind Private Markets Account (PMA) in December 2024. Only available from InvestCloud, the PMA combines public and private assets within a single, unified platform to enable a seamless wealth management experience for financial advisors and their clients.
This collaboration enables InvestCloud’s wealth management clients to incorporate Apollo’s private market model portfolios, and multi-manager models, into their managed account programs through its industry-leading APL platform. By offering efficient access to private markets alongside traditional public market securities, the partnership empowers thousands of advisors to diversify portfolios with confidence and achieve better investment outcomes for millions of clients.
The PMA Network is a connected ecosystem of asset managers, wealth managers, intermediaries, distributors and model creators that will include access to Apollo’s private market model portfolios within the PMA, a centralized point for holding, valuing and rebalancing alternative investments for those who are eligible. The PMA Network will use the InvestCloud platform to connect wealth managers to an array of alternative asset managers, making private markets products available for inclusion in portfolios. Apollo is the founding alternative asset manager in the PMA Network, leading the market on combining private and public market investments in a single portfolio.
NewEdge Wealth
NewEdge Wealth, LLC, a registered investment advisor specializing in serving ultra high net worth families, family offices and institutional clients, announced today that financial advisors can now access the innovative Structured Note Strategies from its investment platform, NewEdge Investment Solutions (NEIS), through the Envestnet and SMArtX platforms. This expansion builds upon NewEdge’s existing relationship with Halo Investing, a platform focused on protective investments, which will serve as NewEdge’s distribution partner on both Envestnet and SMArtX, further broadening access to its sophisticated investment strategies for over 100,000 advisors nationwide.
This offering provides third-party financial professionals and institutions access to many of the same strategies NewEdge Wealth utilizes to help ultra high net worth clients achieve their financial goals. With a forward-thinking and adaptive approach to wealth management, NewEdge Investment Solutions supports investment strategies that are often difficult to access or have structural advantages for clients.
NewEdge Structured Note Strategies aims to simplify the utilization of Structured Notes for clients, advisors and institutions while seeking to mitigate their biggest risks and adding value through active management, trade auction technology and economies of scale that few can match. Specifically, NEIS offers two distinct solutions to enhance and diversify a client’s investment portfolio: the Structured Note Income Portfolio (SNIP) and the Structured Note Advisory Portfolio (SNAP). The SNIP and SNAP strategies are among the first Structured Note Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) available on Envestnet and SMArtX’s platforms.
Payfinia
Payfinia, an open, real-time payments framework, today announced it partnered with TAPP Engine, a B2B2C provider of SaaS embedded finance solutions, to offer an embedded suite of instant payments services to financial institutions (FIs) and wealth management providers.
The partnership enables participating clients to access Payfinia’s full suite of instant payment services, enabling an embedded suite of services to support account-to-account transactions, ACH messaging and instant payments requests. The embedded payment services offering from TAPP Engine and Payfinia is scheduled for availability in Q2.
TAPP Engine provides WealthTech-as-a-service solutions and back-office operations support to financial services providers. Infusing instant payment capabilities into TAPP Engine’s platform enhances the account holder’s ability to manage cash flow within their checking accounts and accelerates the purchase of securities through the connected brokerage account. Account holders also can request immediate withdrawals from the brokerage account to the credit union checking account.
Subscribe
SUBSCRIBE, the leading operating system for alternative investments that digitalizes the investment process for fund managers, institutional investors, wealth managers, law firms, and fund administrators, today announced that is has been selected by LPL Financial Holdings Inc (Nasdaq: LPLA, (“LPL”)) to build a highly customized and fully integrated platform solution to modernizes the firms alternative investments program. LPL is one the nation’s largest independent wealth management firms with over 28,000 financial advisors (including advisors at approximately 1,200 enterprises, and 560 registered investment advisor (“RIA”) firms) that collectively serve over 8.0 million investors nationwide and oversee more than $1.8 trillion in client assets, including Equitable Advisors and Prudential Advisors. Through SUBSCRIBE, LPL is able to centralize their alternative investment products, advisor education, compliance controls, and investment workflows on a single operating system.
Through SUBSCRIBE’s open-architecture platform, LPL Financial Advisors can discover, research, educate, transact, and manage investments across a highly curated menu of products, including private equity, private credit, real estate, hedge funds, 1031 exchanges/DSTs, exchange funds, and feeder funds formed by SUBSCRIBE or other providers.
At the same time, LPL Home Office and Compliance professionals, gain additional confidence in the alternative investments made for clients from the innovative compliance overlays SUBSCRIBE provides that allow for monitoring and supervision. These modules validate advisor registrations and education requirements, account pre-qualification and suitability, sales-kit delivery, and a myriad of additional regulatory and firm specific controls relating to concentration limits and state restrictions for each fund investment, all in real-time and as part of a single flow.
TIFIN
Give, a TIFIN company offering modern philanthropic planning for wealth enterprises, now offers single-charity funds within its flagship platform. Donors can now seamlessly access their donor-advised fund and single-charity fund in a single view, using each vehicle as needed. This capability is designed to help financial advisors enhance their clients’ tax-efficient charitable giving by adding a new strategy for those high-net-worth individuals who have reached the age where required minimum distributions (RMDs) from an IRA kick in.
Clients with Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) must begin taking RMDs at age 73. These distributions may increase taxable income, potentially pushing individuals into a higher tax bracket and limiting the availability of deductions. Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) offer a way to mitigate these tax implications by allowing IRA holders to transfer up to $108,000 annually to charity, satisfying RMD requirements while avoiding additional taxable income. However, QCDs cannot be directed to donor-advised funds, private foundations, or supporting organizations, limiting their use within structured giving vehicles.
Single-Charity Funds provide an alternative by allowing contributions to be earmarked for a specific nonprofit organization while retaining the investment flexibility available within a donor-advised fund (DAF). This enables clients to meet charitable commitments, optimize tax strategies, and maximize the potential impact of their contributions.
