Pete Dorsey, a seasoned financial services executive with tenure at LPL Financial, Altruist and TD Ameritrade, has teamed up with two partners to launch Wing Financial, a registered investment advisor and digital financial planning application.
“After 30 years in corporate America, I decided that if I’m going to grind for the last chapter of my life, I prefer to do it for myself,” Dorsey said in an interview with WealthManagement.com.
Most recently, Dorsey was at LPL as an executive vice president of institution services, the team responsible for the independent broker/dealer’s bank, credit union and enterprise clients. He left last summer.
Dorsey co-founded the tech startup alongside Sean Wing, the former CEO of August, a platform for artists, and John Sharpe, who has a background in commercial real estate. The three, along with 11 engineers, have been “bootstrapping” the platform, which now has a couple thousand users, he says. They’re using Apex Fintech Solutions for custody.
The technology will initially be distributed through financial advisors, banks and retirement providers, but they plan to take it direct-to-consumers next year.
Wing has raised some money already from a handful of RIAs alongside James Vincent, an advertising executive responsible for some of Apple’s biggest marketing campaigns. Dorsey declined to say how much has been raised in seed funding.
The application is a “client-led” platform in which an artificial intelligence engine asks users a series of questions on personal situations, resources and goals, similar to those that an advisor would ask.
Combining that with other reference points, the app can capture up to 300 data points. Clients generate a “micro plan,” with goals they choose, like saving for retirement, taking a vacation to Thailand, getting a pet, or having enough money to quit a job for something more rewarding but less lucrative. The technology then provides guidance based on the data collected.
The ability for immediate personalization around the next-gen client is a differentiator, Dorsey says. “I’ve done this with an advisor, and it’s awful,” he said. “In the traditional status quo model, you get a 65-page document that you probably never look at and never gets updated.” With Wing, clients create their own roadmaps.
The system will recommend a portfolio, but unlike some traditional robos, they can allocate the assets to an advisor’s particular models.
“And with those 300 different data points, I would say that the financial advice one size fits all is over,” Dorsey said. “This is being replaced by deeply personalized guidance that is essentially rooted in every stage of a client’s life, from risk tolerance to your liquidity, your aspirations, your evolving circumstances.
Dorsey added that for many advisors, the bottom 20-30% of their book is under a one-size-fits-all model, and they’re probably losing money on those clients.
Wing’s ambition is to provide financial advice and guidance to the 150 million households in America that don’t have the net worth to qualify for a wealth advisor’s minimums, he added. At the same time, it provides advisors with a more efficient business model for those same households, lowering costs and opening up firm capacity. The idea: Hook those clients early, and bring them into the firm’s higher service models as their assets accumulate.
There’s a per-household license that starts at $240 a year ($20 a month) and then scales down depending on how many licenses the advisor holds. At the moment, the advisors are picking up the cost of the technology.
Once they take the platform direct to consumers, Dorsey says he envisions a referral mechanism to financial advisors.
“The future of this business in my mind is going to be deep personalization at scale,” Dorsey said. “And the question that advisors need to be asking themselves is, how can you use the AI-driven insights to enable your firm to truly understand each client’s very unique values and behaviors and financial goals?”