Wealth management technology providers continue to make moves in the industry. This month has seen new partnerships and new service offerings. Here are our perspectives on five headlines that caught our eye this month:
Wealth.com has moved up the scale in importance and relevance in financial and estate planning quickly in the last few years. The fact that it has garnered the attention of very large firms like Cetera, gained an investment by Schwab and is considering integrations with eMoney Advisor and others is great. In the next 12 months, we’re looking forward to how much integration materializes for advisors as well as its continued ubiquity in the space by truly incorporating other data and creating seamless client experiences between investing and planning.
More advisors who want to fill a larger space with their clients are turning to lending (mortgage lending, securities-backed lending, non-purpose loans, etc.). This is a sign advisors see themselves as financial quarterbacks for end investors. In this area, we see bank-based advisors staying with the banks because they can be a quarterback with the entire relationship, but if RIAs start to do the same thing, and firms like Sora and Flourish together can deliver more banking services, we’ll have a really interesting competition between RIAs. More of this is in our future. In fact, Edward Jones hopes to extend its services as well and has applied for a bank charter (something it did in 2020, but then withdrew in 2022).
Goldman Sachs has a good RIA custody platform with a phenomenal Goldman Sachs-backed banking platform behind those assets. For Dynasty to help advisors break away from wirehouses, where they have those banking products, a relationship with Goldman makes so much sense. Goldman can give Dynasty’s breakaway advisors almost everything they had from a banking standpoint. We would expect the next phase for firms like Dynasty helping advisors break away, is to offer trust and estate services alongside the regular investment and custody services.
The ability to connect marketing content and client engagement with the details that Catchlight can extract from the CRM is powerful. Technology can now connect the dots between what we know about our clients and our content to enhance their experience with our brand, finding those nuggets that appeal to each client individually. We’ve been talking at F2 for the last year about the confluence of marketing and advisor technology, and this is another example of the emergence of its integration into the advisor desktop.
We don’t see anything in the Robinhood plan that shows it’s learned its lesson from the original vastly over-hyped and under-delivered robo advisor of 10 years ago. We don’t think courting a savvier investor will pay off. None of this cap and cost drove the market to robo advisors before. Instead, they wanted to have a relationship with the advisor, and it wasn’t about the cost of being served. The only exception could be some self-directed investors who want a lower-cost version of something, but likely, they would have gone to a model-based portfolio system a while ago anyway.
We’ll have more to come in May as the industry pushes forward in its quest to find the best uses of technology to serve investors.