On today’s broadcast, Pershing partners with a new company for your digital advice delivery needs, Wealth Access continues its growth in the PFM space, and find out how open source code called Wealthbot could pose a serious challenge to automated investment services.
So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now.
(WatchFPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)
Here are the links to this week’s top stories:
Pershing Implements Multi-faceted Digital Enablement Strategy to Help Advisors Embrace the Digital Revolution from Pershing, and
Pershing Introduces Managed360™ to Help Advisors Efficiently Grow Their Managed Accounts Business from Pershing
Marstone Digital Wealth on the web
[Let’s jump right in to this week’s top story with a recap of the Pershing INSITE conference held in Orlando last week, as one of the top institutional custodians for advisors made several technology-related announcements. First up is news of a partnership to allow advisors to offer their own white-labeled online investment service which will be powered by a company called Marstone.
Now if the name Marstone doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry, because it’s only the second time I’ve even heard of them after a chance encounter I had with company executives at the IBM World of Watson event last month. In fact, the company is so new that their latest Form ADV disclosure shows assets of just $15,500 held in two clients accounts. That’s right, two accounts.
Now the few screenshots available from the Marstone website show a reasonably attractive interface, but with a retail investor offering that’s still in beta and an advisor solution that has yet to roll out, it’s just too early for me to say whether or not Marstone is going to gain wide adoption among advisors, especially when there are more seasoned competitors out there like Jemstep, Betterment Institutional, Oranj and more.
But, Marstone will be the first of several anticipated solutions that will integrate with Pershing’s NetX360 platform for advisors as well as the NetXInvestor solution for end clients.
Pershing also announced a new managed account solution called Managed360 that will leverage investment strategies and managed portfolio offerings from Lockwood Advisors, which also happens to be an affiliate of Pershing. Also coming in the future is a Pershing API store which is a catalog of APIs along the lines of the TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo Open Access platform, allowing third-party providers to more easily integrate with the Pershing ecosystem.] At its INSITE™ 2015 conference, Pershing LLC, a BNY Mellon company, today announced a multi-faceted digital enablement strategy designed to revolutionize how advisors and investors work together in 2015 and beyond.
Wealth Access Hires 7 Veterans to Continue Growth from PRWeb
[Next up is news from Wealth Access, the Nashville-based provider of a personal financial dashboard for high net worth clients, as this week the company announced the growth of its business with seven new hires in the last few months, as well as a 350% year-over-year increase in total assets aggregated in the platform, a figure that now exceeds $20 billion.
You know that merger and acquisition activity in the personal financial management space this year has been on a tear, with Fidelity acquiring eMoney, Northwestern Mutual scooping up LearnVest, and John Hancock picking up Guide Financial, so Wealth Access is pretty much one of the last independent PFM platforms out there serving advisors that has no direct custodial or insurance company connection.
So like I’ve said in previous broadcasts, you would be wise to keep an eye on this company.] Wealth Access, an innovative high net worth personal financial management platform for advisors, announced growing momentum in the adoption of the Wealth Access technology solution by advisors, with record year over year growth and the hiring of seven senior technology and financial services veterans.
Wealthbot.io from GitHub
[And finally, wrapping up the week is an interesting discovery I made on the Internet called Wealthbot. Now stick with me on this one. Wealthbot is open source code published on the GitHub repository that can be used to create your own wealth management platform.
Not satisfied with the commercial wealth management solutions available today? That’s right, you can now build your own robo advisor, I mean, automated investment service. Now developers should get excited about the possibilities here, but advisors using Wealthbot directly? Well, that’s probably not going to happen without significant help from programmers.
But here’s the thing: online services like Wealthfront, Betterment, Future Advisor, even Schwab Intelligent Portfolios have attracted huge amounts of attention and venture capital for their software-based investment algorithms. So what happens to the value of those companies when code that mirrors their functionality is published on the Internet, for free?
Could Wealthbot be the next WordPress, OpenOffice, or Firefox of robo advisors? That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you’re watching FPPad Bits and Bytes.] Wealthbot.io makes it easy to launch a Wealth Management Platform. Build and customize your very own version of a robo-advisor.
Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for June 12, 2015
