Here are the links to today’s top stories.
Marcus by Goldman Sachs® Announces Acquisition of Clarity Money from Businesswire.com
United Capital Makes FinLife Platform Compatible with Other CRMs from Wealthmanagement.com
NorthStar Financial Agrees to Acquire FTJ FundChoice from Businesswire.com
Orion Advisor Services is one of my consulting clients. See my full disclosures at fppad.com/disclaimer
Welcome to the FPPad fintech briefing, I’m back from spring break, so here are the top fintech stories you need to know today
Marcus by Goldman Sachs® Acquires Clarity Money
Goldman Sachs, one of the largest investment banks in the world, is becoming a bigger player in the personal financial management space as it just completed its acquisition of a budgeting app called Clarity Money. First reported by Bloomberg back in February, the acquisition rolls in Clarity Money’s one million users into Goldman Sachs’ direct to consumer financial services brand that goes by the name Marcus, which currently offers no-fee fixed rate personal loans and high-yield savings accounts to consumers.
Terms of the the deal were not disclosed, but Clarity Money reportedly raised $14.5 million dollars in two rounds from its investors since 2016 according to data from Crunchbase.
United Capital Financial Advisors Introduces FinLife CX
United Capital Financial Advisors, the nationwide $20 billion dollar rollup firm, announced an update to its FinLife technology platform called FinLife CX that will allow financial advisers to use the proprietary platform without having to migrate from the CRM software they already use. Introduced in mid-2016, the FinLife platform heavily leverages Salesforce and the Heroku cloud development platform, so advisers traditionally had to convert their existing CRM data to Salesforce in the first few months of adopting the FinLife platform. With the introduction of FinLife CX, United Capital hopes to reach a wider segment of advisers interested in the the firm’s consolidated portfolio reporting, client portal, and advisor dashboard tools.
Orion Advisor Services Parent Company Acquires FTJ FundChoice
And finally, Orion Advisor Services is in the news once again as its parent company, NorthStar Financial, announced the acquisition of FTJ FundChoice, a turnkey asset management firm with approximately $10 billion in assets under administration. The deal will allow Orion to complement its technology platform with a mature asset management provider under a single contract and service agreement. For more information on the acquisition, I connected with Orion Advisor Services CEO Eric Clarke:
Thank you Bill. At NorthStar and especially at Orion, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of a decade-long client partner of ours, FTJ FundChoice. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Dean Cook and his team to bring FTJ’s managed account capabilities to our Orion advisors and enterprise-level prospects.
Orion Advisor Services is one of my consulting clients, so visit fppad.com/disclaimer for my full conflict of interest disclosure, and visit fppad.com/flashbriefing to get the links to all of today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
