Click here to see my conflicts of interest regarding Envestnet, mentioned in today’s update.
Here are the links to today’s top stories:
Envestnet and BlackRock Enter Strategic Relationship to Enhance the Financial Advisor Experience from Envestnet.com
LPL Financial Announces the Acquisition of AdvisoryWorld from LPL Financial
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
BlackRock Announces Strategic Relationship with Envestnet
First up is news from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, as the company announced a strategic relationship with Envestnet, a provider of research, analytics, portfolio management, and reporting tools for financial professionals, and also announced that the company purchased a 4.9% equity stake in Envestnet for roughly $123 million dollars.
According to a press release, the new partnership will accelerate work to integrate BlackRock Digital Wealth’s technologies into Envestnet’s platform, which includes solutions such as iRetire, FutureAdvisor, and Aladdin Risk for Wealth Management. The partnership also provides Envestnet with additional growth capital, which some analysts expect Envestnet will use for strategic acquisitions in 2019.
LPL Financial Acquires AdvisoryWorld
And speaking of acquisitions, earlier this week, LPL Financial, the nation’s largest broker-dealer announced the $28 million dollar acquisition of Advisory World, an investment analytics technology provider to financial advisers.
The AdvisoryWorld acquisition will bring over 30 years of analytics and technology expertise to LPL, as the company’s tools like proposal generation, hypothetical illustrations, and digital on-boarding workflow have been widely adopted by over 30,000 financial advisors and institutions in the U.S.
I caught up with AdvisoryWorld COO Mike Wilson for his thoughts on the acquisition announcement:
This is just a great opportunity for us to continue to serve our existing clients in new ways and to deliver our capabilities to more people. Leveraging LPL’s resources will allow us to evolve our offerings, we’re going to be able to try new things and to learn from a broader base of customers which will help us deliver the most sophisticated service we can to all of our clients, both existing and new. Something completely that I must underline is LPL has this broad base of experience and knowledge that we can use to widen our offering to different types of products and to a more diverse audience.
For more information, be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for all the links to 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.