Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Introducing Free Financial Planning from Wealthfront
Today’s update is all about financial planning software, with the first story coming from Wealthfront, the Silicon Valley-based automated investment service with over 220,000 clients. This week the company announced it will now offer free access to its propriety financial planning software called Path with no investment account required.
Originally launched in February 2017, Path allows customers to illustrate the hypothetical growth of stock market investments, estimate home affordability, calculate projected college tuition costs, and more. Prior to the announcement, investors needed $500 to open a Wealthfront investment account in order to use Path, so the minimum fee to access the service was 25 basis points of $500, or just one dollar and twenty five cents.
SEI Strengthens Automated Workflows through Strategic Partnership with Advizr
Next up is news about Advizr, as SEI Investments recently announced an integration with financial planning software from Advizr to expand the company’s BusinessWise Program for financial professionals. SEI works with over 7,500 financial advisers under its SEI Advisor Network, which was recently rebranded to Independent Advisor Solutions by SEI, and the addition of Advizr to the BusinessWise Program is intended to offer financial professionals the choice of implementing a focused, modular financial plan or a completely holistic plan when engaging clients in the planning process.
See the New RightCapital/Advyzon Integration in Action
And finally, in news from from RightCapital, the financial planning software provider announced a new integration with Advyzon, a cloud-based wealth management platform for investment advisors. Soon advisors will be able to leverage data and portfolio account information maintained in Advyzon to quickly and efficiently populate an initial financial plan inside RightCapital without the need to duplicate data entry.
The companies will demonstrate the new integration in an upcoming webinar held on Tuesday, December 11, so be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for a link to the webinar as well as 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.
On today’s broadcast, Advicent rolls out Figlo to advisors in the United States, YCharts raises another $6 million to dethrone the industry’s dominant research terminal, and SEI rolls out a new program designed to streamline your internal workflow.
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[This week’s top story comes from Advicent, as the company announced the official release of the Figlo™ interactive planning tool in the United States. You should recall that Advicent announced the acquisition of Netherlands-based Figlo back in September 2014 which I covered in episode 141, so they’ve wasted very little time to introduce the planning tool to advisors here in the U.S.
Figlo has nearly 20 years of history in the European marketplace and will bring a suite of features stateside that you should find compelling, especially if you strengthen your client relationships through comprehensive financial planning. So here’s what you can expect:
Figlo offers a prospecting and lead generation tool called Figlo Leads, the Figlo planning tool presents an interactive lifeline and goal gauge for plan illustrations, you can collaborate with clients using the client portal and secure document vault, and you can streamline client data entry through a new integration announced this week with Redtail CRM. The integration is a one-way connection with Redtail to start, but you can expect the data synchronization between the two programs to deepen over time.] Advicent Solutions, the leading provider of SaaS technology solutions for the financial services industry, announced the U.S. release of Figlo™, an interactive financial planning tool within its complete product offering for financial professionals. Advisors leveraging Figlo™ technology will have more opportunities for interactive, meaningful and impactful conversations with both prospects and clients.
[Next up is news from YCharts, as this week the provider of research and interactive charts announced series C funding to the tune of about $6 million, bringing its total funding to approximately $14.5 million. YCharts was founded in 2010 and positioned itself as an alternative to higher-priced research terminals, and in less than five years, the company is proving to be a very powerful and popular research tool for portfolio managers, wealth managers, and independent RIAs.
Back in episode 133, I told you about the new dashboard rolled out by YCharts, but at the time, research was limited to equities and ETFs. Fast forward to today, and YCharts now also offers extensive data on over 40,000 mutual funds. So once again, if detailed research and data plays a significant role in your investment process, you might find YCharts to be an attractive alternative to the high-end terminals so prevalent in the industry, but one that’s available at a fraction of the price.] Shawn Carpenter, co-founder and CEO of YCharts, the Financial Terminal of the Web, announced the closing of a C round of venture funding of about $6 million and the appointment of Jeremy Diamond as chief revenue officer of YCharts. These moves coincide with an acceleration of the company’s growth.
[And finally, rounding out this week’s broadcast is news from SEI, the turnkey asset management provider, that just released a new workflow program called SEI ProcessWise.
Once again, back in 2014 at the T3 conference, I covered SEI’s announcement of their partnership with Redtail CRM, MoneyGuidePro and ActiFi to develop an automated workflow solution for advisors. SEI ProcessWise is the first product of this partnership that is being rolled out to the roughly 6,100 advisors that work with SEI.
SEI ProcessWise provides 48 step-by-step workflow processes that address a variety of client service, account maintenance, and portfolio management activities, and for advisors who already use Redtail CRM in their business, SEI will preconfigure those workflows directly within Redtail to facilitate adoption. In addition to the workflow configurations, SEI is also including three months of training to help advisors implement the automated workflows into their business for a nominal cost.] As financial advisors look for new sources of productivity and efficiency, SEI announced today the launch of SEI ProcessWise, a comprehensive workflow program which streamlines client interactions, sales, marketing, and practice management tasks.
Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:
NFP Advisor Services, a leading independent broker-dealer, announced it will provide integrated access to the Vestorly solution to all affiliated financial advisors which includes over 1,400 registered representatives.
On today’s broadcast, a serious security flaw impacts two-thirds of the Internet. How this may affect the information you store online. Betterment announces the launch of an Institutional platform. Will they start winning turnkey asset management business from advisors? And learn how a new integration between Redtail and Riskalyze will help you monitor client portfolios to keep them in line with your client’s risk tolerance.
[Leading off this week’s broadcast is news of a critical security flaw in a web browser encryption standard called OpenSSL, in use by an estimated two-thirds of all the servers connected to the Internet.
To summarize, the flaw, called “Heartbleed,” allows an attacker to use messages called “heartbeats” to trick a server into passing along sensitive information from its memory, which could include account passwords or the server’s private encryption keys. When hackers get access to that information, really bad things can happen.
So what can you do in response to the Heartbleed vulnerability? In all honesty, not too much. Assume the worst-case scenario, that an attacker has compromised your online passwords, so consider updating your passwords for affected websites to one that’s longer and more difficult to crack. You should also activate multi-factor authentication for any service where it is supported.] Researchers have discovered a serious flaw known as Heartbleed that affects the security software that runs on about two-thirds of the servers on the internet and could expose user data, including passwords. Here’s what you need to know about it
[Next is an update from the online investment advice category, as this week Betterment revealed plans to introduce an institutional version of its technology to financial advisors.
In a fascinating report, RIABiz detailed how plans for Betterment Institutional were made public this week at the Tiburon CEO Summit in New York, as Betterment CEO Jon Stein and new Betterment partner and investor Steve Lockshin, known for founding Fortigent and Convergent Wealth Advisors, were both in attendance.
The soon-to-be-released offering from Betterment takes direct aim at existing turnkey asset management platforms, or TAMPs, which include well-known names like SEI, Envestnet, Adhesion, and even Fortigent itself, with an ultra-low cost offering of around 35 basis points all in.
Cut-throat pricing isn’t the only attraction of Betterment Institutional, as both advisors and clients will likely benefit from access to Betterment’s slick online dashboards and mobile app support for Android and iPhone. So if you’ve considered outsourcing your investment management and reporting to a TAMP, Betterment Institutional will be a solution that deserves your close attention over the coming months.] Steve Lockshin lays out his plans for TAMP-like venture and how Michael Kitces, a public critic of the Betterment CEO, very much fits in
[And finally, rounding out this week’s update is news of a new integration between Redtail Technology and Riskalyze. Redtail, known for its CRM, email, and imaging solutions now synchronizes client assets with Riskalyze, a client risk tolerance assessment tool and my pick for best client-facing technology of 2013, on a nightly basis.
In the other direction, Riskalyze updates client risk scores based on the synchronized account information and pushes them along with the client Risk Numbers over to the client’s profile in Redtail CRM. This is a time-saving upgrade as users of both solutions will no longer have to manually switch back and forth to keep assets or Risk Numbers up to date.] Redtail, the industry leader in advisor CRM, email and imaging, and Riskalyze, the company that invented the Risk Number, today announced a next-generation integration partnership that delivers incredible tools for advisors to grow their practices.
And here are stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:
On today’s broadcast, find out who earned the most buzz at the industry’s top technology conference this week. Which custodian just joined the integration arms race? Which partnership will put downward pricing pressure on account aggregation costs? And who launched a new social CRM with an all-out media blitz?
[Unless you’ve been buried in snow or covered in ice, you probably know that T3, the industry’s top technology conference for advisors, was held in southern California this week. There are too many new companies and press releases to cover in just one broadcast, so here are the stories I feel are most relevant for you.] T3 2014 is the place to be and be seen for all things financial adviser technology
[First is an update from SEI, the investment outsourcing provider, who just announced a new strategic partnership to bring integrations to its SEI Wealth Platform(SM). By the end of 2014, SEI will integrate an automated workflow solution using Redtail CRM and MoneyGuidePro financial planning software, all powered by workflows customized by ActiFi. While advisors will need to subscribe to Redtail and MoneyGuidePro, workflows will be available to the nearly 6,000 advisors who work with SEI at no additional cost. This partnership will likely boost SEI’s profile among institutional custodians known for their technology integrations that help advisors run more efficient businesses.] SEI announces strategic partnerships and enters the integration arms race dominated by four leading custodians
[Next up is news from MoneyGuidePro, who told a packed house at T3 that the financial planning software program will soon provide account aggregation capabilities through a new integration with Yodlee, the largest data platform provider in financial services. When I mention account aggregation, you probably think of companies like ByAllAccounts, Fiserv’s CashEdge, or perhaps even Intuit, but these solutions are often too expensive for many growing RIAs to implement.
With the new MoneyGuidePro and Yodlee integration, advisors will be able to aggregate data from over 12,000 financial institutions for an introductory price of $365 per year. <That’s right, it’s just a dollar per day!> Expect the Yodlee integration to rollout during the second quarter of 2014.] Popular MoneyGuidePro financial planning software to aggregate held away accounts through a new Yodlee integration
[And rounding out my abridged coverage of T3 is the launch of a new platform designed to help advisors embrace social collaboration tools in their business. The platform is Wealthbox CRM, which deployed an all-out media blitz this week, including the sponsorship of this week’s broadcast, to get the product in front of advisors.
There are about a dozen CRM vendors in the marketplace, so financial advisors could stand to benefit from a few more choices among providers. And what makes Wealthbox CRM unique is the embedded realtime collaboration functions, better known under the banner of Social CRM.
Wealthbox CRM lets you tag clients and employees in status updates, just like you would when tagging friends or contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can use those tags along with other information displayed in the CRM’s activity stream to find out what you should be doing for clients, what employees are doing for clients, and what clients are saying on their social media profiles.
The Social CRM feature is just one of many in the new product, and Wealthbox CRM’s introductory price of $29 per month per user places it squarely between the affordable CRM from Redtail and premium pricing from CRMs like Junxure Cloud and Salesforce.] CRMs powered by social collaboration and real-time updates could be the next game-changer in the industry.
And here are stories that didn’t make it into this week’s broadcast:
Raymond James Financial, Inc. has partnered with HiddenLevers, the portfolio stress testing toolkit, to provide macro research, scenario modeling and predictive risk analytics. Now, any of Raymond James’ 5,400 US-based advisors can subscribe to HiddenLevers to proactively discuss potential economic and market scenarios with clients, and gauge the impact on individual investment portfolios.
left to right: Redtail Technology CEO Brian McLaughlin, ActiFi CEO Spenser Segal, PIETech CIO Tony Leal, SEI Advisor Network Director of Research and Validation Raef Lee
SEI announces strategic partnerships and enters the integration arms race dominated by four leading custodians
When you think of custodians that make headlines for technology integration initiatives, four institutions likely come to mind.
The “Big Four” Integrated Custodians
In no particular order, Schwab Advisor Services, Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, TD Ameritrade Institutional, and Pershing LLC are the custodians most advisers observe as each tries to one-up the other in the technology integration arms race.
On a side note, emerging advisers with small but growing businesses are paying attention to developments at TradePMR, Scottrade, and Shareholders Service Group.
SEI Enters The Integration Arms Race
But another custodian looking to enter the arms race of integration is SEI, the Oaks, Penn.-based company providing outsourced services to financial advisers for more than 20 years. SEI serves over 5,700 advisors who collectively manage over $41 billion in assets under management.
Raef Lee, Director of Research and Validation. SEI Advisor Network
In a pre-conference meeting at T3 2014, Raef Lee, Director of Research and Validation for the SEI Advisor Network, revealed that the company is entering into a strategic partnership with leading technology and consulting providers Redtail Technology, MoneyGuidePro, and ActiFi.
In development for the last 18 months, and actively under construction for the last nine, SEI plans to rollout the complete solution to advisers by the end of 2014.
Cross Application Workflow Automation
“The partnership will provide the first true cross application workflow automation platform for end-to-end processing orchestrated across multiple applications,” said Spenser Segal, founder and CEO of ActiFi.
In other words, advisers using SEI’s new integrated solution will be able to initiate workflows in Redtail that then execute actions on the custodial side without ever leaving the Redtail environment. It’s the “without ever leaving Redtail” that makes this solution unique.
From Financial Plans to Proposals
Another key differentiator of SEI’s proposed solution is the ability to generate investor proposals using information previously created in MoneyGuidePro financial plans.
“There’s never been a good integration with a proposal system, so having this new integration to seamlessly pass account and client information is the most exciting thing about this solution,” said Tony Leal, CIO and partner at PieTech, the providers of MoneyGuidePro financial planning software.
No Cost Integration
SEI also announced that the new integrated solution will be offered at no cost to advisers who affiliate with SEI.
Advisers will need to purchase standard subscriptions to Redtail CRM and MoneyGuidePro, which combined cost less than $2,000 per year. However, activating and using the SEI solution is free.
