Savvy Advisors, a technology-focused registered investment advisory firm founded by financial software company Savvy Wealth and CEO Ritik Malhotra in early 2022, has recruited the 11th advisor to its “AI-powered” platform.
Michael Most joins a growing collective of independent advisors operating on the Savvy platform and ADV, while working from home offices around the nation. Savvy is based in New York City, with another office location near the Vancouver border in northwest Washington state, and has 10 advisors spread across at least six additional states and in several key markets.
In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Most joins Savvy Advisors from LPL Financial, where he spent more than a decade as an advisor and managed around $80 million in client assets. Prior to that, he was a senior financial advisor with Ameriprise Financial Services.
The firm's largest recruit to date, Most expects to take advantage of the AI-enabled lead generation and marketing tools on Savvy's platform to boost growth and scale his practice.
“The possibilities are endless,” he said in a statement. “I have access to cutting-edge technology that will allow me to enhance client satisfaction and streamline back-office tasks—all while growing my practice exponentially.
“I can confidently say that what Savvy is building is exceptional,” he added.
The Savvy Advisors platform—dubbed Copilot—debuted in July and is built on proprietary client relationship management software developed by Savvy Wealth that leverages generative AI to consume and return data points, client insights and next-best-actions, alleviate onerous administrative tasks, automate certain investment and financial planning functions and create effective marketing strategies.
All generative AI aspects are advisor-facing. “We never have AI that’s publishing content for clients," said Malhotra. "But it can reduce the time it takes to do that by 80%.”
API integrations with other desired tools are also available to Savvy advisors. The firm currently has functioning integrations with Schwab, its custodian, and eMoney’s financial planning software, as well as “a few” background tools assisting with things like billing and reconciliation. Malhotra said the platform was developed to be an open-architecture environment that can work with "best-in-class" tools catering to a wide variety of advisors.
“When we started the company, we said we wanted to build our own technology,” he said. “But we wanted to do it without any ego, and it would be an ambitious task to build everything ourselves. So, we’re looking at the options out there and are building tools—like our onboarding system—in areas where we think the industry hasn’t gotten to where we want to be.”
The Savvy platform also offers a fully integrated client portal to facilitate communication and information sharing, as well as an in-house direct indexing tool that was also rolled out earlier this year.
Malhotra said the latest enhancements have proved attractive to potential recruits.
Incorporated in July 2021, Savvy Wealth proceeded to raise venture capital through two funding rounds before officially launching its affiliated RIA with no advisors or assets in August 2022. Six months later, the firm had attracted a half dozen advisors and more than $100 million in assets. After taking a pause in early 2023 to assess progress and roll out the direct indexing and platform tools, Savvy is back at it and has added six more advisors in recent months.
Malhotra said he hopes to triple the number of advisors on the platform by the end of next year.
“I think we could do it. I think we really hit a nerve in terms of where we are in the market and been able to recruit some amazing folks on the team, and I think we can continue that,” he said.
Vamsi Yadlapati, a former Focus Financial executive who sits on Savvy’s board of advisors, said he has no doubt the firm will surpass that goal.
“Even though Savvy is an earlier stage business, they have created a very unique AI-driven platform that I have yet to see a comparison to in the industry,” he told WealthManagment.com. “The company continues to innovate, which is at the core of its culture. Savvy consistently leans on its advisors to help steer its product roadmap, and I believe this culture of innovation will allow the firm to stay one step ahead of the market.”
Malhotra declined to disclose exact amounts before year-end but said the latest spate of recruits will bring Savvy Advisors closer to $500 million in managed assets. Advisors are given the option of joining as W-2 employees or 1099 affiliates and aren’t required to adopt Savvy branding—but virtually all have. Two of the eleven advisors have chosen to co-brand alongside the firm.
Savvy has an in-house recruitment team and is set up to onboard advisors from every industry channel. Primarily focused on advisors midway into their career—with some experience but also some runway—who have niche areas of focus, the firm has found the majority of its recruits in the independent arena.
“So that’s kind of where we center our own outbound efforts,” Malhotra said. “The wirehouse one, not so much just yet. … One of our first few advisors was actually running his own RIA and was looking to lessen the burden of all of that. Those are the folks that we've found the most success with.”
He also said Savvy receives a good amount of inbound interest through its venture capital partners—including companies like Uber, PayPal and Airbnb—as well as online visibility.
“There’s no one silver bullet here, so I think we want to make sure we’re covering all of our bases."
Within the next 10 years, Malhotra said the goal is to “really be the best-in-class technology-powered wealth management platform,” able to support advisors along whole spectrum of services.
“We want to be able to say that we can handle anything related to finances and money clients need—whether that is wealth management, investment management, or it could be risk, insurance, paying bills, banking and things like that,” he said. “What we hope to accomplish is to really be the all-in-one financial place for both advisors and clients.”