Savvy Advisors, a New York City-based RIA leveraging a proprietary technology platform built by parent fintech firm Savvy Wealth, has added Fidelity as a custodian alongside Charles Schwab as the young firm continues to recruit advisors around the country to work remotely.
Ritik Malhotra, co-founder and CEO of Savvy Wealth and Savvy Advisors, said prospective advisory recruits asked to keep their clients on the Fidelity platform and that having multiple custodial options was always the plan.
“We kicked off the process around September,” he said. “And very quickly after that, maybe a month and a week, we were fully operational and ready to go. Fidelity has an excellent team that really worked with our operations team to get the onboarding done seamlessly, but we always knew it was going to be a multicustodial platform. It wasn’t an ‘if,’ but a ‘when.’
“So, we built it to be able to integrate all the different data feeds and all the things you have to build to support that, which made the whole process easier. Building all the infrastructure for our first custodian took much, much longer.”
Incorporated in July 2021, Savvy Wealth raised venture capital funds before officially launching the affiliated RIA the following summer to create an “all-in-one” wealth management firm supported by responsive, leading-edge technology. The platform is built around a custom advisor dashboard and CRM called Co-Pilot and includes a direct indexing tool introduced last year as well as a new investment management piece, financial planning through an “active, real-time” integration with eMoney and a comprehensive database of alternatives compiled by in-house researchers.
After ending 2023 with 12 advisors and nearing $500 million in recruited assets, Savvy recently welcomed three new advisors, bringing the growing network to 15 and adding approximately $100 million in client assets.
Based in Central Arkansas, Dustin Parsons previously spent 13 years at Arvest Bank and has experience in banking, lending, investing and insurance. Initially a personal banker, he became a client advisor for Arvest Wealth Management in 2017. With expertise in advising clients who have come into sudden wealth, Parsons focuses on helping build and manage retirement, investment, and estate plans.
On the California coast, just north of San Diego in Del Mar, Aaron Wiegman joined Savvy from Financial Sense Wealth Management, where he spent the last five years. As a board member of the San Diego Chapter of the Financial Planning Association, his career includes six years with Saybrus Partners, two with Oakwood Asset Management, five with Del Mar Financial Partners and three with Thrivent Financial.
“I sought the right partner to support my clients' financial goals and my practice growth,” Wiegman posted on LinkedIn last month. “Savvy provides the tools and resources I need to focus on my client relationships and their financial success.”
About two hours north of Wiegman in Beverly Hills, Calif., Arynton Hardy brought his independent practice onto the Savvy platform. Before launching Hardy Capital Investments in April 2019, he spent two years as a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch, following more than three as an analyst for The Pacific Group. Hardy will continue to operate under his eponymous brand.
"The RIA entity is not coming with him, because all the services that he would need to legally be able to operate are being offered by us, but he's still the face and the brand in front of those clients,” explained Malhotra. He noted all clients have already been transitioned to Savvy.
“We are thrilled to partner with these experienced and passionate advisors, who can effectively use our technology to unify every aspect of their clients' financial lives,” Savvy Wealth Growth Leader GinaRose Galli said in a statement.
Malhotra noted that a vital aspect of the evolving platform is its reliance on advisor feedback.
"We’ve actually expanded the feedback loop into the innovative platform development,” he said. "About a year ago, a lot of it was just in-house feedback the advisors were providing in structured weekly meetings to the product and operations teams to help with the development, and then ad hoc feedback here and there.”
As capabilities have been added, Slack communication channels now facilitate an ongoing flow of information between specific service teams and the advisors using those services.
“It’s both proactive and reactive,” Malhotra said. “Advisors can suggest something isn’t working well in the workflow, and we're able to jump on that. And each of these teams can go to them and find out what would make it easier to adopt or make it easier for their clients to understand, which actually makes us better at understanding those interactions.”
Centralized services such as investment management are not compulsory for Savvy Advisors. Still, a few have been directly involved in developing proprietary models that Malhotra said have proved popular.
“Anytime there are customizations needed, that is part of the program,” he added. “They can work in products to enable that as well.”
Innovations on tap for the coming months include product enhancements around investment management, practice management and lead conversion.
“We’re now hitting version 2s and 3s,” Malhotra said. “These improvements are based on advisor feedback on things they’ve now used for a number of months and in a number of different use cases.”
Malhotra, named as one of WealthManagement.com’s Ten to Watch for 2024, expects to triple headcount this year to more than 50 across advisory, product, operations and marketing. He declined to reveal whether Savvy has hit the $500 million AUM mark but said he anticipates sharing more about the firm’s progress later this year.