Broadridge Financial Solutions and Tifin Group announced Wednesday that Broadridge will be integrating and making available to advisors a range of the latter's startup studio and incubator’s 12 wealthtech applications, each run as a separate company.
This distribution agreement follows the April announcement of a $22.3 million Series B round of funding for Tifin from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Morningstar and Broadridge.
Mike Alexander, president of Wealth Management at Broadridge, noted in a prepared statement that the move was meant to “deepen client relationships via personalization,” a central characteristic in many of Tifin’s offerings.
Among the initial Tifin Group technologies to be integrated are Positivly, Magnifi, Louise and Totum.
The advice personalization platform Positivly will be first out of the gate for distribution, according to the announcement. It helps advisors customize proposals and portfolios to a client's “financial personality.” It will be available as part of Broadridge's premium digital marketing offerings that already include websites and personalized digital content and, soon, the recently acquired AdvisorStream platform.
In January, Tifin announced a major integration for Magnifi, enabling the thousands of advisors that custody assets at Schwab to use the natural-language-based semantic investment search engine to import their clients’ portfolios with a single sign-on and daily data matching. This enabled advisors to have real-time topic-driven or values-based conversations with clients around their portfolios, and look at alternatives as needed.
Remote Work Taxing Company Infrastructures Amid Increasing Vulnerabilities
A recent global survey of 450 IT and security professionals by Check Point Software is a reminder that all firms need to take their security more seriously, especially in light of the increased threats that have arisen over the course of the pandemic—and with the bulk of workers continuing to work remotely.
Among the key findings are that, as many have suspected, remote work makes you more vulnerable.
Forty-five percent of respondents stated that cyber attacks have increased over the course of the pandemic and that the most cited types of attacks were data exfiltration—where data is copied and transferred surreptitiously—and leakage (55%), phishing emails (51%) and account takeovers (44%).
Another major finding was that older corporate infrastructures are strained in trying to sustain today’s remote work requirements. The top three challenges cited by IT and security respondents when it came to supporting remote workforces were scaling performance of their networks to meet the load (46%), addressing privacy and data sovereignty concerns (42%), and supporting remote access for devices used by employees that are not managed by the company (40%).
When it came to top remote worker complaints, the most common reasons for help desk tickets were performance, generally slow connectivity or latency (67%), followed by instability and crashes (66%) and issues related to VPNs (62%).
In efforts to address the need to increase remote access capacity 69% of security professionals report they are adding on-premises capacity, while 66% are moving to cloud-based security and 36% are doing both.
AssetMark Completes Voyant Acquisition
Planning and wellness technology provider Voyant is now part of AssetMark, the latter having announced completion of its $145 million acquisition on July 1.
Voyant’s international footprint stretches to more than 20,000 financial professionals across the United Kingdom to Canada, Ireland and the United States.
AssetMark, known originally as a turnkey asset management platform, had grown to $74.5 billion in AUM and more than 8,400 advisors on its platform at the time the acquisition was announced in March.
The firm’s CEO, Natalie Wolfsen, said she expects the integration of Voyant’s capabilities into its platform to provide “foundational planning” that will be sufficient for some advisors and investors. For others, third-party planning software providers will continue to be an option.
AssetMark services a client base of independent broker/dealers, insurance-affiliated groups and RIAs.