Fresh off its recent rebranding announcement, Nitrogen has introduced a new pricing model aimed at scaling firms with three to nine advisors. Nitrogen Ignite sits between the software provider’s plan for solo practitioners (Nitrogen Elite) and its plan for large registered investment advisors with 10-plus advisors (Nitrogen Ultimate). It includes all the features available to Elite customers, in addition to a suite of analytics and insights for those managing the growth and retention goals of an RIA firm.
“As Nitrogen Elite is perfect for the elite solo advisor and Nitrogen Ultimate is perfect for firms with 10-plus advisors or multiple offices, Nitrogen Ignite has been built just for scaling firms who need a consistent client experience and a central place to manage it all,” said Justin Boatman, chief product officer at Nitrogen.
With the announcement, Nitrogen has introduced a suite of firmwide capabilities, including its new Insights dashboard for both Ignite and Ultimate customers. The Insights dashboard features a range of metrics, including book-level Risk Number (client risk tolerance); GPA, an efficiency metric for portfolios and models; tax drag; recent growth trends and other data insights. It also allows firms to benchmark those against other firms of similar size.
Insights also includes portfolio construction tendencies to help judge the risk and quality of each advisor's portfolios, risk alignment across clients and aggregate client sentiment.
That means that firms can use Insights to judge the risk and quality of each advisor’s portfolios — particularly helpful if your firm supports “advisor as portfolio manager.”
The Insights dashboard has been in the works for over a year, and the firm has completely rebuilt all of the data architecture underneath the platform, using Snowflake to power it, CEO Aaron Klein said. (Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse and data analytics provider).
Previously, it would take a long time to calculate a lot of those insights because the software was using 10-year-old database technology, he said.
“There was also a history issue; we couldn’t show you the trend over time,” Klein said. “Leveraging the latest data architecture, we’ve rebuilt all of that to use some of the more modern cloud technologies, where now we can actually, in milliseconds, be able to show an Insights dashboard that shows these kinds of changes over time.”
When you start to grow a firm to three to nine advisors, that’s when one needs these firmwide insights, Klein said. And it’s now possible through one firmwide data feed, where the firm brings the data feed in from the custodian and then routes the data with rep codes. That compares to each individual advisor having to connect up their accounts into their clients on their own.
“This is quickly going to become a critical part of your growth platform because you can’t grow what you can’t measure,” Boatman said. “All of this has been built upon a new architecture that makes it seamless to bring data in on all of these clients and holdings and accounts.”
The Insights dashboard will be available next month, while the Ignite plan is available now.
Klein first revealed that Riskalyze would rebrand and change the company name during its annual summit in Salt Lake City last October; he announced last month it settled on “Nitrogen” as its new brand name. The company says the name better reflects its identity as a “growth platform,” which Klein defined as the organization’s approach to help firms turn meetings into clients (and by extension, assets into firms’ asset platforms). He described firms’ needs for growth solutions as the center of a donut hole they try to fill with services and tech that, while useful in their own right, were never designed or suited specifically for that task.
The growth platform is a hole in the industry that should sit in between marketing, CRM and the asset platform, according to Klein. Other industries use the terms “sales enablement” and “client success,” and those are two sides of the coin that make up a growth platform.
“We have a unique challenge in our profession,” Klein said. Wealth management is one of a few industries that has taken practitioners, who oftentimes study finance and economics, and “thrust them into the role of being the salespeople for our firms. Most of them don’t want to be salespeople at all.”
“By delivering the only purpose-built growth platform for wealth management firms, we can turn those fiduciary advisors into growth engines for their firms without twisting them into the salespeople they don’t want to be.”