Tech-focused advisory Farther revealed it reached a total AUM of $1.6 billion.
According to the firm, it officially surpassed the $1 billion AUM threshold in September.
Its latest AUM announcement represents a jump of more than two times the firm’s previously reported assets, which from its previously filed Form ADV from June, had it at just over $675 million. The firm has grown its headcount significantly over the past year too, expanding now to 120 employees, more than double a year ago.
Rather than revealing the increased AUM in September, Father announced a Series B funding round of $31 million. At that time the firm, founded in 2019, touted the successful closure of its “oversubscribed” round, noting its Series A closed just one year prior. This brought Farther to a total of $53 million raised since launch. Leading the Series B round was Lightspeed Venture Partners, which was joined by previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Cota Capital, Khosla Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and Moneta Venture Capital.
Farther’s founders are Taylor Matthews—who previously headed up account management, customer success and business operations at small-business 401(k) provider ForUsAll, a strategy management role at Deloitte and most recently co-founded an Indian B2B e-commerce platform—and Bradley Genser, a West Point graduate and Army veteran who holds both an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from MIT and before founding his startup spent five years with Goldman Sachs.
Farther is also a multi-custodial operation, having assets held at Apex, Fidelity, Pershing, and Schwab.
Wealthfront Hits $50B In Assets
And not to steal Farther's thunder, but Wealthfront, one of the two pioneering roboa dvisors (the other being Betterment) that many advisors have and continue to love to hate, announced it crossed a threshold of its own: $50 billion in client assets. Those who closely read the company's press release will note that it states Wealthfront now "oversees more than $50 billion in client assets." Its latest SEC Form ADV filed on Oct. 31 shows that assets under management are currently at $24.5 billion.
It is likely the $25 billion in other client assets originated from the several additional products and services the company has rolled out in recent years, chief among them is its cash and banking-like services. Wealthfront raised its annual percentage yield on cash accounts to 5% earlier in November. In recent years the company had expanded into not only cash management, but lending, and introduction most recently of an Automated Bond Portfolio.
In the press release, the firm attributed its growth to "new clients, a higher share of wallet among existing clients, and additional revenue diversity for the business."
Wealthfront also stated it has now reached profitability; current CEO David Fortunato had written the firm would "be cash flow positive and EBITDA profitable in the next few months" in September of 2022 after a planned acquisition by UBS fell through.
Income Lab Selects BridgeFT's WealthTech API
Retirement management software provider Income Lab selected BridgeFT's WealthTech API to aggregate multi-custodial data.
BridgeFT is a cloud-native technology provider of core software infrastructure to advisory firms, which launched in 2015. To date, it has been best known for its cloud-based performance reporting and fee billing offering called Atlas. The company has worked with a variety of clients, including RIA firms, financial institutions (including trust firms and others) as well as other fintechs. BridgeFT first launched its WealthTech API in January.
In May, Zoe Financial, a find-an-advisor service, announced it had selected BridgeFT's WealthTech API to power its data connectivity and infrastructure.
Chief Innovation Officer Justin Fitzpatrick and CEO Johnny Poulsen co-founded Income Lab in 2018. The firm introduced a beta version of its cloud-based software in early 2020 for the financial advisory and planning market.
In September 2021, Income Lab completed a seed financing round, raising $1.7 million from industry executives and investors.
In May, Income Lab debuted its Retirement Stress Test tool. The tool was designed to show financial advisors how their clients might use spending adjustments to navigate difficulties, including market volatility or high inflation. It includes the option to run plans through real-life historical scenarios, including the Great Depression of the 1930s, the post-war period, the 1970s stagflation, the 1990s dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to showing how income adjustments would help keep plans on track during these headwinds, advisors are also able to compare different strategies simultaneously.
Income Lab is one of several such providers to tackle the retirement income problem. IncomeConductor is being used mostly by planners and registered investment advisors, while IncomeDiscovery has pursued larger players, including financial institutions and independent broker/dealers. Another, Income Solver, is a decumulation strategy overlay application.
Summit Wealth Systems Adds LifeYield To Platform
The portfolio management platform provider Summit Wealth Systems revealed it added LifeYield. The partnership will incorporate tax-saving, multi-account rebalancing into its platform, according to the company.
Summit Wealth Systems is a modern wealth management platform that includes portfolio accounting and reporting at its core, with wealth modeling, rebalancing and client communication capabilities built into a unified system. The firm publicly launched at the 2020 Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference by serial technology entrepreneur Reed Colley along with former Advent colleague Anthony Sperling. Colley first appeared at T3 over a decade before with the launch of his cloud-based performance reporting platform, Black Diamond. Colley sold Black Diamond to rival Advent Software in 2011 for $73 million and led the integration of the platform into that firm. Advent was subsequently acquired by SS&C for $2.3 billion four years later.
LifeYield was founded by Wealthmanagement.com “Ten To Watch In 2018” honoree Mark Hoffman. Hoffman has been disrupting financial services for some time: a University of Wisconsin–Madison computer science graduate, he sold his first firm, Lattice Trading, which automated securities trading, to State Street Brokerage Services in 1996. He and his longtime business partner, Paul Samuelson then founded Upstream Technologies, an early player in automating asset management, before selling to what is now FiServ in 2007.
AdvicePay Surpasses A Million Transactions
AdvicePay, the billing and payment system for financial advisors, announced its fee-for-service platform reported it surpassed 1 million financial planning fee transactions.
AdvicePay was launched in 2018 by co-founders Alan Moore and Michael Kitces.
The firm originated as a tool to handle billing for advisor members of the XY Planning Network who charged monthly retainer fees. Since then, an enterprise version of the service has expanded to larger clients, including Cetera Financial Group, Cambridge Investment Research, Kestra Financial and LPL Financial, as well as being integrated with Envestnet | MoneyGuide.
AdvicePay has raised a total of $3.8 million in funding over four rounds, according to Crunchbase.com, and in the past two years, has more than doubled the number of advisors on the platform.
In February, Moore—the then-CEO of AdvicePay and XY Planning Network—posted on LinkedIn that he would be leaving his position at AdvicePay and moving into the role of executive chairman of the board.
In July, Alex Sauickie was named as AdvicePay’s next CEO. Sauickie was previously global head of wealth and retirement services at FIS, with earlier tenures as president and CEO of CircleBlack.