We love bringing you our word on wealthtech, which is why we’ve decided to shed light on six news-making headlines this month instead of our usual five. Here’s our unbiased take on some big wealthtech headlines:
InvestCloud Names Jeff Yabuki CEO
InvestCloud appointed Jeff Yabuki as chairman and CEO to replace former CEO John Wise. The departure of its founders and early employees makes it a difficult task to come in and drive this massive technology company forward, but Jeff has the credibility and authority to make some incredible changes. Will he be a long-term CEO or just make some necessary changes and move on? The jury is still out. Also buried under this news was the announcement of InvestCloud’s hiring of James Young as CIO. It’s clear the firm is moving fast to put good people in place.
Data Management Platform OneAdvisory Raises $8M in Seed Funding
OneAdvisory has secured $8 million in seed funding and rebranded to Dispatch. The firm will invest in engineering and client service resources. OneAdvisory hits on a perennial issue in the industry where firms aren’t able to automate many operations when they work with large custodians so we're bullish on the concept. But it's early days, so we’ll look for proof points of what they've actually done, what their market penetration looks like and, more importantly, the amount of success they've had saving time and complexity for wealth management firms. The proof will be in their ability to integrate into the larger custodians. A lot of firms, including CRM configuration firms and other purpose-built systems, have tried to penetrate this market and haven’t been successful.
What’s Next For Envestnet After Bill Crager
Who Envestnet brings in to replace Bill will tell us a lot about the future direction and the future vision of the firm. Our hope (because we're always for innovation) is that the next CEO will find ways to accelerate innovation within Envestnet and really lead an innovative culture well into the future.
Helios Elevates Advisor Empowerment with New Trade Execution Services
Helios, pioneer of the Insourced Chief Investment Officer model, has a new offering: model trade execution services for advisors. This new take on how advisors can get portfolios built and executed outside of their four walls poses a really compelling challenge to the TAMP market. Helios is definitely shaking things up and driving innovation and change in this area. We think they're definitely worth a look.
SS&C Launches Accord, Integrated with SS&C’s Black Diamond
Accord is designed to remove the friction from the alternatives aggregation and reporting process into the wealth management platform. There hasn’t been much coverage on this news, but it’s worth talking about. In fact, we want to extend a “super hats off” to Steve Leivent and team for listening to the market and delivering a product that addresses the need for less complexity and less manual work in the aggregation of alts data and getting that data into the reporting chain. This is the first example we've seen of a major player like SS&C listening directly to our CTO clients and delivering a product. We're delighted to see it come to market and hope to see more feedback taken from other players.
F2 Strategy Releases 2024 Wealth Tech Outlook Report
We hope you’ll allow us a minute to share our recent industry research report. This outlook report reviews key industry technology trends from the previous year and evaluates their impact on wealth management firms in the year ahead. This year, we expect the strong level of M&A activity we’ve seen over the past three years to continue and bring with it some dramatic shake ups in the industry landscape. Technology will stand as a linchpin during the transformation, helping firms address compliance and legal issues as well as support service delivery and growth.
Enjoy your February and we’ll be back with more commentary in March. The extra day this year will surely help to give us plenty of topics to dissect!