From large institutions to smaller, nimble start-ups, firms are showing they want to play in the wealthtech space. They’ve hit the ground running with innovations this year. As we enter the final month of the first quarter, here’s a look at some big wealthtech headlines:
Vanguard Quietly Embraces AI in $13 Billion of Quant Stock Funds
We’ve seen public indications that Vanguard is working to shed its old-school image and be seen as an innovator in the industry. In addition to these news stories, we know that they’ve relaunched their 2016 idea of opening an innovation lab near their office to provide a space for new and creative thinking. We hope that this time around, unlike their effort in 2016, Vanguard’s interest in innovative technologies and ideas will start to lead to material improvements for wealth management firms.
Nitrogen Unveils Groundbreaking ‘Won with Nitrogen Metric’ Alongside a Suite of Enhancements to Transform Firm Efficiency
Nitrogen is positioning itself as the business growth tool, bringing prospecting, lead generation, marketing automation and onboarding into one place. The “Won with Nitrogen’ concept is fantastic. Having a tool that actually reports on how much growth and value you’re getting from it is a masterstroke that will make the sale of Nitrogen a no-brainer because the other tools don’t tell you how much they’re worth.
Orion Expands Advisor Access by Adding AllianceBernstein Municipal Fixed Income SMAs to the Orion Portfolio Solutions Platform
It may not sound terribly innovative, but getting custom bespoke Muni SMAs in your portfolio automatically through an Orion TAMP solution is very cool. And it’s even better for your clients when you add it to the other benefits of having AllianceBernstein, which has phenomenal research, data and analytics. We would expect to see more of this where asset managers are working innovatively to build SMA or UMA products for investors.
iCapital Expands Wealth Management Industry’s Access to Architect
Now, more than 350,000 U.S. financial advisors can access Architect, where they can evaluate the impact of adding alternatives, such as private equity, private credit, hedge funds, private real estate funds and structured investments to an existing portfolio that includes traditional investments. If you’re a wirehouse advisor or independent broker working in this area, this is really good news, because until now, benchmarking or showing a prospect what it might look like with that asset class was almost impossible. Because iCapital is a fund of funds, they can use their data to model the current portfolio with the addition of a high capital set of alternative assets and present a risk and return profile that’s far more accurate than a general benchmark.
Rogo Raises $7 Million to Advance Specialized GenAI For Wall Street
Rogo seeks to advance a specialized generative AI tool that can provide investors with quick research and analysis. Sounds good, but this news is very vague and we don’t actually know what Rogo will do. The real news story here is that money is flowing into Gen AI tools in our industry. Our research last year showed that 51% of the firms we surveyed were testing some form of AI technology. We hope this Rogo tool will help advisors maximize their time. Clients expect advisors to be everywhere and everything at all times, so using Gen AI to create content and experiences leads to better outcomes for your clients.
Make March count and we’ll deliver our next round of insight into the headlines in April.