Welcome to the June 2023 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors!
This month’s edition kicks off with the news that Riskalyze has completed its previously-announced rebranding, and will now be known as “Nitrogen”, a ”growth platform” for advisory firms – which represents less of a shift in the platform’s core function (given that Riskalyze’s risk tolerance tool was always more about providing a clear way for advisors to generate a proposal that demonstrates their value to prospective clients and facilitating their conversion into paid customers, than it was ‘just’ about quantifying risk tolerance for compliance purposes), and more of an acknowledgment of its true value proposition as a ‘sales enablement’ tool which has allowed it to achieve dominant market share (despite spawning numerous low-cost risk tolerance assessment competitors).
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- InvestCloud, a TAMP and all-in-one advisory technology platform which has undergone rapid growth in recent years through the acquisition of numerous disparate technology tools in order to compete with its more-established competitor Envestnet, has announced the departure of 7 senior executives (including the CEO), suggesting that the platform’s execution of a growth-through-acquisition hasn’t paid off as hoped for by its private equity owners
- Marketing automation technology platform Snappy Kraken has rolled out Freedom360, an outsourced marketing service running on the same technology that it builds and sells to advisors to implement themselves, highlighting an emerging opportunity for technology providers to sell ‘fractional’ services to advisors craving a cost-effective way to outsource the tasks that the technology can facilitate (without having to hire their own internal staff)
- Health and longevity software maker Genivity has been acquired by Lumiant to join its suite of holistic life planning tools, raising questions about whether the wave of individual specialized planning options in recent years is beginning to encounter the reality that advisors can’t realistically adopt (or at least don’t want to separately pay for) every specialized tool on the market
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- CRM platform Redtail has announced a significant overhaul of its pricing model by switching to a per-user fee (rather than its previous model of including up to 15 advisors on one database license) – which, while equating to large price increase for midsized advisory firms, may in fact go to show just how much it has underpriced its software under its current model, which will now be aligned with (and even still cheaper than some) other providers in the CRM category
- Retirement income planning platform Income Lab has released a new ‘Retirement Stress Test’ feature allowing clients to see how their retirement plans would have fared during various historical worst-case scenarios, continuing the platform’s push to move retirement conversations beyond abstract Monte-Carlo-style probability-of-success numbers
And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular “Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map” (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!
*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit them to TechNews@kitces.com!
