Welcome to the January 2025 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 Orion, the “all-in-one” advisor technology platform, has acquired Summit Wealth Systems (and its founder Reed Colley, who previously built performance reporting platform Black Diamond), a client portal and data hub for unifying key client information from multiple sources into a single client-friendly portal – which suggests that Orion feels the need to better integrate together the numerous components it has built an acquired over the years into a more unified client and advisor experience, but also raises the question of how much impact it will have on Orion’s bottom line when individual advisors (who have their own struggles in pulling together data from disparate technology tools) weren’t exactly flocking to portals like Summit Wealth to begin with?
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- SEI has acquired LifeYield, which is designed to facilitate tax-efficient management of multiple accounts across an entire household, to bundle into its RIA custodial platform and investment management technology – underscoring the idea that tax-savvy portfolio management is increasingly being seen as table stakes for advisors who manage investments, rather than “just” a value-add they can use to differentiate themselves
- Range, a startup RIA with a subscription-style fee model and a technology platform that it built in-house, has raised $28 million in venture capital, highlighting how VC firms are still eager to fund firms with in-house technology based on its perceived ability to attract clients and serve them efficiently – although it remains to be seen whether Range’s high-income target clientele will want to be served with primarily tech-based solutions, and if so, whether they’ll be willing to pay the level of fees that will justify the cost of acquiring and serving them to begin with?
- FINNY AI, an AI-powered prospecting tool, has raised $4.2 million as it builds out a solution that not only identifies and prioritizes prospects but also seeks to create automated personalized outreach and follow-up messages to prospective client, which could potentially increase the notoriously low response rates from cold outreach to prospects by enough to easily justify the cost of the platform – at least until AI prospecting technology proliferates further and everyone is inundated with “personalized” messages, at which point it might become even harder to get a response from cold outreach
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- Boosted.ai, an AI-powered “portfolio assistant”, has raised $15 million as it seeks to expand its market reach from primarily institutional investors and hedge funds into financial advisors – and while Boosted.ai’s ability to generate personalized market and performance commentary might be valuable from a client communications standpoint, it will need to prove that it can create better commentary and/or work more efficiently than free tools like ChatGPT in order to overcome advisors’ preference to use the least costly solution
- Sandbox Wealth, a startup provider of banking solutions to clients of financial advisors, has raised $1.25 million of pre-seed funding – and while Sandbox’s core feature of providing technology-enabled solutions like high-yielding cash accounts and lending to high-net-worth households taps into a real desire from advisors seeking to expand their menu of services and solutions for clients, their inclusion of an additional client portal feature means they may be inadvertently also be competing with other portal solutions like Addepar, which could create challenges in convincing advisors to adopt the technology and shoulder the cost of switching from their existing portal
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 to TechNews@kitces.com!
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