When the same football team keeps winning the Super Bowl or the same baseball team keeps winning the World Series, everyone gets used to hearing the same teams names mentioned every year. The same might be true for acquisitions in the wealth management technology space. For the past few years, the name behind much of the […]
The asset gap between the Big 4 RIA Custodians and the second-tier custodians is as wide as the Grand Canyon. With a combined asset base of over $2.5 trillion, the Big 4 would seem to have nothing to worry about from their small custodian peers. Yet, the many niche RIA custodians don’t seem to be […]
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. When science-fiction writer William Gibson came up with this maxim in the early 1990’s, he was referring to how technological advances are unevenly spread across the globe. The same holds true for technological advances across the fintech space. Take Riskalyze for example. When the company was […]
Unified Managed Accounts (UMA) never achieved the expected market domination or lived up to the peak hype that existed before the financial crisis. Now, it is just another managed account program, alongside Separately Managed Accounts (SMA), Mutual Fund Wrap (MFW), Rep-as-Advisor (RAA) and Rep-as-PM (RPM). While UMA currently holds only around 12% of all advisory assets, according […]
Industry conferences are like cramming for a test when you were in school. You have only a few days to stuff as much information as possible into your head and hope you remember one or two key points to when you get back home. The 2016 T3 Advisor Conference, which was held this year in […]
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, Envestnet shelled out almost $600 million to purchase data aggregator Yodlee. The reverberations from this deal are still making their way across the industry. After spending about a year talking about licensing deals and partnerships, Envestnet CEO Jud Bergman came to the conclusion that Yodlee’s […]
While the first day of the In|Vest 2015 Conference was devoted to startups and their potential to disrupt the traditional financial services landscape, day two turned the tables and gave the too-big-to-fail banks and other large wealth management firms a chance to show off their digital mojo and explain why they won’t be the ones to become disrupted. After […]
This is my summary of day 1 of the In|Vest 2015 Conference. This is the first year for this conference and they are targeting a wide audience, at least beyond what I see at other wealth management events. Their goal was to bring together traditional wealth management firms, retail and private banks with enterprise technology and service providers, digital advisory and […]
The woman from the public relations had scheduled a meeting for me with Patrick Yip, Director of Advisory Market Technology Strategy at Pershing LLC. since we would both be at the Technology Tools for Today (T3) Conference in Dallas. Yip was looking to talk about some new technology initiatives undertaken by Pershing and their parent, the […]
“Everybody wants to rule the world” — Tears for Fears, Songs from the Big Chair, 1985 The fight for control of the RIA technology integration hub is well underway as the first quarter of 2015 comes to a close. Vendors have been marshaling their forces to grab this critical territory on the advisor’s desktop; the […]