Will IBM or Microsoft Become the King of Blockchain?
“Chess is not always about winning. Sometimes it’s simply about learning.” This anonymous quote summarizes the new battle between old antagonists; IBM and Microsoft. These two tech giants have staked competing claims to blockchain dominance by backing competing standards. IBM supports hyperledger while Microsoft is pushing Ethereum. Both are decentralized ledgers that can be used to manage […]
Oranj Leapfrogs Robo-Platforms With TradeWarrior Acquisition
It is a great time to be an independent RIA. At least when it comes to technology. There seems to be an endless supply of tools for automating, optimizing and generally improving the efficiency of an advisory firm’s operations. This is especially true in what we like to call the robo-platform or digital advice space. Innovative companies […]
Pershing Looks to Natixis to Help Them Catch Envestnet in UMA
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 […]
How RIA’s Can Survive the Wild West of Roboadvisor Technology – Kitces
In the 1966 spaghetti Western, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Clint Eastwood plays one of three gunslingers competing to find fortune in a buried cache of Confederate gold amid the violent chaos of the American Civil War. Each of the three have only partial information about the gold’s location, so they have to work together if […]
4 Secrets of Successful RIA Rollups
Whether you call them RIA consolidators, aggregators or roll-ups, they are all fighting toward the same goal: keeping their advisors happy and growing their assets. Yet how they got their their current size and how they plan to keep growing is a story that often gets overlooked. Three successful RIA rollups recently appeared on stage […]
