Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: RSS
Come on in and sit back and relax. You’re listening to Episode 204 of the WealthTech Today podcast. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz, founder of Ezra Group consulting, and this podcast features interviews, news and analysis on the trends and best practices, all about Wealth Management Technology.
Welcome to our October monthly news review. I have a lot of stories to cover including the Future Proof festival, big news, both good and bad from Envestnet and Orion and of course our regular updates on movements in the industry integrations, changes acquisitions, and our wealth tech integration score and the Kitces-Ezra Group advisor tech map updates.
But before we get started, I have a message for you executives at wealth management firms. Your tech debt is holding back your business growth. Your software platform is old and rusted and falling apart and needs an overhaul. Your disparate systems don’t communicate with each other and it’s driving your ops team and advisors crazy with manual processes and errors and Excel macros and worksheets.
If you’re in charge of technology or operations for a broker dealer, an RIA, a family office or a TAMP, you should run, not walk to our website EzraGroup.com and fill out the Contact Us form on the homepage. Our experienced team can evaluate your current tech ecosystem, deliver targeted recommendations, optimize your existing systems and operations or even run an RFP and help you implement great new software to take your firm to the next level. And you can take advantage of our free consultation by going to EzraGroup.com.
Now a few housekeeping items before we continue. Please subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. We support the invest in others charitable foundation. You can check them out at InvestInOthers.org. All right. Now let’s kick this thing off.
Topics Covered
- Future Proof
- Orion, Envestnet News
- Miscellaneous Tech News
- AdvisorTech Map & WealthTech Integration Score Updates
1. Future Proof
First up in the news, Future Proof. What a great conference out in Huntington Beach, California. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Three days of a wealth management technology festival, and outside intense it was very cool. A lot of fun, very relaxed, no ties to be found people in shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, certainly a different vibe from your typical Wealth Management Conference.
I’ve got a bunch of notes here that I took during the conference. I’m just going to bounce around a couple different things to give you a quick overview. First day was Sunday, kicking off the conference was Jamie Hopkins, formerly of the Carson Group now of Bryn Mawr trust, some practice management tips. What’s your why? Credit conviction mindset to be a strong leader, not being what you say you are but being what you do, and grit means having a purpose that drives what you’re doing.
A lot of marketing panels at this conference, in fact all the panels were really good other ones that I attended, I was trying to move it back and forth to see a lot of different panels, a bunch of marketing panels and I ate that stuff up. Samantha Allen also from Carson Group talked about finding something that’s unique to your practice for advisors who are looking to market their practice, find something unique that can differentiate you from every other firm that’s out there. Another good tip from Samantha, the funnel doesn’t end at conversion. Keep working your prospects. Even after they’ve become clients so that they deliver better referrals.
Kendra Wright from Rebel Media Marketing, focus is the ultimate competitive advantage. Another tip from Kendra, borrow other people’s audience and what that means is go on other podcasts, write guest posts on their blogs, borrow their audience and let them borrow yours when you get an audience.
Gary Foodim, CMO of Mercer Advisors, rebranding by first thinking about their why and how before the what so think about your why and your how before the what, reminds me of Simon Sinek, what’s the why? Another tip from Gary, measure, measure, measure and then double down on what’s working. Boom, do it.
Another great marketing practice management leader in our industry, Stephanie Bogan was at Future Proof talking about the leadership mindset. Did you know your mindset drives 80% of your success. It’s true. Elevate your work, elevate your wealth, elevate your well being. Be bold, great leaders embrace uncertainty. I’m sure you can find more about Stephanie Bogan, just if you Google he.
There was a CEO roundtable. Sarah Levy, the CEO of Betterment, talks about how she believes robo advisors are an on ramp for new investors to graduate to human advisors. Bill Capuzzi from Apex, the plumbing of our industry is broken with high minimums keeping high minimums keeping younger investors out.
Kunal Kapoor from Morningstar, AI powered chatbots, clients tend to ask technical questions, but when they put a human face on the Chatbot like with their AI powered chatbot called Mo, clients asked more personal questions that they would normally ask their advisors, I found that to be very interesting.
Author Morgan Housel, who wrote a book called The Psychology of Money, gave a couple of tips, as wealth grows increased complexity is directly correlated to increased unhappiness. People with a simpler life are happier, differentiation is survival. He also talked a bit about the business of writing books, which I thought was interesting some of the Q&A.
So those were my notes from Sunday. Again, it was a three day or four day conference, a three and a half day conference on Monday, Joe Duran, founder of United Capital and a number of other firms and RIA aggregator Pioneer, he lamented the industry’s lack of original thinking. He talked about the acquisition by Goldman and made a comment, all private equity is not created equal. Talked about his history and about his past and growing up, mentioned resilience comes from adversity.
An interesting story he told was part of the sale of United Capital to Goldman he insisted that they peel off $30 million off the top and give $6 million to charity. And that $24 million should be distributed to advisor teams that didn’t have much equity in the firm it wouldn’t be making up from the deal. So I thought that was a pretty decent of Joe.
A lot of panels at least five panels, six panels about alternative investments of different kinds. Opto Investment’s Matt Malone said access to alts isn’t the problem anymore for advisors. Instead, they need education and customization to thoughtfully add private markets to client portfolios.
Another panel had Mazi Bahadori from Altruist. He talked about on managing the overwhelming choice available to RIAs. Be deliberate and methodical about what your practice looks like. The type of clients you want to serve and how you want to spend your time.
Margaret Hartigan, CEO of Marstone, most wealth management firms do not have seamless integrations between key systems now we’ve seen that many times we know that over at Ezra Group, integrations are a problem. Also from Margaret, leverage AI technology that can help amplify your empathy. It’s an interesting point and something I’ve heard going both ways I’ve heard some people in industry saying that AI can’t replace empathy from advisors, but I disagree. I think AI can help level the playing field when it comes to empathy with advisors especially around generative AI that can create text outreach that feels empathetic. Many advisors don’t have the same low level of empathy. The best advisors, the most successful ones, in my opinion, have a bit more empathy and understand how to deal with people. Maybe they’re better salespeople. They’re better at connecting with clients. But other advisors maybe don’t have that. And the AI think could help raise them up by either prompting them, giving them recommendations of what they should be saying to different types of customers. It’s only going to get better as the tools gather more data.
Industry leader Brian McLaughlin from Orion was at the conference speaking on a panel talking about AI. Custom localized AI models are required to deliver personalized recommendations to clients. General models like ChatGBT won’t be as useful to financial advisors. A quote I heard on a podcast, I think it was This Week in Startups by Jason Calacanis, where he said that in the next three years or so, all the fortune 500 companies will have built out their own localized large language model because they realize you can’t give up your crown jewels, your core information, your core documents, your core knowledge and intellectual property and put it into a public generative AI model. But you need that capability. So they’ll be building their own models that way that model becomes basically the smartest person at the firm, knowing everything seeing every article, every document every report, and will know everything at a glance. Brian considers Orion to be a most in one platform, which is not an all in one, and he believes that because it covers the prospect plan, invest achieve, pathway and can integrate with any system.
We also had Katie Bruner of Skyview Partners, giving us RIA M&A mistakes to avoid. Buyers and sellers should avoid working with firms that don’t have a detailed transition process. And culture and synergies absolutely matter when it comes to M&A. But at the end of the day, being a strong fit from an operational perspective is equally if not more important.
Another marketing panel with Robert Sofia, founder of Snappy Kraken, think about marketing as a flywheel versus a funnel. Robert has expressed this thought a number of ways. I wrote an article with some of his comments, I think four years ago now, Tweet to Table talking about how marketing is more like farming, not like Vegas, you’re not rolling the dice trying to get a big win, you are planting the seeds and you’re growing and you’re you’re tending your garden your marketing garden over many months or years.
Another comment from Robert Sofia, open rates for emails with video are four times higher than just plain text. That’s great advice for not just financial advisors, but anyone who’s doing marketing and outreach in the b2b or b2c world.
Tuesday comments from Future Proof, got a couple more things I wanted to share with you there was a CTO workshop on AI transformation. That was really interesting. Talking about generative AI and how it can be used low hanging fruit. RIAs should run two different work streams. One, identify external tools that can provide the most value. Two, catalog data that’s unique to your business and put it into a data lake, that came from Julian Gartner of Capital Group.
And the first one, identify external tools that can provide most value. We recommend that all of our RIA clients every year, do even just a one day quick review of your tech stack and a quick review of the market just to see what’s out there. Look at some of the vendors just get an idea of what’s happening doesn’t mean you have to change. You don’t have to buy new software. Just take a look and see what’s going on at least once a year.
It’s hard to have structurally high inflation when you have tech and AI doing who knows what to productivity, said Michael Batnick of Ritholtz Wealth. Not sure about that, but we do know that tech and AI are doing a lot of improvements to productivity. I listen to a lot of AI podcast do a lot of read on ai do a lot of speaking at AI. And some of the stats I’ve heard anecdotally across different multiple industries is white collar workers are seeing a 20 to 30% increase in productivity by using generative AI just in general. And finally, I’ve got two more. One is the great Michael Kitces he was at Future Proof, gave a great great presentation on advisor marketing. He was talking mainly, if I can summarize his talk, was that RIAs when they are small, their marketing is mostly time based, meaning the advisors are spending their time to create the marketing and do the marketing gather referrals. But if they want to grow and scale to very large size, they have to shift from time based marketing which is anti scale because it doesn’t scale. It’s linear. The more marketing you want to do the more time you need. They need to shift to dollar based marketing where they’re putting in funding dollars into marketing tools, platforms, advertising, marketing campaigns. That’s how the largest firms grow. They don’t grow by word of mouth referrals anymore, because that doesn’t scale.
And finally, my own panel thanks very much, which was on alternative investments, specifically, venture capital investing for advisors. And I encourage you to look at these two applications the panelists were representing, one is called Allocate, and it allows advisors to onboard top tier venture capital into a managed account. And Fundrise, which originally started out they are one of the largest real estate investment platforms offering white label private funds through their app, and they’ve recently added venture capital to their core offering so allocate Fundrise you can check them out. And if you’re looking for more about VC investing, that’s my read from Future Proof. I was excited to be there. Thanks to Matt Middleton and Josh Brown and the whole team over at Future Proof, made me feel at home and helped me out getting ready for for my panel and it was it was a really great time. Great networking can’t wait for Future Proof 2024.
2. Orion, Envestnet News
Second story is a combination. I’m combining a bunch of stories here all about two of the biggest tech providers in our space tech and TAMP providers in the space Envestnet and Orion have a lot of news, which makes sense. There’s the biggest vendors providers in space. Why shouldn’t they have the most news? It’s just a lot. I was doing the research here, it just never seems to and I go down a little bit of a rabbit hole. So I got a lot lot for you here. I’ll try to summarize it.
First, bad news Envestnet and Orion conducting layoffs. They’re both laying off just coincidentally around the same time, but for mostly the same reasons. Both firms have been on a kick the last four years or so buying up companies expanding through acquisitions and you have to pay to pay the dues now. It’s all it’s come due. So the rapid growth is slowing and now you need to consolidate and the acquisitions, which requires usually layoffs, so that has happened according to press release, Envestnet’s normalizing expenses and operational environment to meet our goals. Sure, for margin expansion and cash flow, I get it makes perfect sense. The current market environment has macro economic headwinds, according to the Envestnet PR requiring a disciplined approach to managing our expenses and optimizing operational efficiency company wide. Market liked it, Envestnet shares gained 2% Friday to close at 44. Although the stock is down 30% year to date.
Now, this may be partly a response to activist shareholder Impactive Capital, which acquired a 7.5% stake in Envestnet and two board seats last year. They were really banging the drum for for cutting expenses and increasing profitability. So they have been focused on increasing margins, reducing their headcount, cutting real estate costs, they closed their iconic Chicago office well, not iconic, but their long standing Chicago office and relocated to Berwyn, Pennsylvania and they trimmed their marketing budget by a third, 33%, according to the most recent earnings report.
A lot going on there and Envestnet had been acquiring a bunch of firms over the years and that was very helpful for them gathering new clients, gathering new technology. They bought firms like Harvest Wealth, which used to be called Trisic. And they were using that for they’re more of a digital advice provider. They bought of course, Folio Dynamics was a tech platform they bought a number of years ago. Those are those firms need to be consolidated. And so it’s requiring this these these layoffs.
Now moving on to Orion, they also announced some layoffs that 80 people we don’t have any people Envestnet’s laying off, but according to a CityWide report, Orion’s laying off 80 people, which sounds like a lot until you realize they’ve got over 1500 employees according to PitchBook which means is only about a 5 or 6% hit, which is not unusual for firms of that size. They said they were basically eliminating redundant roles, which again, it was expected.
Now of course Orion also had a string of acquisitions. I was a little better, more detailed, writing those down because I had forgotten a couple of them. They had bought, they acquired FTJ FundChoice choice a $10 billion TAMP in April 2018 Advizor Financial Planning software which became I believe the new client portal, Hidden Levers, stress testing and proposal gen software in March 2021. They acquired Brinker Capital, announced in June 2020. That was a very interesting acquisition. It was really huge for Orion, really, even though FTJ was the first TAMP acquisition but I think Brinker really put them on the map because Brinker has a about double two and a half times the assets of FTJ. But also, they’re known for their own strategies. So they didn’t have that before, acquiring Brinker gave them access to custom strategies that a lot of RIas really like and have been successful over time that attracting assets.
Another thing that flew under the radar about the Brinker Capital acquisition was that Genstar Capital, another PE firm became an investor in the business alongside Orion’s existing PE firm TA associates. You don’t hear a lot about that, since it’s not flashy tech news. But having Genstar on board to me is a big deal. Because Genstar is very well versed in the industry and they’ve got a number of other industries they work in but in wealth management, they’re really smart. They have made some strategic investments that have done really well. They they invested in Mercer Advisors in 2015. And that firm has grown tremendously. They’re over 48 billion now. And they also invested in 2018 and Cerity Partners, which is over 53 billion RIA in 2018. Also in 2018 they bought a majority stake in broker dealer Cetera, which recently announced the acquisition of Advantax for 1.2 billion and now has 9000 advisors, and 163 billion in AUM. So I believe Genstar capital is a great partner to have for Orion in their next phase of growth.
And two final acquisitions for Orion Basis Code in October 2021, which was a compliance tool or still compliance tool. And I think that really helps Orion’s platform that would their compliance wasn’t bad, but I think Basis Code really help beef up the compliance aspect of their their platform which is important because a lot of broker dealers you work with believe in compliance and compliance is very important. And we find when we’re helping broker dealers with RFPs. For enterprise platforms, compliance plays a major role in their decision. I know a number of firms that with Envestnet as an example, cited of compliance Envestnet’s compliance tools as a major part of their decision. So I’m not surprised that Orion bulked up in the compliance category. And finally one of their biggest acquisitions April 2022, red tail technologies Redtail CRM, the most popular CRM in the RIA space. So layoffs were not surprising, that’s the bad news.
Let’s talk about good news for Envestnet and Orion. Envestnet announced some enhancements to their enterprise platform. One of them which I thought again flies under the radar but really jumped out at me. Generic orders for fixed income securities, which we also call characteristic based models. For many years and managed accounts and I’ve been doing you can do fixed income in a model. If you want fixed income individual fixed income securities in a managed account model, a sleeve, a UMA or an SMA, you need to go to a manager traded sleeve. The manager has to do all the trading of the SMA directly. You can’t model it out because there’s too many. There’s too many. There’s too many individual bonds. There’s every every security every company can have dozens of issuances of fixed income securities. So it’s not like buying IBM stock. IBM bonds is very different. But if you could tell the rebalancer, I want you to create a model with fixed income with this maturity, this this risk, this double a triple A this return and they now go find the bonds that match that that’d be very powerful. A number of firms have been trying this over the years and haven’t really done it well enough. So I’m very excited to see Envestnet’s version of this characteristic based fixed income modeling.
The other announcement from Envestnet was their Insights engine which is part of their Wealth Data Platform now offers 100 different data types of 100 different types of data driven insights, including the new money emotion AI rely on insight that establishes patterns in account activity and cash flows, such as regular deposits or withdrawals and immediately alerts the advisors if things are changing. If they’re used to getting regular deposits and the deposit stop, or vice versa if they used to getting regular withdrawals and they stop or something big comes in. And this is sort of the holy grails of of AI for advisors is being able to analyze tremendous amounts of data across your entire book of business and alert you as to the next best action what should you be doing next? Which clients you should be talking to next, which clients might be interested in particular products next, and Envestnet is really investing heavily in their data platform.
Additional insights include identifying opportunities for tax loss harvesting, clients who are in underperforming products, which the compliance team I imagined likes, and flagging if clients don’t have they haven’t had their federal plan updated. So we’re seeing more and more of these things, sort of working to different platforms. And you’re gonna see AI become ubiquitous, it’s just going to appear into different platforms, and pretty soon every adviser will be using it and they won’t even know it because it’ll be behind the scenes.
And some more good news for these two firms Orion announced at Future Proof their new portfolio comparison tool. This tool has a number of features and I find it pretty interesting. It’s got scenario visualization so advisors can do what if scenarios for the different portfolios, including risk factors tax implications, allocation changes, it’s got to enhance precision centralized workflows, and integration with the rest of Orion. And these kinds of things are super helpful. You know, some of the firm’s some RIAs we work with in the past, when they don’t have these kinds of tools have to resort to you know, blunt force things like well, we can’t tell what the unrealized gain is on a portfolio because our system doesn’t allow it. I’m just going to put in a liquidation into my rebalance or so I can see what the realized gain is without without submitting the orders, which is really not the right way to do that. You want a what if tool like this, this tool from Orion, that where you can say what if I do this? What if I were to liquidate What if I were to sell, you know, or implement this model that that replaced this position, this position with that position? What are the tax implications? How would it change? So this is not going to be available, I believe until next year, so but we’re interested to see the Orion portfolio comparison tool when it comes out.
More good news for Orion, I promise this is the end of the Orion-Envestnet news. Orion’s new CEO, Natalie Wolfsen new CEO coming from Assetmark. Natalie was on the podcast. If you want to check out the WealthTech Today podcast, just do a search for Natalie Wolfsen. I find her to be a fascinating person,great leadership skills as she led Assetmark through a tricky phase of their growth. And now we’ll be leading Orion for the next phase of their growth and look forward to seeing what Natalie can do with with Orion as they move on.
3. Miscellaneous Tech News
Continuing with the next story I gotta add a combine a couple stories here about updates to other tech vendors, acquisitions, new feature functionality and investments. We’ve got FMG acquires MyRepChat, expanding compliant text messaging capabilities. MyRepChat enables users to conduct text and group messaging provides a digital assistant to automate triggered communications and includes compliance features, scheduling options, auto forwarding guessing SES, yada, yada yada. MyRepChat deal is FMG’ s eighth acquisition in seven years in the wealth management space since 2016 FMG has acquired Advisor Launchpad, Advisors Assistant, Agency Revolution, Platinum Strategies, Marketing Pro, TwentyOverTen, and Vesterly.
They’ve become a major player in advisor marketing. We’ve done it at Ezra Group in our research division, we keep track of all the different categories and advisor tech, digital marketing is no different. So seeing how FMG has grown over the years, from a very basic marketing platform to a full featured marketing platform has been impressive. Their capabilities and CRM, websites, social media, content personalization, automation, I think is impressive. Adding MyRepChat, a very well known firm in the industry, with a very good client base and strong technology, I think will really help FMG in their overall suite and you want to have more things to sell to your existing client base and increase your wallet share with them. So it’s good to have that and FMG is also working on a generative AI powered tool that uses their unique knowledge to create automatic responses by chat or email for FMG’s customers. So that’s something that you’re going to see more and more where these ChatGPT powered chat bots that appear to be more intelligent. And can answer more question FMG.
More tech news we have a YCharts, which I’m sure you know these guys Ycharts.com has announced integration with VRGL, which is an application that started out with OCR of client statements. I wish I thought that idea. Brilliant. So they allow advisors to take PDF files of their prospective clients’ held away accounts or other accounts and then suck them in and pull out the data. And then you can stick that into proposal. Naturally, VRGL has expanded into proposal generation as have YCharts, and they’re partnering. So now they can move data between themselves.
YCharts for their new proposal generation capabilities can pull in data directly from VRGL. I’m not sure if it’s vice versa. No, it’s from VRGL to YCharts. I’ll check into that. We have a number of RIA clients who use both of these vendors. So I’m happy to see them partnering, because you definitely want to we were always looking for ways to make our advisory clients lives more seamless. Companies like VRGL and YCharts that can work together. Even though in some areas, other areas, they may be competing. It always helps when you’ve got common clients to be able to integrate together and that also helped their WealthTech Integration Score, which we’ll be talking about a little later.
Next up, Holistiplan announced a strategic partnership with Lead Edge Capital to transition from a startup to a scale up close to plan such a great great story. Roger Pine and Kevin Lozer founded Holistiplan in 2018, they’ve been on the podcast you can check them out. They recently surpassed 20,000 users this past summer, big kudos to them they basically created this category of tax. This tax management category of OCR, of PDFs for 1040s and then providing automated advice on those. They really own the market. I believe, five years ago, before they started, tax management software had a very, very small market share of advisors. And now just four years later, it’s I think 60% of advisors are using some form of tax management software and Holistiplan owns an astonishing 42% overall market share. That’s according to the latest 2023 Kitces’ advisor tech survey, which you can find at Kitces.com and their closest competitors, BNA Income tax and fpAlpha each have just 3%, that’s 10x, more than 10x unheard of.
For Holistiplan to double down, get some funding to see how they can continue their stranglehold on this category because success breeds competitors and there’s going to be more firms building out these type of 1040 analysis tools like fpAlpha did, they came up with this recently. And Holistiplan also received the highest satisfaction score of any provider on the Kitces survey, which was a an average of 9.3 which is extremely high for advisor satisfaction.
More news is this is a personnel news people moving around. Former Brinker CEO Noreen Beaman joins Commonwealth board congrats Noreen, congrats Commonwealth for bringing an industry leader, an experienced operator and and CEO Noreen Beaman onto your board. She joins luminaries such as Mark Tibergien former CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions. Noreen left Orion last year after completing the integration of her firm Brinker Capital into Orion and Noreen also started your own executive coaching and consulting business. So please reach out to her if you need any of those services from Noreen.
Another announcement of board members Wealth.com adds Brian Hamburger as a strategic advisor. In June Wealth.com debuted their artificial intelligence powered legal assistant Esther, which allows advisors to upload an existing estate planning document and receive immediate summary of the plan. They added Brian Hamburger industry leader and founder and CEO of Market Counsel, the compliance firm as well as Market Counsel conference. So kudos to them. They made a great a great move of managing convinced Brian to join their board because he’s a very knowledgeable person, very well connected and I know he will help them out tremendously. So that’s that’s a quick roundup here. Now on to the advisor tech map and the Wealthtech Integration Score news.
4. AdvisorTech Map & WealthTech Integration Score Updates
As you know, I work with Michael Kitces on the Kitces-Ezra Group advisor tech map, which you can find at Kitces.com, and every month we meet and go over new vendors that want to be added to the map vendors that are being taken off the map as your acquisitions or firms going out of business. Michael and I are constantly revamping the map looking at categories evaluating how do we make it more useful, more organized, and so there’s always something going on always something we’re tweaking or changing. So let’s give you a quick rundown on what will be what you’ll see in the October map, which had come out I believe, this week, some time.
Five additions to the map. First is Buckler which is cybersecurity platform, which is I believe owned by FCI Cyber. So Buckler is a cyber program management system. So that’s if you have your own CISO and you’re managing your own information security policies, business continuity plans, things like that vendor risk management. If you’re doing it in house, you use a tool like Buckler to manage your program. Now, if you wanted to outsource all of that you’d call FCI Cyber, they’re a managed security provider around cybersecurity. So you can call them and we did tweak those categories a little bit. So FCI Cyber was in the cybersecurity subsection of managed service providers, but now we moved FCI into the managed service provider section and put Buckler into the cybersecurity section. So you’ll see that in the map.
My Compliance Office is a compliance tool, as the name implies, they’ve got communications, pay to play compliance, conflict of interest, crypto compliance, a wide range of tools to monitor what your employees are doing, so that you can check them out at MyComplianceOffice.com. CacheTech.io looks like an all in one platform for advisors comprehensive software solution, portfolio management, workflow billing CRM, Client Portal, mobile app, tax loss harvesting, performance reporting, they’ve got everything here at CacheTech.io, so you can check them out at CacheTech.io. They are now in the all in one category.
Nova-Trak.com goes into advice engagement. They are an advice engagement solution, helping advisors work with their clients better take helping clients make meaningful actions, presenting data and analytics in an engaging way. It looked a little bit like it was financial planning-ish to me but apparently there that’s only one part of their tools and they really think that they’re more of advice engagement so you can check them out at Nova-Trak.com.
Rainbook Advisor lead gen This looks like a direct to consumer website that’s trying to get consumers investors to log on and then select an advisor helping them determine which advisor might be best for them. So that’s definitely securely in the lead gen space. And that is Rainbook.com. And that’s all the additions.
We have some restructuring. Michael had been talking about restructuring the portfolio management all in one categories and rebound in the trading rebalancing categories, moving them around a bit renaming it to something else. So we’re not doing it this month. But just so you know, it’s coming down the pike at some point probably before the end of the year. Some things that were removed, Advisor Peak was acquired by Addepar. So that came off as an icon in the rebalancing category. TIFIN plan has been renamed to TIFIN Wealth, and we removed TIFIN risk, TIFIN magnifier replaced TIFIN plan, boy TIFIN has a lot of news, and TIFIN Clout has been closed. Apparently they shut that one down.
RegEd was bought by Compliance Max, so that icon got removed. And then Covisum has a number of applications tax clarity, income insight, social security app and smart risk app so they’re all on the map. You can check those out. I think it’s all the updates. You can check out again, I mentioned Kitces.com.
You can check out the WealthTech Integration Score if you want to see the score of any of these, any of these vendors, you can go to EzraGroup.com and then click on what we do and then select WealthTech Integration Scores. And you can see you can go by category so you can look at the all in ones if you want to see all the all in one applications and see how they’re scoring. You can see that Orion investment BlackDiamond all have superior scores. Morningstar office Advyzon, Tamarac have excellent scores. And then below that, not so good scores. But it’s all available to you on the Ezra Group website. And our scores are also available on the Kitces.com advisor tech directory. If you look at any particular applications, we send him those scores, he can see the Kitces satisfaction score for each application, as well as the Wealthtech Integration Score.
And something I’m announcing here is for all vendors that have a Wealthtech Integration Score of six or above, you are eligible to join the Wealthtech Integration Score recognition program. So please contact us either Consulting@ezragroup.com or you can email me at Craig@ezragroup.com and we are happy to talk to about the benefits of the recognition program.
One of them is the ability to use our badges on your websites in all your marketing materials. But there’s a lot of other benefits to the Wealthtech Integration Score recognition program. So please reach out to us to learn more about that. All right, that’s a wrap for another episode of WealthTech Today podcast. Thanks for listening, please go to our website as a group.com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage and sign up for our newsletter. Every month you’ll receive an email chock full of wealth management, goodness, news, information updates, you will not be disappointed. Thanks for listening and talk to you all again next time.
