DriveWealth has entered the RIA custody and clearing business. Apex Clearing will enable online brokerage platforms to provide commission-free trading. AssetMark, Inc. updates its AssetMark PortfolioEngine®. Finicity will share Fidelity Investments customer information with financial apps and services. Wealthsimple introduced the Wealthsimple Pension to provide an easy and affordable way for people to save for the future.
Trustee Partners has rebranded to Sargon. FinaMetrica and PlanPlus have rebranded to PlanPlus Global and revealed details of a new product suite.
Moody’s Analytics partners with Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk business. SoFi announced a new partnership with home improvement platform Kukun. NexJ Systems partners with Symphony Communication Services to enable banks to better engage on accounts.
A new player has entered the RIA custody and clearing business; DriveWealth and its CEO Robert Cortright has a head-spinning track record of success in ventures that blend financial technology and the processing of money. Now DriveWealth wants to get its foot in the RIA custody door by painting Apex as legacy.
You can read more here.
Moody’s Analytics, a leading provider of financial intelligence and analytics, partners with Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk business to offer a classification solution for conducting the Solely for Payment of Principal and Interest (SPPI) tests required under the IFRS9 accounting standard. The solution allows fixed-income investors to automate SPPI tests for securities in their portfolios by providing data on over 1.2 million corporate, government, and structured securities globally.
You can read more here.
Software firms FinaMetrica and PlanPlus have formally rebranded to PlanPlus Global following their merger in August last year and revealed details of a new product suite.
The new product, SuitabilityPro, is a platform that delivers a “scientifically validated” Suitability Score, which gives financial advisers confidence that their clients’ risk profiles map to their chosen portfolios.
It would combine the FinaMetrica Profiler tool, which is a psychometric risk profiling solution, the Pro Planner tool, a financial planning software, and the Pro Tracker tool, which enables continuous portfolio monitoring.
You can read more here.
Apex Clearing, a leader in digital wealth management, announced that it will be offering any online brokerage platform the ability to provide commission-free trading. This new product offering aims to help all brokers and advisors continue to meet the challenge of providing the faster and cheaper online experiences that today’s consumers receive and expect in all aspects of their digital lives.
You can read more here.
AssetMark, Inc., a leading provider of innovative investment and consulting solutions, announced updates to AssetMark PortfolioEngine®, a newly enhanced and redesigned modeling tool that enables financial advisors to dynamically create, compare, and plan portfolios that are in-tune with clients’ financial goals. The expanded features of PortfolioEngine also help advisors leverage intuitive visual modeling analytics to educate and empower investors to make well-informed investment decisions.
You can read more here.
Finicity, a leading provider of real-time financial data aggregation and insights, has agreed to use an application programming interface (API)-based method for sharing Fidelity Investments customer information, after the customer authorises such sharing, with financial apps and services that Finicity supports.
Finicity is the first data aggregation provider to sign on to use Fidelity AccessSM, Fidelity’s new data sharing API. Fidelity Access will allow Fidelity customers to provide third parties access to customer data through a secure connection without providing log-in credentials. The log-in process is replaced with direct authorisation by the customer through Fidelity and the use of tokens for authentication and access.
You can read more here.
Trustee Partners has rebranded to Sargon and expanded its management team with five new senior executives.
The new appointments include Darren Goodger as Chief Financial Officer, Maria Dalton as Chief Risk Officer, Daniel Wirjoprawiro as Chief Technology Officer and Stuart Howard as Chief Executive of New Zealand.
Former Trustee Partners general manager/head of Australia, Andrew Peterson, has become Chief Operating Officer of Sargon.
You can read more here.
SoFi announced a new partnership with home improvement platform Kukun to offer advanced new tools to help homeowners gain a greater understanding of how much their home improvement project could cost and how it can affect the resale value of their home.
The tools will help homeowners estimate costs and returns on investment for over 28 project types that range in price from $10,000 to $300,000, including renovations and expansions. These are the first tools SoFi is offering related to its home improvement loans.
You can read more here.
Wealthsimple, a global online investment service, introduced the Wealthsimple Pension. It is the only digital pension in the UK that provides unlimited access to investment advice from a human adviser – at no additional cost to the client.
The Wealthsimple Pension is a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) that provides an easy and affordable way for people to save for the future by combining their pension pots in one place, alongside their other investment accounts. Wealthsimple Pension customers benefit from globally-diversified, low fee portfolios, with no minimum account size.
You can read more here.
NexJ Systems Inc. (TSX: NXJ), a provider of intelligent customer management software to the financial services industry, announces a partnership with the cloud-based secure team collaboration platform Symphony Communication Services, LLC to offer a product that allows corporate banks to engage with colleagues and clients in new and exciting ways. The integrated solution was on display at Symphony Innovate 2018.
Symphony was founded in 2014 by a consortium of 15 financial institutions, and has evolved into a powerful integrated messaging platform that offers its clients the ability to quickly and easily build chatbots that connect to other client ecosystem components and trading platforms.
You can read more here.
XY Planning Network, the leading turnkey financial planning platform for fee-only financial advisors, is proud to announce Mineral Interactive (“Mineral”) as the winner of its third annual Advisor FinTech Competition. Mineral, a digital marketing and technology firm recently acquired by Carson Group, was recognized for its next generation client digital marketing and onboarding tool “Approach.”
Mineral competed against five other finalists pitching live demos of their software at the #XYPNLive Conference, which brought together over 650 attendees including more than 75 companies exhibiting on September 23-26 in St. Louis, Missouri. The finalists were selected from 24 startups that submitted to the FinTech competition and was overseen by an elite panel of judges including: XYPN Co-Founder Michael Kitces, advisor technology guru Bill Winterberg of FPPad, and Jeff Merkel, co-founder of digital life insurance company Ladder.
You can read more here.
