Wealthtech Week in Review (4/15/19)

Betterment plans to partner with Goldman Sachs and BlackRock to provide its customers with a greater range of personalized services. YCharts partners WealthManagement.com to have access to an expanded platform to communicate with and learn from professionals in its target market. Finicity partners with Pulte Mortgage to help the firm improve the home financing process for borrowers. NorthStar Financial Services Group, LLC will be renamed Orion Advisor Solutions and unify its subsidiaries under the Orion brand identity. Chalice Financial Network boosts cost savings for its advisor members through a lower monthly fee and a money-back guarantee. iCapital Network was recognized in the 2019 FinTech Breakthrough Awards as the Best Banking Infrastructure Platform for its white-label technology program. SoFi plans to enter the private student loan business, offering mobile-first undergraduate loans with no fees, competitive rates and flexible repayment options.

NorthStar Financial Services Group, LLC, the parent company of Orion Advisor Services, FTJ FundChoice, LLC, CLS Investments, LLC, and Constellation Trust Company, announced that it will be renamed Orion Advisor Solutions and unify its subsidiaries under the Orion brand identity. The changes, which will take effect in September 2019, will enable NorthStar and its subsidiaries to better align their corporate strategies; bring clarity and cohesion to the product and service experiences offered, and help identify technological synergies as the company accelerates the growth of its open architecture advisor platforms.

Chalice Financial Network™ (“Chalice,” “CFN” or “the firm”), a first of its kind Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based member benefit organization for independent financial advisors, announced that stronger than expected start-up performance in its first quarter has enabled Chalice to boost cost savings for its advisor members. The increased cost savings are being delivered through both a lower monthly fee as well as a money-back guarantee that advisors will recoup membership fees with the discounted industry-leading solutions available on CFN’s single sign-on digital marketplace, consistent with the company’s mission of serving as “the Amazon Prime for independent financial advisors.”

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., a global Fintech leader and part of the S&P 500® Index, announced the launch of Broadridge Securities Lending Board Insights, a firm-specific fund-by-fund comparative securities lending assessment solution for mutual fund companies and the boards that oversee their funds. This client-specific report lets companies monitor the relative cost, fee ‘splits’, and income obtained from their securities lending arrangements. It will also help all interested parties receive appropriate rewards for the risks they undergo in their lending programs and helps to reduce risk related to mal-distributed securities lending income.

Betterment, which operates approximately $10 billion in assets under management, is the largest robo-adviser firm in the world. Now, the company which has previously shunned traditional Wall Street firms has announced its plans to partner with two of the biggest companies in the financial world: Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Together, Betterment will work with these two agencies to present two new portfolio options for its customers. The development is part of Betterment’s mission to provide its customers with a greater range of personalized services.

iCapital Network, the financial technology platform that is improving access and efficiency in the alternative investment marketplace, announced it has been recognized in the 2019 FinTech Breakthrough Awards as the Best Banking Infrastructure Platform. The platform was awarded for its white-label technology program, which allows the asset and wealth management industry to integrate a customized version of iCapital’s end-to-end technology solution with an existing legacy platform to help manage operations and administration of alternative investments.

YCharts, a modern investment research platform that enables smarter investments, and WealthManagement.com, a leading resource for wealth advisors and planners, announced a partnership in which WealthManagement.com’s editorial staff will utilize YCharts’ suite of data, tools, and visuals to better serve the publication’s nearly 1 million unique monthly readers. The WealthManagement.com staff will benefit from using YCharts’ platform, a “Swiss Army Knife” for investment research, to better follow market movements that impact the wealth management industry, enhance the depth of research they can access in the creation of digital content, and improve the quality and impact of the charts and tables they use to disseminate key insights. Additionally, this partnership will give YCharts access to an expanded platform to communicate with and learn from professionals in its target market.

PIEtech® announced the official launch of their newest product to the MoneyGuide suite – MoneyGuideElite (“Elite”). Elite enables advisors to illustrate income distribution, analyze the benefits and tradeoffs of annuities in a plan, and uncover a new way of protecting clients by providing advanced lifetime insurance modeling. With Elite, advisors can visually demonstrate to their clients where the money is coming from to fund retirement goals, as well as how an annuity can cover any income gaps. Providing access to advanced annuity modeling makes it easy to showcase the benefits and potential trade-offs of these complex instruments. Leveraging integrations with all of the major insurance technology solutions, the lifetime protection feature instantly quotes the insurance strategies to show the cost of the recommendation along with the impact to the clients’ plan and cash flow.

Real-time financial data access and insights provider Finicity has a new partner in the mortgage space. The company is teaming up with Pulte Mortgage to help the firm improve the home financing process for borrowers, reports David Penn at Finovate. Pulte Mortgage will leverage Finicity’s technology to accelerate asset verification, reducing the time-consuming, manual, and paper-intensive process “from weeks to minutes” the company says in a statement. Finicity’s platform will enable lenders to access up to 24 months of bank, brokerage, and 401k information to quickly confirm assets without requiring paper verification. Via API, Finicity’s data aggregation and insights platform provides clients with consumer-permissioned data in real-time to support financial management, payments, and credit assessment services and solutions.

SoFi, a San Francisco-based lending and investing platform, has announced plans to enter the private student loan business, offering mobile-first undergraduate loans with no fees, competitive rates and flexible repayment options. The company plans to expand its student loan portfolio in the coming weeks with graduate school loans and loans that parents can apply for. The program allows borrowers to prequalify for student loans online in minutes without a negative impact to their credit score. The borrower can also add a co-signer using a digital application.

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Contributed by Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and co-owner at INSART, FinTech & Java engineering company. Vasyl is also the author of WealthTech Club, which conducts research into Fortune and Startup Robo-advisor and Wealth Management companies in terms of the technology ecosystem.