Not all digital wealth platforms are slow growers.
While standalone robo-advisors have struggled to raise assets, FinLife Partners, the digital wealth management operating system from Newport Beach, Calif.-based United Capital Financial Partners, attracted $3 billion in assets in less than a year without spending a cent on marketing.
“After our press releases in April and May, we didn’t really do any marketing or publicity,” says CEO Joe Duran. “We knew that there were a lot of advisors who were thinking about joining United Capital, but didn’t want to sell their practice. That led to some pent-up demand for what our platform offers.”
Launched in April 2016, FinLife Partners is an integrated wealth management platform which United Capital white labels for independent advisors and packages with its open-architecture investment management, middle office and on-demand coaching services.
To call the collection of digital tools and processes a wealth management platform may not do it justice, says Duran, as FinLife Partners centers around goal-based financial planning, placing the advisor at the center of the client experience.
“Our lens wasn’t to replace the advisor, but to empower them,” says Duran. “Everyone seems to be ending up in a similar space, the digital providers are all hiring humans. We’re humans putting technology behind everything we do, and the difference is important. At the end of the day, people with wealth want to deal with other human beings.”
As part of United Capital’s offering, advisors adopting the platform are trained on its use to help maximize its value within their everyday workflows. To fully implement FinLife Partners, advisors must become fluent in the company’s processes around behavioral finance and coaching.
FinLife Partners also integrates custodian feeds, e-signature, open architecture financial planning software and data aggregation with investment platforms like Envestnet's Yodlee and Morningstar's ByAllAccounts into a single sign-on environment.
The platform was launched with an initial one-year target of $1 billion. Within the first three months, the FinLife Partners had surged past its goal, with Lenaxa, Kansas-based Barber Financial Group among a group of early adopters.
"Since starting our advisory business in 2010, we grew to over $850 million in assets but realized we lacked scale and the ability to bring the same experience to every new client," said Dean Barber, Barber Financial CEO, in a released comment. "FinLife Partners is exactly what I was looking to create on my own, but it gave us the opportunity to tap into an experience and process that already exists and is proven. I view this as a way to serve our clients and create a destination firm for recruiting and acquiring other advisers."