One such solution is Benjamin, a business support system for financial firms that is, at heart, an AI-driven automation assistant handling advisor tasks like scheduling, meeting preparation and onboarding follow-up. Benjamin has also become an integration hub, says Matt Reiner, the firm’s CEO and co-founder.
“We have integrations with custodians, CRMs, portfolio management systems and document management systems, unifying everything in a holistic manner,” Reiner says. “We’re not trying to be the platform. We’re trying to make everything else more effective and efficient. But we’re part of the full stack of the entire office.”
Another solution, INVENT, specifically targets enterprise firms struggling to integrate third-party technologies with their older platforms.
Backed by a cloud-based development platform that allows firms to create their own integrations without coding experience or a lot of technological know-how, INVENT creates a single-view operating environment to allow large bank or broker-dealer advisors to more easily move between disparate pieces of software.
“Having operated broker-dealers and RIAs for my entire career, one of the biggest issues we’ve had in our operating environment is that we have legacy everything,” says Larry Roth, a strategic advisor to INVENT who in the past led two giant broker-dealers, Cetera and Advisor Group, as chief executive officer. “If you were buying firms and bringing advisors together, attempting to bring the technology together—everything from CRM to account opening to trading to ongoing service—it’s a major undertaking. INVENT speaks to putting all of these processes in a single pane of glass for the advisors and the operating and executive teams.”
An earlier entrant among the firms trying to solve the integration question, CircleBlack, was created to help firms of all sizes, and it has relentlessly pursued new integrations on behalf of its users.
CEO Alex Sauickie describes CircleBlack as a “bundler” of unbundled advisor software.
“I think about television, and I’m a big user of Roku,” Sauickie says. “Roku is the connective tissue that brings together a lot of different streaming channels, and we’re kind of the Roku of wealth management platforms. Traditional advisor technology was like closed containers, and for a lot of companies remains that way. They want to take this more modern approach, but their technology debt is now measured in years and decades.”
Other companies, like Riskalyze, support advisors trying to build their own technology in house. In March, the company rolled out a “Build Your Own Tech Stack” tool with a list of different software providers that integrated with its risk analytics and management software and offered step-by-step instructions on how to best piece the technology together into a coherent whole.
Riskalyze does not, however, want to become an all-in-one technology company, like an Orion or Envestnet, or an integration hub, says Dan Bolton, the firm’s managing director of customer marketing.
“We’re still focused on risk, portfolio analytics and trading right now, but advisors using best-of-breed solutions is the future of our industry,” he says. “That can only happen if integration [gets] to the next level.”
At AdvisorPeak, Deru sees the future as one where enterprise firm and custodian platforms are distilled down to one central component, a CRM, that then integrates into each practice’s—or practitioner’s—customized, personalized tech stack, allowing every individual in the industry to build precisely the technology they need for the practice and clientele they want.
“If a custodian, broker-dealer or large RIA is building out technology, it can still give everyone complete flexibility,” Deru says. “In the future, fintech isn’t going to be separate pieces of software or big platforms; it’s going to be all data and whatever the advisor is using as their central hub.”