As a wealth management fintech closing out 2022, Advisor360 had a lot going for it.
Since spinning off from mega-independent broker-dealer Commonwealth Financial Network in 2019, Advisor360 had grown to serve three million client accounts encompassing $1 million in client assets, much of that coming from large legacy business with firms like Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, whose 7,500 advisors use the platform. It also opened its first international office in India.
But its prospects for growth in 2023 were potentially hampered by its custodial relationships and integrations with advisor client-relationship management software (CRMs), said Rich Hart, senior vice president of corporate development at Advisor 360.
“We were connected to Fidelity’s National Financial Services, and with Salesforce, which many advisors use, but we were interested in expanding our footprint,” said Hart. “We have sales prospects at other places. We contemplated building a bunch of integrations ourselves, but that would have taken time and resources to complete.”
Instead, Advisor360 is expanding to connect to almost every major RIA custodian and every major CRM in one fell swoop with its first-ever acquisition, of Canadian fintech Agreement Express from private equity firm Frontier Growth. In addition to a payments business that was sold off last year, Agreement Express specialized in digital onboarding and streamlined account opening processes for advisors and clients.
Through the acquisition, which closed just before the 2022 December holidays and was announced earlier this month, Advisor360 will get the remaining technology and staff of Agreement Express.
More importantly, Advisor360 almost immediately will connect to TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Pershing and Fidelity IWS. It will also integrate with CRMs Practifi, Redtail, Wealthbox and Microsoft Dynamic.
“This is huge for us and our prospects in terms of growth strategy and where we want to be as a provider,” said Hart. “When we look at the world, we’re really custodian and clearing agnostic and we want these systems to work the same regardless of where we and our clients are. This definitely makes us more attractive to independent broker-dealers and RIAs, but our strategy here is not to just go after that segment—we can definitely handle bank broker-dealers and insurance broker-dealers as well.”