Happy Tuesday, fellow Fintechers!

We woke up Monday to markets crashing due to new announcements on the spread of the coronavirus. Next week we will explore some potential implications for fintech around this health scare, but for this week, we’re going to look back at an epic T3 conference, produced by Joel Bruckenstein and his team, that just wrapped up in San Diego.

In fact, we have a great piece on that today from conference publicist Marie Swift reviewing all the major press announcements that came out of the event.

Today we also have an informative Q&A with Sheryl O’Connor from the wealthtech firm IncomeConductor. We had a chance to visit with O’Connor recently at the TD LINC conference, and she and her team have built an impressive offering around compliant “time-segmented income plans” advisors can create for their clients with this platform. We love promoting female entrepreneurs in wealthtech, and we continue to see more emerge.

As usual, we also have our latest wealthtech news for the week from our resident expert Vasyl Soloshchuk.

We also learned last week that the Omaha-based Carson Group has reached $12B in AUM and will now cover the tech stack costs for their advisors. This is huge news and a major industry shift that got little coverage, but we think it’s significant. With the ongoing fee compression occurring for advisors, one of the bigger operating costs has been building out an effective and compliant tech stack. Carson just took that cost —and worry— out of the equation for its advisors, so look for this trend to continue with other firms in the future.

On a slightly different note, Fidelity announced a new and improved self-service feature for advisors, Integration Xchange, which is also headed by a woman, Lisa Burns. As noted above, we continue to see more women in leadership and tech roles within the wealthtech industry.

Finally, we finish with the “gorilla in the room” – last week’s huge announcement that Morgan Stanley will acquire E*Trade Financial for $13B. Per Morgan’s CEO James Gorman, “innovation in technology” was a major reason for the acquisition. Of course it is. And coupled with that, we take a look at how E*Trade has been a pioneer in the financial services by advancing women in STEM careers to senior managemente positions, including the head of their innovation lab, Jeanne Jang, their vice president of product management, Liensa Vidra, their senior vice president of tech development, Heather Munoz, and Alice Milligan, their chief customer officer who oversees the retail products used by digital customers.

As we’ve said for a long time now, fintech and wealthtech are where it’s at. Read up and be in the fintech know!

Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor/Publisher