Happy Tuesday, Fellow Fintechers!

Welcome to day 3,020 of the pandemic (or so it seems).  Let us start by sending our ongoing prayers to our family, friends and readers for your continued safety and well-being, and our deepest sympathies to those who have lost loved ones.

All this and yet fintech marches on. In fact, there are record numbers of new accounts being opened at roboadvisors, huge deals are still being made, and with so many advisors now working virtually, it becomes paramount to  utilize fintech for personal and/or business finances and wealthtech for advisors working with their clients. Our job continues to be to share with you the latest news in that realm so you can stay informed and ahead of the curve.

This week, as always, we start with the latest news in the wealthtech sector from our resident expert Vasyl Soloshchuk, including  word that our friends at Chalice Financial Network are waiving their annual fee so new members can obtain affordable healthcare insurance through their platform. AdvisorPeak has also announced they offering their trading and rebalancing program free through the end of Q2 2020, and Docupace has announced a new ‘suite of Digital Adoption Bundles that lower the cost of and barriers to digitizing operations.”

Today we also have a new 3 Questions interview from Ron Carson of Carson Group, who recently announced their “commitment to cover the costs of our tech stack for partner firms.” We think this is a major trend we will continue to see and that started before the outbreak, with free trading offered from TDAmeritrade, Schwab and Fidelity and before that, Robinhood and other robos. Now “free” (which is never really free, by the way) has moved to the institutional market.

We also have several great items from our FA Mag editorial team today including an excellent interview from Chris Robbins with Bill Capuzzi, CEO of Apex Clearing, which has just announced a streamlined product launch cycle with the addition of a new chief product officer brought in from Google. Speaking of free, Robbins also penned a piece for us detailing Milwaukee-based Advicent’s announcement that it will be providing its Naviplan client portal free through the end of the year.
 
This week we also learned that Vanguard, currently with 30 million online users, teamed up with China’s Ant Financial to target their 900 million customer base. That is an astonishing potential market and interesting timing given that the current pandemic originated in China. We’ll see how that partnership works out – I have some doubts.

FA senior writer Karen DeMasters has penned a piece on the threat of cybersecurity breaches for advisors working from home. It’s more important than ever to make sure that firms are buttoned up on their cybersecurity front.

Finally, FA staff writer Joyce Blay has written a piece for us on a new roboadvisor that just obtained $750K in startup funding. There’s still VC out there for fintechs, though it’s definitely a little more challenging right now. We love to continue to see the innovation and entrepreneurship in fintech emerging, though.

Read up, stay safe and be in the fintech know!

Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor