We’re hoping all our U.S. readers had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, whether you were sheltering in place or hitting the open road in your Harleys!
For those of you who may wonder what it feels like to push out this newsletter each week, let me try to paint a picture for you: Imagine a 3-year old barreling through a china shop that suddenly boards a space ship traveling through the universe at hyper speed. That’s what it feels like to be me right now.
The speed and pace of fintech and wealthtech seems to have just blasted off and is now moving at an exponential rate. COVID19 is no doubt in part to thank (or blame) for this. As we’ve said, advisors have ZERO choice now except to get up to speed on how best to utilize wealthtech in their practices.
In the meantime, we start once again with a quick take of recent industry news in our Wealthtech Weekly series from Vasyl Soloshchuk. We also have a fantastic new 3 Questions interview with Lawrence Calcano, CEO of alternative investing platform iCapital, with some great insights on how the firm has adjusted post-COVID19. This is a very leading edge fintech firm and it has been from the get go. It’s one our readers should definitely be following.
FA magazine Senior Editor Chris Robbins has once again filled our docket with timely wealthtech content, and admittedly more than we can actually publish in our newsletter. We have word of two major acquisitions this week. Cybersecurity firm Entreda has been acquired by Smarsh, and wealthtech marketing firm FMG Suite has been acquired by private equity shop Aurora Capital. How interesting is that? I’ve been telling everyone lately that automated wealthtech marketing is the new darling of the wealthtech industry – along with cybersecurity and compliance. To that end, we also have news of yet another new digital marketing platform launching from New York-based consultancy Seven Group.
Next up is news that Interactive Brokers has launched a major new mutual fund platform and competitor Schwab now has over 1,000 firms using their Portfolio Connect Tool that just launched last year. Finally, we finish up with a look into the new direct indexing offering coming from Smartleaf and IDX Insights.
Wow. The head is spinning. Keep on reading FA Mag’s Fintech News, and we’ll do our best to keep you apprised of all that’s happening in wealthtech right now - and in the meantime, be safe and well!
Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor