Happy Tuesday, Fellow Fintechers!
Hoping you had a great weekend, though we heard it was a hot one for many of our friends throughout the US.
Today we have some great new fintech content for our readers, starting with our Wealthtech Weekly column from Vasyl Soloshchuk with news from Twenty Over Ten, Riskalyze and AdvicePay, amongst others. This week, our 3 Questions column features Kabir Sethi, Head of Digital Wealth Management at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America Private Bank. Kabir shares with FA Mag that the firm’s wealth management business has nearly $3trillion in client balances and gives us some great insight into how the client base has significantly increased their digital usage of the bank’s online platforms over the past year.
On a separate note, this week, we are saddened to report of the passing of one of wealthtech’s truly visionary leaders – John Michel, CEO and Founder of CircleBlack. FA Mag editor Chris Robbins paid him a wonderful tribute in announcing the news to our internal staff last week….”He was an extremely nice guy - I remember being so grateful to him for carrying a panel discussion I moderated at one of our conferences when the other panelists couldn't really deliver.” Michel was a US Army vet and previously worked at Merrill Lynch and Bloomberg Wealth before founding CircleBlack. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and colleagues as our industry mourns his passing.
This week, Robbins has also broken down the results of a financial advisor satisfaction study from J.D. Power for our readers. The study had several items addressing the use, and underuse, of financial technology at wealth management firms, but amongst many of its findings, concluded that if advisors want to attract top talent, they need to invest in technology. Robbins has also reported on news of a new partnership with Dynasty Financial and Envestnet and has also delved into Ayco Marketplace for us. Marketplace is an open-architecture digital platform for employers to offer planning solutions linked to financial wellness for their employees, from Goldman Sachs' Ayco subsidiary.
Finally, we finish up at a look at how tokenization is opening new asset classes for investment for institutional – and smaller investors – alike, including Class A real estate.
Read up and be in the know!
Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor