Happy Tuesday, Fellow Fintechers!
Today starts with a huge mixture of emotions. We have an exciting lineup for you today of incredible content and FA Mag’s first ever Zoomcast with Robert Sofia of Snappy Kraken and I this Wednesday. Make sure to register to attend if you haven’t already. You can find more info on the survey information that will be covered in this piece filed last week by Financial Advisor magazine Senior Editor Christopher Robbins, and we can’t wait for Wednesday to come!
I want to acknowledge – that even as we write this – we are seeing news of our beautiful hometown Chicago’s overnight Sunday siege. Here in Buckhead our neighbor had his car stolen –with his puppy inside— over the weekend, and now unbelievably little JuJu is being ransomed, and it’s a major news story in Atlanta. So, we all have stresses that we are living through during this Summer of 2020 – in addition to the pandemic – and it’s so important to stay centered and focused on moving forward.
And moving forward is what fintech NEVER ceases to do. To that end, we start this week’s newsletter with our Wealthtech Weekly column from Vasyl Soloshchuk with new from Riskalzye, Addepar and LPL, amongst others. We also have a new 3 Quesitons with Snappy Kraken’s Bradley DeLoatche.
FA Senior Editor Ray Fazzi has written a post for us reporting news from Cerulli Associates on equity funds in Europe who are increasingly utilizing artificial intelligence for fund management. The report also stated that the cumulative returns on AI-managed funds were three-times higher than actively traded funds from 2016-2019. That news is not going to be welcomed from many hedge fund managers!
Robbins, our fintech/wealthtech editorial expert, has filed the remainder of the stories for us this week, including an excellent piece on a fintech platform – Overstone – which “keeps a database of 10,000 assets and tracks how actively traded they are in the art market, with 2.5 million art transactions recorded in its database, offering a sense of the overall liquidity, volatility and valuation of works of art”. Digitization of assets is a trend that is growing rapidly, and platforms such as these will play an increasingly important role in financial markets moving forward.
Robbins has also reported on a new product from Smarsh called “Echo Cancellation.” Such an unusual product name, but the premise is that it reduces the number of emails requiring compliance review, which ultimately cuts costs, and claims it has 100% precision. Smarsh is a very interesting company focused on compliance, social media and digital communication with clients, and this is a must read.
We finish up with news from two wealthtech behemoths – Orion and Envesnet. Orion recently reported it had updated its client portal through an integration with Apex Clearing’s technology platform. Envestnet | Yodlee announced Insight Solutions – a “new feature for its data-aggregation and analytics platform that purports to allow advisors to have “hyerpersonalized” virtual interactions with their clients.”
It may be summer, a usually slower time of the year in the wealth management industry, but as we’ve often said, fintech never sleeps. This week’s news seems to prove that point. Read up and be in the know!
Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor