Happy Tuesday, Fellow Fintechers!
Huge, happy smile today as I start the week with my cell phone restored! I had a “SIM Swap” attack to my cell number, coupled with simultaneous hacks to two emails. I have never seen anything like it – and the name it was all transferred to was also falsified – a fintech VC guy in Silicon Valley. Five days later my cell number was restored. You learn something new every day/week and this past week taught me the value of two-factor authentication.
Last week, we had our first Zoomcast, with Snappy Kraken’s Robert Sofia – and it was great fun and most informative. If you missed it, you can register here to view the replay.
We start this week’s newsletter as per usual with our Wealthtech Weekly column from Vasyl Soloshchuk with news from iCapital Network, Ocrolus (a new name) and Interactive Brokers, amongst others. We have a new 3 Questions Q&A with Patrick Reed, a young fresh face in fintech, with YourStake, an ESG platform that we first got to view at last year’s Fall TD Ameritrade Nationl LINC conference in the Veo Village. Make sure you check this out.
Fintech veteran Jack Sharry, Executive Vice President with tax planning wealthtech LifeYield, recently penned a piece for Financial Advisor magazine on the rush to find an “Easy Button” for retirement planning for clients. Sharry will be posting more pieces soon for FA Mag with a “current roster of state-of-the-art tools” available for advisors to use now, so watch for those in coming weeks.
Our remaining wealthtech posts this week have been filed by Senior Editor Chris Robbins and include news of a new partnership between Oranj and Robo Global and Fidelity’s new fixed income trading tools for advisors.
Robbins also recently interviewed Patrick Kelly, founder of Signal Advisors, a new Detroit-based firm that is a hybrid between an insuretech and IMO. In another exclusive interview piece, Robbins spoke with Mike Sha, CEO and co-founder of robo-investment platform SigFig, which has evolved from its 2006 launch as a direct-to-consumer investment portal to a sophisticated hybrid digital wealth management platform used by consumers, institutions and advisors alike. It is fascinating to read about the company’s product expansion since its launch 14 years ago.
We finish with a deep dive into Finra’s recently issued Regulatory Notice 20-16, created in response to the number of advisors who were more recently working from home offices.The guidelines included how to’s on transitioning to remote working environments, maintaining appropriate supervision in the new remote work environments, and preserving compliance via archiving of all communications with customers. Robert Cruz, vice president of information governance at Smarsh, spoke with Robbins about all the above items and more in a fascinating, must read piece.
Once again – despite what would normally be a slow time for advisors and markets – August in the summer – fintech marches on and on and on. Technology never sleeps!
Read up and be in the know!
Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor