Happy Tuesday, Fellow Fintechers!
We hope you all enjoyed the long, beautiful Labor Day weekend! We’re publishing an annotated version of our column this week, but will be back with our longer commentary beginning next week again, along with our Wealthtech Weekly column, which is not appearing in this week’s newsletter.
However, we have a great new 4 Questions interview with Andina Anderson, executive managing director of Envestnet | Tamarac, and it’s such a pleasure to feature an influential woman in this column this week. The fintech industry has some very powerful women within it, but they’re still just a small percentage of the C-Suites and Andina, who started her career in fintech as an international equity sales trader in the late ’90s, comments on this and much more in this interview.
Speaking of powerful women, FA Mag broke a major fintech news story this past week on another female power broker, with news that social media phenom Clara Shih was stepping down from her role as CEO of Hearsay, but continuing in her role as executive chairwoman at the firm. Interestingly, Hearsay recently received an investment from Salesforce. One has to wonder if something went amiss there.
In a compelling guest post, Corey Walther, president of Allianz Life Financial Services and Jack Sharry, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at LifeYield, have co-authored a piece on the benefits of new technology platforms to make the process of enhancing Social Security strategies easier for FAs to administer and effectively communicate to clients.
FA Mag Senior Editor Chris Robbins has two other posts, in addition to the Hearsay piece, for us this week, one delving into the new UX at financial social network AdvisorBid. I’ve seen that new dashboard as well, and it is pretty slick. Robbins has also reported on results from Fidelity’s latest Financial Advisor Community COVID Series survey, which points to how advisors have significantly ramped up their adoption of digital processes (their utilization of wealthtech) during the pandemic. I hate to say it, but – I told you so!
Finishing up, we have news that fintech trading darling Robinhood seems to be in hot water again. I don’t know – this is a wildly successful investment platform, but they sure seem to get themselves into a lot of trouble along the way, this time for payment for order flow from high speed traders, according to a recent SEC probe. And then there’s the quants: In another post, a recent research paper has determined that literally hundreds of back-tested, quant-based strategies touted by firms, that are then rolled into ETF wrappers, are not performing as thought. Imagine that. Discretionary human traders the world around will no doubt rejoice and say “I told you so!” That’s twice in one newsletter!
And with that, we sign off and wish you a great week! Read up and be in the fintech know!
Yours in Fintech,
Cindy Taylor