From large institutions to smaller, nimble startups, firms are showing they want to play in the rich tech space. They have hit the ground running with innovations this year. As we enter the final month of the first quarter, here's a look at some big Wealthtech headlines:
We've seen public indications that Vanguard is working to shed its old image and be seen as an industry innovator. In addition to this news, we know that they have resumed their 2016 idea of opening an innovation lab near their office to provide a space for new and creative thinking. Hopefully, this time, unlike their efforts in 2016, Vanguard's interest in innovative technologies and ideas will begin to lead to material improvements for wealth management firms.
Nitrogen is being positioned as tool for business growthbringing research, lead generation, marketing automation and insertion into a country. The concept “Won with Nitrogen” is fantastic. Having a tool that actually reports how much growth and value you're getting from it is a masterstroke that will make selling Nitrous a no-brainer because other tools don't tell you how much they're worth.
It might not sound terribly innovative, but getting custom Muni SMA in your wallet automatically through an Orion TAMP solution is pretty cool. And it's even better for your clients when you add that to the other benefits of having AllianceBernstein, which has phenomenal research, data and analytics. We look forward to seeing more of this where asset managers are working innovatively to build SMA or UMA products for investors.
Now, more than 350,000 US financial advisors can access Architect, where they can assess the impact of adding alternatives, such as private equity, private credit, hedge funds, private real estate funds and structured investments to a existing portfolio that includes traditional investments. If you are an office advisor or an independent broker working in this area, this is really good news, because until now, comparing or showing a perspective of what it could look like with that asset class was almost impossible . BECAUSE iCapital is a fund of funds, they can use their data to model the current portfolio with the addition of a high-cap pool of alternative assets and present a risk and return profile that is much more accurate than a generic benchmark.
Rogo seeks to advance a Specialized generative AI tool that can provide investors with quick research and analysis. It sounds good, but this news is very vague and we don't know what Rogo will do. The real news here is that the money is flowing into it AI generation tools in our industry. Our research last year showed that 51% of the firms we surveyed were testing some form of AI technology. We hope this Rogo tool will help advisors maximize their time. Clients expect advisors to be everywhere and everything at any time, so using Gen AI to create content and experiences leads to better results for your customers.
Make March count and we'll deliver our next round of headlines in April.