Weston, Mass.-based Advisor360° has added GWN Securities as a client.
About 800 GWN Securities advisors will have access to Advisor360° capabilities, including account opening, advisor experience, data and reporting, and client portal.
GWN Securities is a national independent broker/dealer and RIA. The firm is based in Palm Gardens, Fla., with approximately $21 billion in total assets under management.
The move represents a milestone for the platform, which Advisor360° designed for independent advisors. The road to this point has been a long one for Advisor360°, with significant pauses along the way.
360° Advisor Drunk from the privately held Commonwealth Financial Network in April 2019.
Two months ago, in February 2019, insurance broker/dealer Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) announced it would be the second company to license the 360° Suite, the first being Commonwealth.
However, this relationship between MassMutual and Advisor360° did not materialize for more than two years. MassMutual took until June 2021 to start licensing Advisor360° software to its 7,500+ advisors. The unique capabilities developed for MassMutual and the firm's Commonwealth spinoff meant thousands of coding changes and delayed implementation, Darren Tedesco, president at Advisor360°, said at the time.
Nepsis appoints Amanda Butler as first CTO
Nepsis, a money manager-turned-investment advisor-turned-family office and CPA buyer, has named Amanda Butler the firm's first chief technology officer (CTO).
Prior to assuming this latest role, Butler served for more than 10 years as an external consultant to Nepsis. Most recently, she was a principal at Mosaik Consulting, director of wealth management at Redkite (later acquired by LiquidHub) and information systems manager at Telaurus Communications.
The past few months have been busy for the Minneapolis-based RIA, which Chief Investment Officer Mark Pearson founded.
After moving away from a third-party asset management model in 2018, Nepsis began planning its new growth strategy of acquiring tax and accounting firms. For this purpose, Nepsis completed its first M&A deal in November 2023 with the acquisition of Sevenich, Butler, Gerlach & Brazil, a CPA firm in St. Louis. Paul, Minn.
The firm announced in February that it had recruited Ed Stober of Choreo to serve as a senior wealth advisor on the Nepsis executive team.
in March, Trenton Hazen left Northwestern Mutual to lead Nepsis' new corporate retirement plan division as director of retirement plan services.
According to its latest Form ADV filed in April, the RIA reported over $350 million in adjusted advisory assets, 23 employees and 15 advisors.
Hearsay research reveals that original content resonates with customers
Firms that want to connect with customers would do well to produce more original content, even though overall social media engagement fell compared to last year, according to the Hearsay Financial Services Social Selling Content Study.
Although last year's study found a 23% increase in social media engagement, this year's edition found that changes to these platforms' algorithms and a general decrease in posts by brands decreased engagement. For example, after LinkedIn began targeting spam last summer, the overall platform reported a two-thirds drop in engagement year-over-year since October 2023.
To combat this trend, advisors who want to stand out from their peers should produce more original posts instead of edited and recycled content, according to Hearsay. The average engagement rate, or total engagement divided by total followers multiplied by 100, of original content dropped to 5.2% in 2023, while edited posts averaged just 1.7%. Unedited posts fared even worse, as this copy-and-paste content only garnered an engagement rate of 0.5%.
The study is in its seventh year. The 2024 version aggregated data from over 100 asset management, wealth management, property and casualty insurance, life and annuities and banking firms representing 260,000 agents and advisors who used the Hearsay platform during 2023. The data includes over 13 million posts published on social media, with 21 million engagements on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.