WealthStack Roundup: VastAdvisor Closes $1 Million Funding Round
VastAdvisor, an AI-powered startup focused on organic growth for wealth management firms, announced it has closed a $1 million funding round led by investments from several well-known industry executives.
The round was led by Dani Fava, chief strategy officer at Carson Group, Jason Pereira, senior partner at Woodgate Financial and Sally George, partner at Convergency Partners. The funds will go toward accelerating VastAdvisor’s product roadmap and support go-to-market efforts, according to the company, which was launched in March by co-founder and CEO Ian Karnell.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, except that it was a Simple Agreement for Future Equity round, a generally less complex form of financing created by the startup accelerator Y Combinator. According to the company, the platform integrates AI-driven audience intelligence, campaign orchestration, compliance automation and performance optimization into a single system focused on acquiring assets.
The funding follows several leadership hires, including Phil Gale, co-founder and chief operating officer; Eli Gassert, chief technology officer; and Dr. Edoardo M. Airoldi, acting chief data officer, the company said.
FP Transitions Launches RIA Benchmarking Tool, Appoints COO
FP Transitions, a Portland, Ore., provider of business valuation and succession planning solutions for financial advisors, launched a new value estimator and benchmarking tool for wealth managers.
FP Transitions’ Estimated Value Index scores advisory firms from 1 to 100 based on financial performance and is available through the firm’s FPInsights platform. The tool is designed to give advisory firm owners a view of their business’s financial strength relative to comparable firms in the company’s database, the firm said. The tool, which is free for advisors with an FPInsights account, assigns scores based on key financial information, with higher scores indicating stronger performance relative to peers, the company said.
“We believe enterprise value should be something owners understand, measure and intentionally build throughout the life of the business,” FP Transitions CEO Brad Bueermann said in a statement. “The Estimated Value Index gives them a simple starting point for doing that and represents an important next step in how we use our data and experience to help advisors make better business decisions.”
FP Transitions also announced that it had hired Tom Kimberly as its first chief operating officer. Kimberly previously held leadership roles at McKinsey & Company, Barclays, Betterment, Fidelity Labs and Edelman Financial Engines.
In the new role, he is tasked with integrating the firm’s business intelligence, consulting work and product development to “continue building solutions that translate FP Transitions’ data into practical tools for advisory firms,” according to the announcement.
NewEdge’s Anthropic Advisor Rollout Bears Fruit
NewEdge Capital Group’s work to give its advisors access to vendor Anthropic’s Claude, starting in June, is already paying off with custom tools and activations for clients, the wealth management group announced this week.
According to the firm, which has more than 450 advisors and affiliated representatives across three units, adoption of Claude in recent weeks has led advisors to create retirement roadmaps, put insurance and annuity contract language into plan-English, and reduce the time it takes to build a client webinar from hours to minutes. Advisors are also using Claude to distill financial plans and meeting notes into concise briefings in minutes ahead of client meetings.
“What’s happened since we offered this out to our advisors has gone beyond what any of us expected,” said Alex Goss, co-founder and CEO of NewEdge Advisors, the firm’s RIA platform and aggregator. “We built the framework and gave advisors the access, and they’ve taken it further, faster, than we could have built for them. That’s the real story here, not that we gave them the tool, but what they’ve already accomplished with it.”
NewEdge is now also working on a library of Claude best-practices resources, webinars about how to use it, and forums for advisors to collaborate and exchange ideas.
Costs for using Claude are split between NewEdge’s corporate side, which uses enterprise licenses purchased in tokens, and the advisors, who purchase their own licenses.
The firm is one of the first large RIAs to partner directly with Claude, but LPL Financial also announced in February that it had expanded an ongoing relationship with Anthropic to develop AI-related integrations, and in April, alternative investment platform iCapital announced it was working with Anthropic.
XYPN Offers Members Deal for CurrentClient Communication Tools
XYPN, a support platform for over 2,200 fee-only financial planners, is working with financial advisor communication platform CurrentClient to offer its advisor members discounted pricing on compliant texting, business phone services, AI-backed call summaries and team collaboration tools.
The move comes as XYPN members have been calling for a communication suite that offers texting, calling, collaboration and compliance, CEO Alan Moore said in a statement.
“CurrentClient provides that functionality while integrating with important tools many advisors already use, making it a natural addition to our partner ecosystem,” he said.
CurrentClient, which secured a $1.25 million seed funding round this March, integrates with advisor technologies such as Wealthbox CRM and XY Archive for compliant message archiving.
CurrentClient was named “Best in Show” at the 2024 XYPN LIVE AdviceTech Competition, which is given to technology providers that help advisors operate more effectively.
