Advyzon becomes the latest wealthtech to launch a TAMP

Advyzon, one of Financial Planning’s best fintechs to work for, is the latest wealthtech company to start offering outsourced investment management services.

The company — which provides an all-in-one tech solution that includes CRM, portfolio management and reporting to about 1,000 financial advisors — announced the launch of Advyzon Investment Management (AIM), a turnkey asset management program for financial advisors.

Advyzon’s clients and prospects had been increasingly asking for a more unified experience between investments and technology, according to John Mackowiak, Advyzon’s chief business development officer and Financial Planning contributor. So rather than partner with a third-party investment firm, as other technology vendors have done to roll out a TAMP, the company instead built a new one on top of its existing technology.

Unless a firm outsources all client portfolios to a third party, it often runs into problems between its technology and the TAMP’s, said Hailin Li, founder and CEO of Advyzon. By building everything with a single source code, Advyzon believes it can avoid that problem and let advisors retain control over some investments while outsourcing the rest.

“We can offer a fully integrated user experience because it’s a natural extension of what we are doing,” Li said.

It’s that digital experience and the fact that AIM is independent from any asset manager that Advyzon hopes will help its new TAMP stand out and compete for assets in an increasingly crowded market. 

“We are decoupled from pushing individual investments or anything like that,” said Lee Andreatta, CEO of Advyzon Investment Management. “We are not going down the path of offering investment products, and we’re not owned by an investment product manufacturer.”

In addition to Andreatta, AIM is led by Chief Investment Officer Brian Huckstep, who previously spent 15 years at Morningstar as senior portfolio manager and head of U.S. asset allocation, and Chief Operating Officer Meghan Holmes, who most recently worked with advisors affiliated with Charles Schwab Advisor Services’ largest enterprise clients.

AIM plans to leverage the team’s collective experience to offer a lineup of proprietary model portfolios including active/passive mutual funds and ETFs, an ESG model, a tax-sensitive ETF-only solution, an alternative model and a version of indexing, Andreatta said. Advyzon plans to eventually build out a model marketplace to include third-party strategies.

Other wealthtech companies have made similar pivots to outsourced asset management. Orion Advisor Solutions has long had investment management services through CLS Investments, gained full TAMP capabilities with its 2018 purchase of FTJ FundChoice and boosted its offering with the 2020 merger with Brinker Capital. More recently, InvestCloud made the jump after buying and merging with Tegra118, formerly Fiserv’s wealth management business.

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“Many firms like Advyzon are adding TAMP capabilities. It seems to me that advisors prefer a one-stop solution for investment management and performance reporting/portfolio management,” said Joel Bruckenstein, producer of the Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference.

Though Advyzon isn’t as well known as some of the competing wealthtech companies, it seems to be growing rapidly, Bruckenstein said. In his latest technology survey, Advyzon received the highest advisor satisfaction ranking among all-in-one technologies, as well as in the portfolio management and reporting categories. The technology has also been singled out by XYPN co-founder Michael Kitces as a software that advisors enjoy using.

And while others may have more extensive offerings, some firms don’t need everything the TAMPs provide, opening the door for new entrants.

“For those with the needs that Advyzon fills, who want a provider with high satisfaction rankings, Advyzon is a good fit,” Bruckenstein said.