WealthStack Roundup: News from Apex Group, Vanilla
It has been a busy week of technology announcements. Here are briefs on some that will be of interest to advisors.
Apex Group Launches Private Markets Platform
Apex Group has launched a private markets platform.
The platform digitizes some of the private market investment processes and helps match investors with curated investments “while leveraging blockchain and asset tokenization to enhance transparency, security and liquidity, making alternative assets more accessible to a broader range of investors,” according to a company statement.
The platform offers digital onboarding, transactions, data and performance reporting, API integration, straight-through processing and access to private market funds, and cross-jurisdictional custody and compliance.
“Our wealthtech platform aims to increase accessibility to an asset class that was previously difficult to invest in by offering technology solutions aligned with changing investor needs,” Zion Hilelly, group chief product officer, said in a statement. “By tokenizing private equity investments, we are enabling dramatically different liquidity options across multiple jurisdictions and time zones and transforming how the market will operate in the future.”
Private Advisor Group Adds Capital Group, Franklin Templeton & Goldman Sachs to WealthSuite Platform
Morristown, N.J.-based Private Advisor Group has added investment strategies from Capital Group, Franklin Templeton and Goldman Sachs to its proprietary investment management platform, WealthSuite.
Capital Group offers model portfolios aligned to five investment objectives—aggressive growth, growth, growth with income, income with moderate growth and income with capital preservation. These active-passive models were created specifically for Private Advisor Group and include Capital Group’s active ETF strategies.
Franklin Templeton offers open architecture, ETF-based completion portfolios that include U.S. equity (with or without Bitcoin exposure), international equity and fixed income (taxable and tax-exempt).
Goldman Sachs Asset Management manages model portfolios through its Multi-Asset Solutions team, combining strategic and dynamic asset allocation with ongoing evaluation of underlying investments through quantitative and fundamental research.
Arch Forms Client Advisory Board
Fresh off raising $52 million in Series B, private markets fintech Arch has launched a client advisory board.
Among the 15-member board are Chris Schultz, principal in operations at Churchill Asset Management; Tim Riker, director of fund finance at Thrive Capital; Randy Schultz, vice president of operations at Homrich Berg; Tim Halladay, head of operations at Jordan Park Group; and Dave Breslin, executive vice president of GC Wealth.
“We know that the best solutions are built in close collaboration with the people who use them,” Ryan Eisenman, co-founder and CEO of Arch, said in a statement. “This group of carefully selected industry leaders will help us continue building meaningful, future-ready tools that drive value across the industry.”
The advisory board centers around Arch’s four client segments: Institutions and Allocators; Investment Advisors (including multi-family offices, RIAs and banks); Platforms; and Family Offices.
Covenant Launches AI-Powered Legal Service for Private Market Investors
Covenant, an “AI-powered law firm” that specializes in private markets, launched Covenant 2.0, a data intelligence platform that it says provides “investors direct, real-time access to verified legal data and insights, unlocking unprecedented speed and leverage throughout the investment lifecycle.”
The firm stated that the service allows investors to retrieve verified legal data using Covenant’s proprietary “Ask Covenant AI” to analyze fund terms and benchmark portfolios, visualize trends and surface hidden correlations.
“Legal data has always been locked in PDFs and law firm files, making it difficult to manually sift through and obtain key insights to leverage in negotiations,” Jen Berrent, CEO and co-founder of Covenant, said in a statement. “Covenant 2.0 will alleviate this ongoing bottleneck for private market investors by enabling them to gain immediate access and control over their legal data, which hasn’t been done before. We’re not layering automation on top of legacy law firm processes; we’re restructuring the workflow system for the legal space.”
Waitlist for Vanilla Starter Opens
The estate planning provider to RIAs has announced the waitlist for Vanilla Starter this week and its base pricing: $99 per month.
Meant for solo practitioners and small RIA firms that want to offer estate planning services in-house, it will provide advisors with marketing materials, training resources and the ability to create sophisticated estate planning documents using templates as well as model basic estate and insurance strategies in their practices.
The new Starter tool will also provide access to analysis features that let advisors perform an “Estate Health Check,” and to Vanilla’s state-specific attorney network.
Holistiplan and Zocks Partner, Provide Discount
Popular tax planning software Holistiplan this week announced a strategic partnership and integration with the popular AI-powered digital assistant and notetaker Zocks.
With the integration (available now to users of both platforms), Holistiplan’s tax data and insights are now integrated directly into Zocks’ AI-powered workflows, which include automated meeting preparation, a live meeting experience, the “Ask Anything” feature, email replies and more.
Advisors who adopt both Holistiplan and Zocks will have access to a reciprocal 10% partnership discount (meaning Holistiplan users can get 10% off Zocks and vice versa).
Monark Markets, Apex Fintech Offer Access to Pre-IPO Investments
Fintech startup Monark Markets and Apex Fintech Solutions Inc. (a different firm from Apex Group, mentioned in a previous brief) have teamed up to offer accredited investors access to the pre-IPO market with minimums as low as $5,000.
The partnership builds on APIs of both companies and the Monark Alts Marketplace and the Apex AscendOS clearing, custody and trading platform. The firms expect to make shares available beginning later this quarter.
Accredited investors will be able to invest in single-asset Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that provide access to private companies, funding transactions from the cash balance in Apex brokerage accounts.
Monark and Apex plan to expand in the future to other privately held alternative asset classes, including private equity funds, private credit, real estate, sports teams and infrastructure.
Four Former Orion Executives, Including Eric Clarke, Launch AI Tool
Long-time Orion CEO Eric Clarke and Redtail founder and CEO Brian Mclaughlin have come out of semi-retirement to launch a self-funded, AI-driven communications startup.
Announced this week, the tool remains in closed beta with select asset managers, according to a prepared statement.
Rather than competing head-to-head with more than a dozen other more RIA-focused, AI-powered notetaker and communications and platforms, the new startup, called Hamachi, instead has been “purpose-built for advisors working with asset managers,” according to Clarke in a prepared statement.