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RFG Advisory, the Birmingham, Ala.-headquartered hybrid RIA platform with $7.3 billion in assets, has made a strategic investment in Zocks Communications, the AI assistant, notetaker and meeting automation application for financial advisors. As a result, Zocks co-founder and CEO Mark Gilbert has joined RFG’s board of directors.
RFG made the investment as part of Zocks’ Series B funding round, which was announced in January and co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors.
With the investment, Zocks will play a more active role in how RFG’s operating system captures and structures data from client conversations and automates workflows, going beyond a simple integration. RFG recently unveiled its ClickONE Command Center, a new operating system built on a unified data layer. RFG President Ed Swenson said the firm has been working on ClickONE for the last two years.
“What Zocks will be helping us do is to take that data and turn it into what you would call ‘agentic,’ meaning actionable insights,” he said. “No. 2, better business intelligence for our advisors, so they can be better CEOs and owners of their businesses as independents.”
It’s the latest in a flurry of moves by advisory firms, custodians, wealthtechs and other technology providers that have announced agentic platforms in the wealth space, including Advisor360°, Altruist, Anthropic, Apex Fintech Solutions, Boosted.ai, Datalign Advisory, Goodfin, Jump, OneVest (and a collaboration with Merit Financial Advisors), Nitrogen, Savvy, TIFIN and Zeplyn, among others.
“We believe the ‘human in the loop’ wins every time, and advisors armed with this tech will win. We’ve already built the foundation with ClickONE,” Swenson said in a statement. “Our investment in Zocks accelerates that build, allowing us to embed AI into the core of how advisors operate, giving time back and surfacing opportunities for organic growth. That’s where you start to unlock real scale and enterprise value.”
RFG also announced that Jim Patrick, a former group president of Envestnet | PMC, has joined the board. Patrick will support the expansion of RFG’s Bluemonte ETFs platform and other investment management capabilities.
Zocks announced its Series B funding in January, raising $45 million and bringing total funding to $65 million. The company will use the investment to expand its agentic AI capabilities and help financial advisors identify insights and planning opportunities across their client base.
Among the advisor technologies that Zocks syncs are customer relationship management tools, financial planning systems, tax software and portfolio management tools. The company has used these integrations to build workflow automations for client onboarding, account openings, meeting preparation, follow-ups and document processing, among others.
Zocks now works with more than 5,000 financial firms, including Ameritas, Carson Group, Kestra Financial and Osaic.
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