The Wealth Management Digest

Transcript:

Welcome to this week’s Wealth Management Digest.

We have three headlines this week. The first one is Bill Crager stepping down as CEO at Envestnet. The reason on its own is big news, considering Bill has been a pioneer within the industry. But it is interesting because of what they call a twelve-month period, we had so much of a passing baton. In April of last year, John Weiss of Investcloud moved on as CEO. We had Eric Clarke stepping down from Orion in May of last year. We had Riskalyze founder Aaron Klein stepping down as CEO in November. And now, in January, we have Bill Krager. So, it’s definitely big news. And I think it does feel like a passing the baton from the pioneers of, call it, technology for independent advisors to the next wave of founders and builders, and I have no doubt that many of these folks will join boards and will continue to mentor the next generation.

The second headline was Edelman Financial engines closed down their tax prep services (separate/different from their tax planning services). But they did close tax prep. And this is just a reality, which is tax implementation is time-consuming and it’s often offered because clients want more for that 1%. But we have seen that here at Zoe a fair bit, which is a lot of firms try to offer it because others do as well. Then they realize this is not in our DNA, this is not our core offering, and this is just one use case. But I think plenty of others will try to offer something but then realize, “yeah, just because others are doing it might not necessarily be how we can differentiate ourselves.”

The last headline is that on Wednesday of this past week, the SEC finally approved eleven spot bitcoin ETFs wholesale. This is huge news. The cryptocurrency world had been waiting for the SEC to approve ETFs, which will, from their perspective, hopefully allow for higher adoption from the masses rather than just early adopters of cryptocurrency. I think the big question for advisors will be, “Does this mean that you’ll have to look at it as another part of your asset allocation decision, the way you would for commodities or REITs, etc?” That’s to be seen. It’s still very early days, but it’s definitely kind of this first step of mass adoption is to get SEC approval for ETFs. So, we’ll follow that story as it unfolds. That is it for this week. Stay tuned for next week.

– Andres