Docupace acquires Hubly to drive advisor CRM workflow solutions

At a high level, financial planning isn't something that can be done with a cookie-cutter approach. Each client has different goals, values, and financial circumstances, and plans need to be carefully tailored to ensure that they closely match the clients' needs and wants. But at a more granular level, financial planning can also be thought of as an ongoing series of smaller processes, many of which can be broken down into sequential steps that can be systematized and repeated each time the need for that task comes up. For example, each time a client wants to move money to or from one of their investment accounts, the advisory team might go through the same process of verifying the dollar amounts and locations, populating and submitting paperwork, resolving NIGOs, and potentially submitting trades. On the financial planning side, an annual client meeting might entail a systematic review of all components of the client's plan, including data gathering, summarization, and analysis for each. And in all cases, it's a best practice to document the completion of each step to demonstrate compliance with the RIA firm's policies and procedures and with state or Federal laws and regulations. 

It's helpful, then, for financial advisors to establish and maintain written workflows to help them stay organized. At the very least, solo and small ensemble advisors can use checklists to stay on top of where they are in each process and avoid missing any steps, for which they can create their own individual checklists from scratch or use off-the-shelf versions from providers like fpPathfinder. For larger teams with staff supporting multiple advisors, however, the need for workflows is more urgent (because of the number of team member handoffs involved along the way) and also more complex: The workflow solution needs to be more than a list of steps in a process, it also needs to reflect how tasks are assigned and handed off to those responsible for each step along the way, and there needs to be a way for managers to stay appraised on the big picture of how each project is progressing and which team members are responsible for which tasks at any given time. 

It would seem that the most obvious place for a workflow tool to live within an advisor's tech stack would be within their CRM, since that tends to be the hub for most of an advisor's client-related tasks, and is usually the first place where an advisor goes after a client meeting to log meeting notes and update information (after which the next step is usually to kick off one or more workflows based on action items from the meeting). And many CRM platforms do include workflow tools in one form or another – but in recent years, as advisory firms have on the whole gotten bigger and more complex, CRM platforms by and large haven't invested in improving their workflow tools enough to keep up with the needs of the firms they serve. They might be able to perform the basic functions of kicking off sequential tasks and assigning them to the appropriate team members, but they often stop short of more advanced functions like automation of routine tasks (e.g., triggering a scheduling email to a client six weeks in advance of their annual review date) or project management tools to keep team members appraised on the status of collaborative tasks. 

Advisors' frustration with the limitations of their CRMs' workflow capabilities led to the launch of Hubly, which was designed to integrate with and overlay advisors' existing CRM tools (specifically Wealthbox and Redtail) with more robust workflow features, including a visual "kanban"-style layout of tasks, automation capabilities, project tracking tools, and a large library of pre-designed workflows that can be used out of the box or customized to the advisor's liking. The caveat, however, was that Hubly's pricing of $110+ per user per month meant that Hubly itself was often more costly for advisors than the CRM platforms it was overlaying – and since advisors still needed the CRM to work with Hubly, that meant they were paying more than double the cost of CRM alone 'just' for a tool to improve on the CRM's workflow capabilities. And so despite Hubly's enhancement of advisors' ability to deploy workflows in their practice, it hasn't gained a great deal of traction among advisors, with most of the advisors who do use workflow tools opting to stick with what's in their CRM despite their clear limitations (given the relative cost difference when 'just' the CRM is less than half the price of the two together). 

Against that backdrop comes the news this month that Hubly is being acquired by Docupace, the advisory back office management platform that also owns PreciseFP. For now, like PreciseFP, it appears that Hubly will keep operating as a standalone product under Docupace's umbrella, although comments from Docupace CEO David Knoch suggest that Hubly and Docupace will be "thoughtfully brought together" as soon as next year, which makes it uncertain whether current Hubly clients will be able to continue using it on its own without adopting the whole Docupace platform, or if Hubly will be positioned more directly as part of Docupace's "RIA Productivity Suite" alongside PreciseFP. 

For Docupace, the Hubly acquisition represents a further expansion beyond its roots as a document management system for enterprise RIAs and broker-dealers to attract small- and mid-sized RIAs. To that end, it likely sees synergies between Hubly and PreciseFP, a tool made to help with systematizing the process of collecting client information that likely appeals to the same types of process-oriented advisors who represent much of Hubly's user base. And indeed, Docupace is already offering a temporary discount to users of either Hubly or PreciseFP who decide to sign up with the other. 

But for Hubly, the acquisition reflects the difficulty of sustaining as an independent provider that overlays a core advisor software system… especially at a price that's higher than the system it overlays in the first place. In Hubly's case, it always had a narrow path to walk between small firms whose workflow needs are simple enough to be accomplished within their CRM (and wouldn't need to pay up for Hubly), and bigger enterprise-level firms who use Salesforce and its own robust built-in workflow capabilities (and wouldn't need Hubly to overlay their CRM). And among those firms whose needs did fit in between (using small/mid-sized RIA CRMs like Weatlhbox and Redtail, with a large enough team to need more sophisticated workflows), it needed to price its product in a way that reflected the magnitude of the pain point that it addressed in the size of firm addressing it – with the implication being that the incremental process improvement provided by Hubly just didn't align with the asking price for the advisors in its target market. Which was made even more challenging by the existence of cheaper, general-purpose solutions like Asana or Trello, as well as by the recent launch of solutions like Quivr as a CRM specifically built around workflows to eliminate the need for a separate overlay entirely. 

Still, there's likely enough of a niche among process-oriented workflow power users for Hubly to stay in operation as a subsidiary of Docupace, especially if they can encourage some crossover between Hubly and PreciseFP. However, Docupace might still find it necessary to adjust Hubly's pricing to where it's palatable for advisors to pay for it in addition to their CRM. Because as Hubly's story as a standalone company shows, while advisors do often lament about workflow inefficiencies, most advisory firms just don't have very high organic growth rates, which means they'll just only pay "so much" for software to solve the pain point. Or put more simply, even the right product can struggle to gain traction when it's offered at the wrong price – and when the cost for a solution to solve CRMs' workflow shortcomings is more expensive than the CRM itself, it isn't surprising that advisors en masse would balk at adopting it. 

Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful. 

Michael Kitces is the Chief Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning and helping to make financial advisors better and more successful. In addition, he is the Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, the co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, New Planner Recruiting, fpPathfinder, and FA BeanCounters, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View.