Obviously, the big technology story that everyone wants to talk about this week is Elon Musk finally pulling the trigger to acquire Twitter for $44 billion.
When the deal was first announced, I wrote about advisers’ reactions, and today my colleague Jeff Benjamin looked at it again. Check those stories out.
We’ve already seen intense reactions from both sides of the political spectrum — right-wingers claiming that Twitter’s fact-checking is suddenly working for the first time ever and confirming the validity of “conservative news,” while left-wingers are threatening to leave the website en masse because of a wave of abuse and harassment that has already begun.
I’m skeptical about how much Musk significantly altered Twitter’s algorithms before 8:00 a.m. on his first day as the owner of the company. What I’m most interested in learning is who helped him complete the financing for the deal, who he'll hire to replace departing executives, and who he'll name to Twitter’s board of directors. The answers to these questions will tell us more about how the platform will change in the future.
But change is no doubt coming, and not all of it will be good. People from the darker corners of the internet celebrated by tweeting racial slurs and anti-semitic imagery, and the Washington Post reported an early return in trolls. Musk needs to rein this in if financial advisers are to continue using the platform to communicate with clients and prospects.
For now, let's all just enjoy the weekend and try not to get too worked up on social media. Here are some of the rest of the fintech stories you may have missed this week.
Well, sort of. Digital advice startup MoneyLion announced the launch of MoneyLion University, a financial literacy initiative created in partnership with Brandon Copeland, a University of Pennsylvania lecturer and former NFL player. Bringing content from Copeland’s course at UPenn and using MoneyLion’s media department, the plan is to build a social curriculum covering budgeting, planning for retirement, gross income, building credit, investing and understanding financial inequities. The “semester” begins in January an will be available in live-streamed webinars and on-demand videos on MoneyLion’s app.
On a panel of “industry titans” at the recent Riskalyze event, Jamie Hopkins, managing partner of wealth solutions at Carson Group, said one thing that he was sure would have happened by 2022, but hasn't, is improved financial literacy. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. found that those with higher financial literacy are more likely to make ends meet than those without, but no one has figured out how to crack the code of how to make a difference here. Here’s hoping MoneyLion can crack the code.
Described as the first “CRM-centric advisor marketing suite,” Redtail Campaigns helps advisers to create personalized marketing campaigns from within the Redtail client relationship management software, which Orion acquired in April. Redtail Campaigns will include a library of content from digital marketing firm Snappy Kraken and custom content from Orion’s investment, financial planning and behavioral finance experts. Early access pricing is available for a limited time at $200 a month per user for an annual subscription, with no set-up fee. Standard pricing for month-to-month is $305 a month per user with a one-time set-up fee of $500. Standard annual contract pricing is $255 a month per user and no set-up fee.
Orion already had a marketing technology, Market*r, but clearly CEO Eric Clarke felt the need to step things up by deploying the company’s latest acquisition with some outside help from Snappy Kraken. If things go well, I wonder if Snappy Kraken becomes the next company to watch for an acquisition, either by Orion or a competitor.
A Fidelity survey of institutional investors — defined as family offices, hedge funds, pensions, financial advisers, endowments and high-net-worth investors — found that 58% invested in digital assets in the the first half of 2022, and 74% plan to invest in the future. While ownership among U.S. institutional investors trails those in Asian and Europe, the U.S. did see a nine-point increase in interest driven largely by HNW investors.
The data fall in line with something I previously reported — even if retail interest in crypto has cooled, financial institutions are still going “full speed ahead” with their plans. The fact that HNW investors are driving adoption here in the U.S. says all you need to know about why they’re doing it.
Adviser fintech company Bento Engine has a new product it calls Life Events that gives financial advisers targeted guidance they can share with clients and prospects around milestones such as getting married, buying a home or having a child. The idea is to help advisers be proactive in reaching out to clients “on the right topics, at the right time, in the right way,” according to Bento CEO Phillipp Hecker. Bento integrates with most of the well-known CRM systems in the industry to pull in the necessary information on clients.
It's kind of wild to me to that every single financial adviser in the industry isn’t already doing this with clients, but here we are. Bento’s approach sounds like a great way to give advisers the nudge they need, but my question is — if advisers don’t already know how or what to say to clients during these huge milestones, then why are they even advisers?
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