Fintech Bytes: SEI, SMArtX and Vise

Twitter’s former head of security blew the whistle on the social media company this week, saying it has jeopardized national security while misleading investors and regulators.

In a 200-page document filed with the U.S. government, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko alleged that Twitter’s problems go far beyond well-documented issues like fake accounts and phishing schemes. Thousands of employees work directly with Twitter’s live product rather than on a “sandbox” platform, which exposes user data and can make the social network unstable and vulnerable to hackers, Zatko claims.

Considering how many financial advisers use Twitter as a key tool for client engagement, it’s worth reading up on the report. It’s also worth advisers thinking about their own cybersecurity practices and what sort of client data they're exposing to third-party technology vendors.

Here are some of the other adviser fintech updates you may have missed this week.

SEI INTRODUCES DATA CLOUD

Turnkey asset management and technology provider SEI partnered with Snowflake, a cloud-based data company, to launch a new data service for wealth management firms. The SEI Data Cloud offers provides access to real-time data, event-based alerts and notifications and improved analytics.

SEI’s hope is that offering a cloud-based database can address the industry’s ongoing integration problem. These platforms can certainly help, but with companies like Amazon and Salesforce making concerted efforts to expand their cloud data products into financial services, can SEI offer something that they cannot?

SMARTX PARTNERS WITH FLYER

Flyer Financial Technologies has integrated its Co-Pilot order and execution management platform with SMArtX Advisory Solution’s unified managed account technology. Advisers using SMArtX will have full control over order instructions, routing and post-trade allocation processing, which the company says can improve overall execution quality and help scale back-office trade operations.

For SMArtX, this partnership creates a foundation for what the firm says will be the next stage of its technology road map: a stand-alone portfolio management solution designed to support managed accounts across custodians. SMArtX remains relatively small as a TAMP and tech provider in terms of its adoption among advisers, and it remains to be seen if this next phase will start moving the needle.

VISE LANDS TWO NEW FIRMS

Custom indexing startup Vise has attracted two more RIAs to its platform — Forest City, Iowa-based Greenstone Wealth Management and Prosper, Texas-based CPR Financial and Insurance Services. Greenstone president Taylor Wilson, the firm’s only financial adviser, manages 130 client accounts, while CPR’s four financial advisers manage 500 clients.

Every adviser wants to grow their practice, but the only way a single adviser can manage more than 100 client accounts is to effectively deploy technology. The fact that these RIAs selected Vise to do so is a good look for the fintech, which has reportedly struggled to grow this year after raising $65 million in venture capital at a $1 billion valuation.     

[More: Fintech unicorn Vise partners with Morgan Stanley alum’s new RIA aggregator]