Five years after launching as a basic referral program connecting consumers to financial advisors, Zoe Financial has evolved into a back- and middle-office services platform for registered investment advisors.
The Zoe Wealth Platform is touted as a one-of-a-kind platform that simplifies and consolidates all the digital communications, forms, and account management services that already exist but are rarely interconnected for ease of use.
Andres Garcia-Amaya, founder and chief executive of the company, compares the evolution of the platform to the way Slack and Teams changed corporate communications.
“They weren’t solving for anything new; they just made it easier to use what already existed,” he said. “It’s the same thing on our platform. On its own each experience already exists; it’s just built today, not 30 years ago.”
Garcia-Amaya said the idea for the expanded platform came through basic follow-up conversations with consumers and advisors who had connected through the Zoe referral program, which he said has referred more than $2 billion in assets through thousands of consumers.
“We found that once the consumer said yes to working with an advisor, the pain didn’t stop there,” he said. “We assumed this was something advisors didn’t need help with, but what we found is most platforms were built decades ago and just bolted onto new systems and financial planning software. It’s not uncommon for a client to need six different logins to work with an adviser. It’s four or five minutes to open an account through us.”
The solution, Garcia-Amaya said, was to “build a continuation of the experience.”
While the Zoe Wealth Platform officially launched Wednesday, the platform is already being used by some of the RIAs that have been using the referral program.
Tony Schmitt, president and chief executive of GreenUp Wealth Management, said his firm is using Zoe Financial from the “warm introduction” stage all the way through to managing investments in a “seamless ecosystem.”
“The referral partnership with Zoe has given GreenUp the ability to reach potential clients that we would not have been able to connect with in any other way,” he said. “We fully believe that Zoe can help us take the next steps to enhance client relationships while transforming the wealth management industry.”
Advisors pay Zoe Financial a fee for any referral that results in a new client relationship. The Wealth Platform charges a separate fee based on advisory assets.
Garcia-Amaya said that RIAs that signed up during the beta testing period combine for approximately $2.5 billion under management, and that the total assets of the RIAs Zoe Financial works with is more than $700 billion.
“In the beginning, we figured if we helped consumers find and hire an advisor, we’ve done our job,” he said. “Now, we’ve given them a platform to manage the client relationship more efficiently.”
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