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Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company has agreed to acquire Flourish, a technology platform for registered investment advisors, from Stone Ridge Asset Management.
Flourish is best known for its Flourish Cash program, which provides a sweep account clients can use to push cash in an account into an interest-bearing deposit account at one or more banks without any minimum deposit requirement. The Flourish program serves about 350 RIAs with about $600 billion in assets under management, according to MassMutual.
"Big #AdvisorTech news! Flourish was early player in high-yield cash mgmt for RIAs, along w/@maxmyinterest, @Galileo_Tweets, & SC_Funds," tweeted blogger and financial planner Michael Kitces, who also asked: "MassMutual gets RIA relationships for fee-based insurance exchange?"
"After the acquisition, Flourish will continue to serve RIAs, operating independently from MassMutual's existing insurance and wealth management business," the insurer said in a statement early Tuesday.
The fintech firm adds to the insurer's product lineup and boosts its ability to "deliver digitally-enabled holistic financial planning while complementing its efforts to provide the best technology to its advisors and clients," a MassMutual spokesperson explained later in the day via email.
"With that said," Flourish is reviewing more "products and services across banking, wealth management and insurance … specifically built for financial advisors," the spokesperson added. Flourish's advisors "will be able to decide whether to make any new products, including any MassMutual insurance products, available to their clients on a client-by-client basis."
MassMutual, which did not disclose the terms of the deal, aims to close the transaction by March 31 and to retain the Flourish team.
News of the Flourish acquisition comes four days after MassMutual agreed to pay $5 million for a minority stake in NYDIG, a New York-based company that provides institutional investment programs and technology for Bitcoin operations.
MassMutual also worked with NYDIG to buy $100 million in Bitcoin for its general investment account.
In other insurance-technology deal news:
SE2, a life and annuities insurance technology and services firm in Topeka, Kansas, said it has acquired Convergent Financial Technologies, a software developer in Hamilton, New Jersey, that develops cloud-based systems for life insurers and retirement services companies.
Convergent was founded in 2013. The company's UV Cloud system helps customers manage variable product assets and calculate the unit values, according to SE2.
