United Capital had been growing through acquisition before Goldman Sachs acquired it in 2019 and that business — now called Goldman Sachs Personal Financial Management — will continue to grow this year, according to Rachel Schnoll, head of FinLife at Goldman Sachs PFM.
However, "I think you'll see more focus on organic growth from PFM and the linkages that we have" with sister PFM Group company Ayco, which focuses on company-sponsored financial planning and was purchased by Goldman Sachs in 2003, she told ThinkAdvisor in a recent interview.
"Ayco has a lot of corporate relationships and now, with the PFM advisors, we're able to provide that personal financial planning service to more employees of the corporations that Ayco works with than we were ever able to provide before," she said. "So I think you'll see a lot more of that partnership and that will really fuel our organic growth."
All PFM advisors, meanwhile, are now using the company's FinLife wealth management platform tools created by United Capital, she said.
The company is also "starting to integrate other high-net-worth advisors at Goldman Sachs to use those" tools, including Ayco teams, she said.
Goldman Sachs PFM also has a "white-label version" of the FinLife platform that she said "saw 50% growth last year in terms of adding new, independent RIA firms."
Tech Challenges
One challenge that advisors face today is that "digital is not optional anymore," according to Schnoll. "The advisors that were able to engage digitally have had a much easier time of it than advisors that weren't engaged digitally" during the pandemic, "pivoting from working in an office to working from home," she said.
Schnoll recognizes that is challenging for at least some advisors because "people that became financial advisors did so because they care about investing and they care about helping people live the lives they want," not because they wanted to get deeply involved in customer relationship management, financial planning software and other tech, she said.
"It's a challenge of time and interest that advisors have to care about their tech stack now," she said.
However, advisors don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money on tech. "The nice thing is that there's a wide array of technology right now to really fit the needs of almost any financial advisors," Schnoll said. "There's more sophisticated tools that cost more money and there's less sophisticated tools that you can get for less money. And, as an advisor grows their practice, they might want to grow their tools with their practice."
The FinLife suite of tools helps advisors overcome at least some of the tech challenges. "One of the things that's great about United Capital and has gotten even better as they've become a part of Goldman Sachs is we're a technology-first organization and so a United Capital client and now a PFM client has an app called Guide Center where they connect with their advisor," she noted.
