InvestCloud Acquires Advicent and Its NaviPlan Platform

"The acquisition aims to create the world's leading financial planning solution," Advicent and InvestCloud said in a joint announcement. "It does this by bridging the advisor-client communication gap by combining Advicent's cash flow, trust and tax financial planning engines with InvestCloud's digital client and advisor platform and existing market leading goal-based financial planning engines."

The transaction comes as "market volatility has accelerated a focus on financial planning — a market worth $52.9 billion in the U.S. alone, and predicted to grow 3.5 percent in 2021," the companies pointed out.

"Advisors require connected experiences for their clients to enable seamless integration from financial plans to proposals, and on to implementation," they explained. "The acquisition will give advisors a full-scope unified platform to achieve this, alongside providing client management and ongoing maintenance functions. It will offer a comprehensive digital experience across an advisor's entire book of business, from mass affluent to ultra-high-net-worth individuals."

InvestCloud's planning engine "will be enhanced with the combination of Advicent (NaviPlan)," John Wise, CEO and co-founder of InvestCloud, said in a statement. "Advicent is a highly differentiated planning engine covering the simple goal-based assessments that most of the known financial planning engines cover; however, and importantly, Advicent also has advanced retirement income scenarios and estate/trust planning focusing on the very difficult planning aspects of tax and cash flow," he said in the announcement.

That will be "greatly leveraged" by the InvestCloud planning solutions and platform used by advisors today, he said, adding: "The Advicent team has created a great asset which, when combined with InvestCloud's expertise in Digital Design, Gaming Theory, Decision Theory and Data Science, will accelerate the Advisor experience and drive better adoption and better outcomes."

With the support of investment partners Motive Partners and Clearlake Capital, InvestCloud is "able to substantially grow both organically and by enabling great acquisitions such as Advicent," he also said.

The opportunity that the merged companies see together is "massive and our team has thought this for years — how powerful a partnership would be with InvestCloud," Angela Pecoraro, Advicent CEO, said in a statement. "As digital plays a more and more critical role in the advisor experience, InvestCloud's platform will enable our clients to reduce complexities, increase flexibility, and be a game-changing power for client-to-advisor collaboration by applying behavioral science to improve client outcomes."

InvestCloud's latest acquisition further expands its global client base in North America and Europe, while also "deepening its dominance within wealth management, trust and estate planning, as well as private banking," according to the companies.

The capabilities will be immediately made available to InvestCloud's existing global client base through its Digital App Store, they said.