InvestCloud acquires Advicent and the NaviPlan platform

InvestCloud, a global leader in cloud-based financial digital solutions, has announced a strategic acquisition of Advicent, the premier cash flow, trust and tax financial planning provider.

Advicent, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, provides financial planning technology for over 140,000 financial professionals across nearly 3,000 firms worldwide. Through its NaviPlan platform, Advicent creates scalable financial planning software through industry-leading APIs as well as cash flow and goal-based planning engines. It aims to help thousands of financial professionals and their clients understand and impact their financial future.

Advicent's global headquarters are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and its European base is in the Netherlands, InvestCloud reported in a press release.

InvestCloud is a global company specialising in digital platforms that enable the development of financial solutions, pre-integrated into the Cloud. It supports over USD4 trillion of assets for more than 500 direct clients – including some of the world's largest banks. The company offers on-demand client experiences and intuitive operations solutions using an ever-expanding library of modular apps, to create powerful products.

The acquisition aims to create the world's leading financial planning solution. 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 acquisition comes as market volatility has accelerated a focus on financial planning – a market worth USD52.9 billion in the US alone, and predicted to grow 3.5% in 2021. Advisors require connected experiences for their clients to enable seamless integration from financial plans to proposals, and on to implementation. 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.

John Wise, Co-founder and CEO, InvestCloud, said: “InvestCloud's planning engine will be enhanced with the combination of Advicent (NaviPlan). 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. This will be greatly leveraged by the market-leading InvestCloud planning solutions and platform used by advisors today. 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. I'm thrilled to welcome Advicent into the InvestCloud family.”

“I'm delighted that, with the support of our Investment partners Motive Partners and Clearlake Capital, we are able to substantially grow both organically and by enabling great acquisitions such as Advicent,” Wise contined.

Angela Pecoraro, CEO, Advicent, said: “We deliberately focused on the most complex components in the functional area of financial planning. InvestCloud is functionally strong and also extremely well known for design of intuitive user experiences. We are delighted to be joining forces with InvestCloud, the world's best and most comprehensive financial digital platform for wealth, which specialises in intuitive and empathetic digital experiences, visualisations and workflows. The opportunity we see together is massive and our team has thought this for years – how powerful a partnership would be with InvestCloud. 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 behavioural science to improve client outcomes.”

InvestCloud's latest acquisition further expands its global client base in North America and Europe, while deepening its dominance within wealth management, trust and estate planning, as well as private banking. The capabilities will be immediately available to InvestCloud's existing global client base through its Digital App Store. Clients will be able to leverage InvestCloud's design-first approach to digital and the power of the Advicent engines to create unparalleled empathetic plans for all clients.