While most financial advisors know Riskalyze for their popular risk tolerance assessment tools, the company’s pivot in recent years to build out their Autopilot “robo-for-advisors” software, and a Model Marketplace of third-party asset managers where they can monetize not just their software solution but the asset flows across it, funded by a massive $20M venture capital raise led by FTV Capital in late 2016, makes them look less and less like “just” an advisor technology company that gets paid a software fee, and more like a holistic advisor platform that aims to compete with the likes of Envestnet by earning bps on its aggregated assets as a technology distribution channel for asset managers. And now, Riskalyze has announced the addition of Lori Hardwick to its Board of Directors, who had a brief stint as the COO of Pershing but spent the bulk of her career at Envestnet (since its inception) finishing as its Group President of Advisor Services, and hasspent the past year building a start-up called “AI Labs” that aims to roll up and overlay all of an advisor’s software components into a unified advisor dashboard that would work across any/all custodians or broker-dealers. In other words, Hardwick spent most of her career building and overseeing a unified advisor platform that supported Envestnet’s marketplace of third-party managers, then went out to build her own next generation platform at AI (Advisor Innovation) Labs, and now is joining the Board of Directors of Riskalyze as it is seemingly moving to compete head-to-head against Envestnet as a holistic advisor platform that distributes third-party asset managers – a move for Hardwick that comes, probably not coincidentally,almost exactly 2 years after her departure from Envestnet (and the end of what was likely a 2-year non-compete clause). As Riskalyze CEO Aaron Klein notes, Hardwick’s value includes both her “extensive relationships with industry leaders and her deep grasp of the issues facing our institutional customers”, an indication that Riskalyze is looking to increasingly encroach on the turf of companies like Envestnet by going not just directly to advisors but to their parent company enterprises – likely broker-dealers in particular, where Riskalyze already has a deep advisor base, and has been rolling out solutions like its Compliance Cloud. Expect to see an ever-widening list of enterprise features from Riskalyze in the coming year, woven into an increasingly comprehensive advisor platform for broker-dealers (and perhaps some large RIAs that run a broker-dealer-style roll-up of lots of independent IARs)… and perhaps even an announcement someday that Riskalyze is partnering with or outright acquiring the AI Labs centralized dashboard platform altogether as it moves far beyond “just” risk tolerance assessment tools alone.
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