Wealthtech Marketing SaaS Provider Acquires Text Messaging Platform In Strategic Ramp Up Of Integration, Automation And AI Features For Advisory Firms
San Diego, California-based FMG, a SaaS company specializing in marketing software and services for the wealth management industry, acquired MyRepChat, a client text messaging platform designed to facilitate compliant communications in the financial industry.
MyRepChat enables users to conduct text and group messaging; provides a digital assistant to automate triggered communications; and includes compliance features, scheduling options, auto-forwarding, customizable workflows and integration with major CRMs.
“FMG has been looking at texting for a while now, and we see business texting as the next logical piece in our suite of tools that includes everything from websites to emails to social marketing,” Dave Christensen, the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer, told WSR. “Texting can be a very intimate way for advisors to communicate with their clients back and forth asynchronously, and get their message out.”
The MyRepChat deal is FMG’s eighth acquisition in seven years relevant to the wealth management space. Since 2016, FMG also has acquired Advisor Launchpad, Advisors Assistant, Agency Revolution, Platinum Strategies, Marketing Pro, Twenty Over Ten and Vestorly. As a result, FMG has built up marketing capabilities in CRM, websites, social media, content personalization, coaching and automation.
FMG sees growth opportunity in texting tools for multiple reasons, says Christensen. Younger investors prefer to communicate through text messages and companies in other industries increasingly conduct business via texting apps, even as regulators are cracking down on wealth management firms for text-based communications violations.
In the near future, FMG aims to leverage MyRepChat’s technology to enable automated webchat functionality, which would allow advisory teams to communicate on mobile devices with users who initiate conversations on the wealth management firm’s website. FMG also is working on a GPT-powered tool that uses the firm’s unique knowledge base to create automatic responses by chat or email for FMG’s customers, who then could decide whether to share them or modify those responses for their own end clients.
“MyRepChat has made tremendous headway with many of the largest enterprises,” said Susan Theder, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer at FMG. “If everything you’re communicating goes through email, advisors’ clients and prospects are going to miss it. This is the way, from a marketing perspective, that advisors are going to be able to break through at the right time with the right message that will really pack a big punch. So it’s exciting.”
In the spring, FMG launched an AI-powered “one-click” personalization engine that helps financial advisors automatically generate original social media captions about shareable content in FMG’s library. The one-click tool leverages technology from FMG’s Vestorly platform as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This summer, FMG and Nitrogen partnered to integrate the email marketing and website creation capabilities of the FMG digital marketing platform with the risk alignment, financial planning, proposal generation and client engagement tools of the Nitrogen Growth Platform. Its other integrations include Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Redtail, Wealthbox and Ebix.
This year FMG also announced that it achieved 400% growth of enterprise business relationships since 2021. Supporting more than 40,000 financial advisors and insurance agents, its relationships include Advisor Group, Cetera Financial Group, Atria Wealth Solutions, Baird, Kestra Financial and LPL Financial.
“We want to be absolutely trusted by advisors to bring them the right technology when it’s ready and should be widely adopted,” Christensen said. “That’s what we believe very much right now about texting and MyRepChat.”
Chris Latham, Managing Editor at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at clatham@wealthsolutionsreport.com
