Envestnet, a financial company with $1.2 trillion in assets under management, has integrated with Flourish Crypto, a subsidiary of the the Flourish platform which itself is wholly owned by the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual).
The Flourish Platform claims to serve over 440 registered investment advisors (RIAs) managing over $1.4 trillion and is offered through Flourish Digital Assets and the Paxos Trust Company.
While Flourish Crypto has grown to 75 firms with $150 billion assets under management, making this one of the biggest little known crypto company.
They have now integrated with Envestnet as the two companies have built a direct, custodial integration, allowing RIAs to incorporate Flourish Crypto data into their reporting much like any other asset.
Envestnet | Tamarac is used to manage client portfolios, support reporting and planning, implement billing, and more, the companies says, now including crypto with it all live.
“This integration helps RIAs meet a growing demand from clients to stay competitive in today’s evolving marketplace,” said Dani Fava, Product Innovation at Envestnet. “RIAs now have access to a solution to bring crypto to their existing clients, and add value to their current and next-gen clients.”
This is the biggest integration of its kind since BackRock partnered with Coinbase to provide crypto exposure back in August.
“The next generation of investors are paying attention to digital currencies and advisors need to be thoughtful about the space in order to retain current clients and win new prospects,” said Ben Cruikshank, President of Flourish.
One such client, the New York based Wealthspire which has 270 associates, says they’re seeing higher demand for cryptos.
“Increasingly we’ve seen a demand for crypto, and searched for options that aligned with our investment strategy and integrated with our core reporting system,” says Michael Moriarty, Chief Investment Officer of Wealthspire Advisors.
They’re now working with Flourish Crypto and Envestnet | Tamarac “to bring this integrated solution to our clients, and built to work for advisors,” Moriarty said.
This is the latest example of crypto moving towards the mainstream in the pipelines of traditional finance.
Such infrastructure was pretty much non existent even just two years ago, and though work has been ongoing at the edges since 2018, it’s this year that it appears to have reached a new level.
That follows the first early adopters wave of institutional investors that arrived in November-December 2020.
Including MassMutual, which bought $100 million bitcoin in December 2020 in the midst of that wave.
Few would be aware, however, that since then this insurance giant has spunned off an entire crypto platform, and is integrating that with another giant of finance, Envestnet.
So paving the way for the arrival of news waves of institutional investors and wealthy individuals, with Cruikshank pointing out that 91% of high-net-worth individuals younger than 40 have investments in digital assets.
