Savvy Raises $100M and Launches a Custody Platform
NOV 11, 2026
When a client pays a financial advisor an advisory fee, a significant portion of that fee goes to pay for the support services and technology that the advisor needs to be able to serve their clients (compliance, trading and reporting, marketing, client service, and so forth), with the rest going to the advisor as compensation and to the advisory firm as profit. Although every advisory fee involves this allocation of dollars, the way that those dollars are allocated and paid out depends on how the advisory business is structured. If the advisor owns their own practice, they pay all of their own expenses out of their fee revenue and keep the remainder as profit. But if the advisor instead affiliates with a larger entity such as a corporate RIA or broker-dealer that covers at least a portion of their overhead costs (like compliance, technology, or centralized trading), then what the advisor receives as income represents a percentage of their gross fee revenue (e.g., an 85% payout) – or when flipped around, the portion that the advisor doesn’t receive represents their ‘payment’ to the affiliate platform for the support services that platform provides.
There is a wide range of different types of affiliate platforms with an equally wide range of payout rates. Some offer little more than SEC registration (and associated compliance support) and E&O insurance while others go further to provide back-office and portfolio management, technology, marketing and branding, office space – covering virtually everything the advisor would need except the actual client meetings that the advisor does themselves. But in general, the more support and services an affiliate platform offers, the higher percentage of their advisors’ fee revenue the platform keeps for itself, to cover its own costs in providing those services (as well as to generate profit for the platform’s owners).
There’s certainly a value proposition in supporting financial advisors in the functions that they need to serve their clients (and that the advisor isn’t necessarily best suited to do themselves), especially since most advisors got into the business to service their clients (not to pick technology, handle compliance, and manage staff), which makes many advisors willing to pay a percentage of revenue to affiliate platforms who can provide that support staff infrastructure.
The issue, however, is that many of the expenses that the platforms cover represent fixed overhead costs: Other than investment management (which is typically paid on basis points since it’s directly tied to an AUM-based advisor’s revenue stream), most advisory firm costs don’t expand directly with the size of the client base or the amount of revenue the advisor generates. At the least, this means affiliated platforms often have a graduated fee structure where advisors pay a smaller percentage of their revenue as the firm itself gets larger. Still, as advisors grow their book of business, the amount that they pay their affiliate platform can grow beyond what it would cost for the advisor to find and pay for those services themselves as an independent RIA. At which point the only thing keeping them affiliated with the platform is either their simple unwillingness to launch their own firm and take on the responsibility of building and managing it all, or the difficulty in replacing the services and/or technology the platform is offering. Which means from the platform’s perspective, the more reliant the advisor is on the platform’s support and the more difficult it would be for them to switch to new tech and service providers, the harder it is for them to break free.
In this light, it’s notable that Savvy Wealth, an RIA platform that’s distinguished itself by building out in-house (AI-centric) technology for its affiliated advisors, has announced September 2026 the launch of a new custodial platform available to both Savvy and non-Savvy advisors, which comes on the heels of a $100 million capital raise – both of which appear to signal a shift in focus for the company from being an RIA with a proprietary tech platform to being a technology company that happens to have an affiliated RIA (as ultimately, tech firms can add tech users and grow faster than RIA service providers that have to add one advisor and hire one service team member at a time).
Savvy’s custody platform is not self-clearing, but instead serves as an introducing broker-dealer on top of Fidelity’s National Financial Services (NFS) – in effect, Savvy is a technology layer for directing account openings, money movements, and trading while NFS handles the actual custody and clearing. This is notably similar to how Altruist worked in its early days as an introducing broker-dealer on top of Apex Clearing before it became its own self-clearing custodian in 2023, and how TradePMR is layered on top of First Clearing, and raises the question of whether Savvy sees itself as being a potential competitor to Altruist – except whereas Altruist offered its core trading and reporting technology for ‘free’ to advisors who custodied on its platform (since it could make enough money on the custody itself to give away the technology), Savvy’s non-custody technology is still only available to advisors who affiliate with and pay a portion of their revenue to Savvy’s RIA.
Which raises an interesting question about how Savvy’s offering differs from what advisors could buy directly with third-party software to help with custodian onboarding (e.g., Docupace, OnBord, or Skience), or find on an existing custodial platform like Altruist. With Altruist’s technology expanding beyond custody and portfolio management and into AI-enabled meeting support, tax, and financial planning via its Hazel AI platform (and most likely a CRM offering to follow?), there’s less to differentiate a company like Savvy based on technology alone – but when technology is one of its main selling points for advisors to affiliate with it, there seems to be less of a reason to pay a percentage of revenue to Savvy when an advisor could get a similar level of technology from Altruist for the $300/month that the highest-tier Hazel offering costs (or more generally paying a monthly SaaS fee to any number of third-party providers that help with custodian onboarding). Which isn’t to say that Savvy can’t or doesn’t offer value beyond its technology platform, but as the competition from platforms like Altruist ramps up, the pressure will be on Savvy to demonstrate that it provides real support in areas like compliance and marketing – not just self-serve technology that advisors can find elsewhere for a SaaS fee – to justify its revenue-based platform fees.
And so this is the Catch-22 that Savvy is ultimately facing. The more that it continues to plow its funds into technology investments and automate what historically were support-staff services, the less differentiated it becomes from a ‘pure’ technology company – at which point it faces a pricing challenge to have a percentage-of-revenue model when advisors are more accustomed to paying flat SaaS software fees to get something similar elsewhere. Whereas if it invests more into the support services it provides for advisors who affiliate it, it starts to look more like a ‘normal’ corporate RIA, which will have a harder time attaining hyper-scaling growth speed and the tech-company valuations and eventual IPO that it’s seeking – but it will have a better chance of retaining the advisors on its platform who will have a harder time replacing those services on their own.
The key point is that while some advisors will always prefer to be affiliated with an advisor platform because they simply don’t want to bother with owning and managing their own RIA, the technology that’s available to independents is rapidly catching up, and the lines that have been drawn are that technology is a flat SaaS fee for software, while service-providers providing overhead staff support get a percentage of revenue to fund the growing volume of staff it takes to provide those services to more and more advisors – which means that even as RIA platforms implement tech to be more efficient service providers, they will arguably still need to offer services beyond just technology to retain advisors with a percentage-of-revenue-based platform fee.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-oct2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
