Weston, Mass.-based Advisor360° has added GWN Securities as a client.
GWN Securities’ approximately 800 advisors will have access to Advisor360° capabilities, including its account opening, advisor experience, data and reporting and client portal.
GWN Securities is a national independent broker/dealer and RIA. The firm is based in Palm Gardens, Fla., with roughly $21 billion in total assets under management.
The move represents a milestone for the platform, which Advisor360° designed for independent advisors. The road to this moment has been long for Advisor360°, with significant pauses along the way.
Advisor360° spun off from the privately-held Commonwealth Financial Network in April 2019.
Two months earlier, in February 2019, insurance broker/dealer Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) announced it would be the second company to license the 360° Suite, with Commonwealth being the first.
However, this relationship between MassMutual and Advisor360° didn’t come to fruition for over two years. MassMutual took until June 2021 to begin licensing Advisor360°’s software to its over 7,500 advisors. The unique capabilities developed for MassMutual and the firm’s spinoff from Commonwealth meant thousands of coding changes and delayed implementation, said Darren Tedesco, president at Advisor360°, at the time.
Nepsis Names Amanda Butler as its First CTO
Nepsis, a money manager-turned-investment advisor-turned-family office and CPA acquirer has named Amanda Butler the firm’s first chief technology officer (CTO).
Before taking on this latest role, Butler served for over 10 years as an outsourced consultant for Nepsis. Most recently, she was principal at Mosaik Consulting, director of wealth management at Redkite (later acquired by LiquidHub) and information systems manager at Telaurus Communications.
The past few months have been busy for the Minneapolis-based RIA, which Chief Investment Officer Mark Pearson founded.
After shifting away from a third-party asset management model in 2018, Nepsis began planning its new growth strategy of buying up tax and accounting firms. To that end, Nepsis completed its first M&A deal in November 2023 with the acquisition of Sevenich, Butler, Gerlach & Brazil, a CPA firm in St. Paul, Minn.
The firm announced in February that it recruited Ed Stober from Choreo to serve as a senior wealth advisor on the Nepsis executive team.
In March, Trenton Hazen left Northwestern Mutual to lead Nepsis’ new in-house corporate retirement plan division as director of retirement plan services.
According to the latest form ADV filed in April, the RIA reported over $350 million in regulated advisory assets, 23 employees, and 15 advisors.
Hearsay Study Finds Original Content Resonates with Clients
Firms that want to connect with clients would do well to produce more original content, even as overall social media engagement dropped compared to last year, according to Hearsay Financial Services Social Selling Content Study.
Though last year’s study found a 23% increase in social media engagement, this year’s edition found that changes to the algorithms of these platforms and overall decreased posting by brands drove down engagement. For example, after LinkedIn started targeting spam posts last summer, the overall platform reported a two-thirds drop in engagement year-over-year as of October 2023.
To combat this trend, advisors who want to stand out from their peers should produce more original posts instead of modifying and recycling content, according to Hearsay. The average engagement rate, or total engagement divided by total followers multiplied by 100, of original content sat at 5.2% in 2023, while modified posts averaged only 1.7%. Unmodified posts fared even worse, as this copy and pasted content garnered only a 0.5% engagement rate.
The study is in its seventh year. The 2024 version aggregated data from over 100 asset management, wealth management, property and casualty insurance, life and annuities and banking firms representing 260,000 agents and advisors who used the Hearsay platform during 2023. The data includes over 13 million published social media posts, with 21 million engagements across Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.