ScratchWorks Kicks Off Its 3rd Annual Star Search

ScratchWorks — a fintech accelerator founded by six leading RIAs — launched its third annual program intended to help innovative startup and emerging fintech firms find funding.

The ScratchWorks website is now open for submissions for emerging and startup fintech companies to pitch their business models, products and platforms for potential investment from the six investors who started the accelerator, it said Tuesday.

Those ScratchWorks investors are Marty Bicknell, CEO of Mariner Wealth Advisors; Dick Burridge, CEO of RMB Capital; John Eadie, CEO of Covenant; Jon Jones, CEO of Brighton Jones; Michael Nathanson, CEO of The Colony Group; and Shannon Eusey, CEO of Beacon Pointe Advisors. Collectively, these six RIAs manage over $70 billion in assets for high-net-worth clients.

The fintech firms selected to compete this time will get to make their pitches at the Barron’s Top Independent Advisor Summit, March 18-20, in Louisville, Kentucky.

Earlier this year, ScratchWorks held its “Season 2″ event live at the Barron’s Top Independent Advisors Conference, where pitches were presented by semi-finalists that included 280 CapMarkets and its fixed income trading and software-based price discovery platform; AdvicePay, the fee-for-service billing platform from advisors Michael Kitces and Alan Moore; and SolidusLink, a digital gold technology platform.

280 CapMarkets has seen “dramatic growth” in RIA firms using its cloud-based BondNav platform, which highlights the success of the company’s new features and other enhancements, Gurinder Ahluwalia, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told ThinkAdvisor last week.

Advisor-focused marketing technology company Snappy Kraken, which was granted $100,000 at the inaugural ScratchWorks event in March 2018, was granted an additional $1 million in September, followed by $2.5 million last month, Kevin Corbett, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Mariner Wealth Advisors, recently told ThinkAdvisor, pointing out he’s directly responsible for managing the ScratchWorks program. The latest seed funding round was led by Bicknell, who said in a statement Tuesday that he and the other ScratchWorks investors were “extremely impressed with the caliber” of the participating fintech firms the first two times.

Continuing their support of the ScratchWorks program for the third time as sponsors are Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions and the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business.

Many Self-Employed Americans Aren’t Saving Enough for Retirement: Transamerica

(Photo: Shutterstock)

Many freelancers and other self-employed Americans plan to continue working even after they retire — and many of them will have to because they’re not saving nearly enough to live on while retired, according to the findings of a new study recently released by the nonprofit Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies (TCRS).

“The whole idea of retirement seems to be a lot less relevant” to self-employed workers, who like the flexibility self-employment offers and being their own boss, Catherine Collinson, its CEO and president, told ThinkAdvisor on Monday.

Sixty-two percent of self-employed Americans plan to continue working while they’re retired and only 26% of the self-employed are “very much” looking forward to retirement, the study “Self-Employed: Defying and Redefining Retirement” showed.

Sixty-eight percent of the self-employed intend to work beyond age 65, including 40% who expect to retire after age 65 and 28% who don’t plan to ever retire, TCRS said.

Among the self-employed who plan to retire after age 65 and/or continue working in retirement, their reasons for doing so are more often healthy-aging related (83%) than financial (73%). The most-cited reasons were to be active (59%), keep their brain alert (56%), enjoy what they do (54%) and want the income (54%).

The number of self-employed people who plan to continue working in their retirement years was surprising, Collinson said. But she told ThinkAdvisor: “If anything, the self-employed may have a false sense of security. Given that they’re self-employed and they’re successful in what they do, they may be overly optimistic about how long they will be able to continue working or that their business will be viable, and retirement could very well come sooner than planned or expected.”

Many of them are failing to make the necessary preparations for their retirements, she noted. Although most of the self-employed are saving for retirement to some degree, all too many of them are either not saving enough or not saving at all. While 55% of them are consistently saving for retirement, 30% are only saving from time to time and a “concerning” 15% say they never save for retirement, the firm said in an announcement about the study.

Of the self-employed, 16% indicated they had either taken a loan or early withdrawal from a retirement account, Collinson also told us. Of those who said they weren’t saving for retirement, 20% indicated they had done that, she said.

Total household retirement savings among the self-employed is $71,000 (estimated median), TCRS said. But relatively few are saving in tax-advantaged retirement accounts, suggesting they may be missing out on an opportunity, it noted, adding only 31% are saving in a traditional or Roth IRA. The self-employed, meanwhile, expect diverse sources of income when they retire. Seventy percent expect income from Social Security and 54% from other savings and investments. But only 40% expect retirement income from typical retirement accounts including 401(k)s, 403(b)s or IRAs.

The analysis contained in the study on the self-employed was broken out from the company’s 19th Annual Transamerica Retirement Study, which was prepared internally by the research team at Transamerica and based on a 25-minute, online survey conducted between Oct. 26 and Dec. 11, 2018, among a nationally representative sample of 5,923 adult workers by The Harris Poll on behalf of TCRS. Of those workers, 755 people who identified themselves as self-employed were broken out for the separate study, TCRS said.

It was the first time that TCRS did a separate study on the self-employed, Collinson told ThinkAdvisor, noting her company was responding to the surging number of Americans who have become self-employed.

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Apprise Labs Gives Advisors a Peek of New Retirement Planning Software

Edmond Walters, of eMoney fame, told a story: After he sold that company, he said to his wife, “Let’s move south.”

Her response: “And live on what?”

So he went to his investment advisor to find out how much they could live on and hit a brick wall. No software really existed that would help him and his wife visualize what they had for retirement.

So he created it.

In the Apprise Labs founder’s presentation at the Envestnet Advisor Summit in Austin, Texas, Walters highlighted the bells and whistles of his new software, for launch likely in fall, that provides the logistics, forecasts and tools to aid advisors in showing clients exactly where they stand with retirement income — or even current income — and how much they have to save or alter behavior to get to their goal.

The software, which will be white labeled to advisors and accessed through Envestnet’s platform, provides a Lifestyle Studio that uses stacked bar charts to show guaranteed income, additional income, investment income and retirement income. Current or future cash flow events — such as contributions or gifts or selling a home — can be entered.

The bar chart, which includes Envestnet | Tamarac’s real-time investment income data, will adjust automatically as income and expenses do. In addition, a Monte Carlo simulation will provide a look at a client’s progress toward their goal.

A spreadsheet can be accessed if a client wants to see the details.

The product, still in production as the company works out changes with feedback from advisors, also provides a click to its “legacy studio” to see how money is dispersed after a death, whether it’s to children (broken down per child) or charitable donations (to a college, for example) or other factors. This, too, can be changed and calculated automatically, and is a talking point for the advisors, Walters said.

Further, number changes can be spoken, and are kept in script form, Walters explained, which involves client interaction. The program also can be shared with the client to “play with,” although the advisor planning will be saved as the default.

Walters isn’t sure yet about pricing, but estimated they would charge about $100 to $150 per month

“Seventy percent of advisors get fired after a spouse dies,” Walters told the audience. “But advisors who have this tool that provides all the income/expenses won’t.”

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