Savvy Wealth, an AI-native registered investment advisor nearing $7 billion in client assets, plans to offer proprietary alternative investment strategy options on its platform in the third quarter of this year, Chief Investment Officer Anshul Sharma said on the sidelines of Wealth Management EDGE in Boca Raton, Fla.
Sharma, who has already built out a proprietary traditional investment allocation for Savvy, is working with his team on an “institutional quality” alternative offering that will likely be focused on private markets.
“We’re still working through the design element there in terms of what we can do and what’s possible,” Sharma said. “We want a truly differentiated alts solution that checks a lot of the boxes.”
In addition to that offering, Sharma’s in-house investment team is also working to curate alternative options for its 135 advisors across private markets, private equity, private debt, hedge fund solutions and direct real estate investments. The effort, he said, all goes toward offering Savvy advisors options beyond the third-party marketplaces they already have access to on the firm’s platform.
“There’s more than enough [alternative] solutions out there now,” Sharma said. “The problem is navigation. How do you take a marketplace of 400 individual solutions as an advisor, right? The first step is curating to simplify for advisors. … we’ll shoulder that responsibility.”
Sharma joined Savvy in August from Bank of America, where he was a managing director and senior portfolio manager at Merrill Lynch.
At that time, Savvy’s platform had third-party, customizable options for its advisors to choose from. Sharma has since built out Savvy’s own strategic investment allocation, along with market views and commentary led by a monthly investment committee.
The investment strategy, called Savvy Total Portfolio, was made available for Savvy advisors in January. The commentaries, called Savvy Portfolio Perspectives, were made available in February.
“That’s going to be part of our DNA on a go-forward basis,” Sharma said. “I think what we have done on the traditional side is that we have really moved the ball forward with Savvy’s capabilities, demonstrating to the market that Savvy is building an institutional-grade investment partner, and this is part of it.”
A few days before Sharma’s comments on the alternatives project, larger RIA platform Dynasty Financial Partners announced its own move to make a third-party private markets allocator a preferred choice for its advisors. Dynasty advisors will have access to private-market investments and a related platform from the Silicon Valley-based Allocate, according to the firms.
While a smaller player, Savvy has been announcing a steady drumbeat of new deliverables and advisors under founder and CEO Ritik Malhotra. In April, he told Wealth Management about the firm’s new Savvy Intelligence, an AI-driven product offering that integrates advisors’ investment, tax and financial planning data into a single, reconciled system.
CIO Sharma’s team, which began as two investment operations managers, is also growing. It now includes six employees, with job openings for another three, he said.
Advisors’ use of the firm’s internal investment strategies varies, Sharma said, which aligns with its ethos of a customizable approach to financial advice.
“We have advisors on the platform that delegate everything to my team, which is investment authority and trading authority,” he said. “We have advisors who are on the other side of the platform, who choose to retain all of that themselves. We respect that. Then we have the belly of the curve, which is advisors that think and choose individual solutions, individual strategies, and individual ways of engaging with my team.”