Savvy aims for 60% margins
Ritik Malhotra, CEO of Savvy, on the rise of tech-enabled wealth management
Getting to a 60% operating margin would turn a wealth management firm into something that behaves much more like software than a traditional advisory practice. The real bottleneck is not investment advice, it is the manual work around onboarding, data gathering, account transfers, planning, reporting, and client communication. Savvy’s thesis is that one shared front end can absorb that labor, so advisors spend more time with clients and less time stitching together eight tools and rewriting reports.
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A typical independent advisor stack is fragmented. Advisors use separate tools for planning, risk, reporting, billing, prospecting, and onboarding, and one advisor told Savvy that 40% of time was spent moving data between systems and compressing long PDFs into client ready summaries. That is the cost base the software is trying to remove.
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This is different from pure software vendors like Addepar or Vise. Those products digitize pieces of the RIA workflow, but Savvy is combining software with the actual advisory firm, so the savings can show up directly in advisor P&Ls instead of only as better tools inside a still fragmented business.
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The payoff is especially large because revenue per client is already high in this segment. Modern tech enabled wealth managers serving $1M to $20M net worth households often charge 75 to 100 basis points on AUM, so if automation lowers service costs while advisors also capture more held away assets, margin expansion compounds with revenue growth.
The next step is a steady climb from workflow glue into owning more of the stack. As firms like Savvy unify reporting, planning, communication, and held away asset visibility in one system, the winner can add adjacent products like insurance, lending, and eventually custody, which pushes margins higher and makes the advisor platform much harder to leave.