Savvy Builds Full-Stack Platform via Advisor M&A
Ritik Malhotra, CEO of Savvy, on the rise of tech-enabled wealth management
This reveals that Savvy is using advisor M&A as a product development engine, not just a way to buy revenue. The advisors taking equity are not simply selling a book, they are helping design the software that is meant to replace the patchwork RIA workflow of separate planning, reporting, billing, onboarding, and prospecting tools. That is the core difference versus classic aggregators, which mostly buy firms and add shared services around them.
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Savvy built its early roadmap with direct workflow input from advisors, including about 80 hours with one acquired advisor, and aims to become the main screen both advisors and clients use instead of making advisors jump across multiple systems.
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The economic pitch is that better software changes advisor math. Savvy argues it can lift revenue by helping advisors win more clients and capture more held away assets, while pushing operating margins from roughly 25% to 30% toward about 60% through automation.
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That is a different offer from firms like Focus, which built scale through partnership and acquisition, and from Addepar, which sells software into RIAs. Savvy is trying to combine both, owning the advisor relationship while also owning the operating system underneath it.
The next step is a fuller stack. As Savvy adds embedded investment management, onboarding, marketing, and eventually adjacent products like insurance, mortgages, and lines of credit, advisor equity becomes a way to lock in talent before the platform can deliver its full economic advantage. If that works, wealth management shifts from a roll up business into a software compounding business.