Savvy's Tech-Enabled Advisor Leverage
Ritik Malhotra, CEO of Savvy, on the rise of tech-enabled wealth management
The core bet is that Savvy is not buying advisors just to roll up revenue, it is using shared software to raise each advisor’s output after the deal closes. In practice, that means replacing the usual patchwork of planning, reporting, onboarding, billing, and prospecting tools with one operating layer that cuts admin work, improves client communication, and lets a mid career advisor keep growing instead of selling into a platform built mainly for succession.
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Savvy describes advisor work as a mess of separate tools for planning, risk, reporting, billing, marketing, and onboarding. Advisors can end up spending large chunks of time moving data between systems and reworking reports. The leverage together point means Savvy captures that work in software, then shares the upside with the advisor through higher growth and better margins.
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That is different from the classic aggregator model. Focus disclosed in its 2022 annual report that partner firms buy target RIAs for cash or mixed consideration, while the interview frames large aggregators as concentrating on bigger firms and succession driven deals. Savvy instead targets sub $1B AUM firms, with a sweet spot around $200M, where better tooling can matter more than maximum upfront price.
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The economics support the pitch. Savvy says most advisors charge around 1% of AUM, and it believes software can both pull in more wallet share from existing clients and lift operating margins from roughly 25% to 30% toward 60%. Recent company updates show the model scaling, with Savvy passing $1B in AUM and marketing an integrated advisor platform built around CRM, onboarding, and client dashboards.
The next step is a deeper shift from tech enabled RIA to fully integrated wealth platform. As more advisors join, the software gets trained on more real workflows, which makes it easier to pull advisors away from wirehouses and traditional consolidators. Over time, the winner in this segment is likely to be the firm that turns advisor productivity into a repeatable product, not just an acquisition process.