Envestnet, a major wealth management solutions provider for financial advisors, has snapped up Tamarac, the portfolio management technology specialist, for $54 million, the companies announced.
After the deal’s expected closing in May, Envestnet-Tamarac will focus on the portfolio management services for which Tamarac is well known in the industry, particularly for its Advisor Xi suite of investment and technology solutions for RIAs.
“Although our functions seem the same, what Tamarac has done is they’ve focused very hard on the individual RIA,” Envestnet Executive Vice President Mike Apker said in an interview at the Technology Tools for Today Conference in Dallas.
“For RIAs who have a practice pattern of wanting to manage their own portfolios and manage their own money, they’ve really built a very nicely integrated suite of software and technology. ... We see this as a great marriage because Envestnet is really trying to deliver the tools and the services for advisors to deliver scalable advice.” For example, Apker added, “The Tamarac [portfolio] rebalancer is a great rebalancer. Over time, we seen an opportunity to import that and bring that into the Envestnet platform.”
Envestnet will benefit competitively, Apker said, because “firms like to have fewer relationships with technology and services vendors. Any time that you’ve got more things that you can offer, particularly for the larger firms that are out looking to consolidate advisors and roll them up, …I think that this is something that gives us an advantage ahead.”
Envestnet provides integrated wealth management software to financial advisors, and has over $127 billion in total assets served. Tamarac has a client base of 500 RIA firms, collectively managing over $250 billion in assets. The RIAs using Tamarac range from $10 million in assets under management on the smaller side to over $10 billion in assets on the upper end.
