Changes in its market due to the pandemic has caused a Wichita company to pivot, launching a new product this week with the backing of the biggest player in its industry.
The founders of LegacyBook, a financial planning app, have gone live with a superseding platform called Plain Wealth.
The financial technology (fintech) company, based in Old Town, will roll out to between 40,000 and 50,000 financial advisors across the country thanks to partnership with Redtail Technology — which owns more than 50% of the market in customer relationship technology for the wealth management industry.
Plain Wealth CEO David Thorne says Legacy Book was growing rapidly prior to the pandemic. But customers quickly began cutting capital expenditures as Covid-19 bore down.
That sent the company back to the drawing board — but not without a lot of market intelligence to take with it.
“We’d touched a lot of the market,” Thorne says. “What was the market telling us?”
The resulting Plain Wealth platform, a Software as a Service (SaaS) app, takes the features the market liked the most and cuts out anything not needed.
“We’ve got, I think, the most basic thing we’ve ever built,” Thorne says. “It’s all just the right stuff.”
The big get for the company is the partnership with Redtail which, while approached by dozens of entrepreneurs daily, only partners with six companies a year.
Thorne says Redtail actually approached Plain Wealth after the former’s engineering head saw the product.
“Redtail’s partnership for our product launch confirms the value of Plain Wealth,” he says.
Launched on Tuesday, the plan now is to see how it lands with those tens-of-thousands of advisors.
“(It’s) just the information they want, financial and informational, and the feel of a closer advisor relationship,” Plain Wealth CTO Paul Peloquin says in a press release. “We designed the platform so new firms can setup in less than an hour, and pull clients onto the Plain Wealth platform, private labeled for branding, and integrated with their data on Redtail.”
The company has more on the new app available on its website.
Elsewhere, Thorne tells the WBJ, the company has other business in the works that could help make the tougher times of 2020 a distant memory.
That includes a financial wellness platform that has attracted a customer he can’t reveal yet that Thorne says has an industry value measured at $1 trillion.
Thorne says the goal going forward is gain a market footprint with both platforms, something that could make the Old Town-based company a big name in the fintech arena of the future.
“We don’t know if we’re going to have a little fun or a lot,” he says.
