Fintech in focus: d1g1t

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Company: d1g1t Inc.

Co-founder and CEO: Dan Rosen. Born and raised in Mexico, Rosen moved to Canada 33 years ago to pursue graduate studies in chemical engineering at the University of Toronto, earning both a master’s and a PhD.

“I went from academia straight into doing mathematical models in finance and risk. I thought I was going to be an academic all my life, but I got lured into the startup world,” Rosen said.

A part-time adjunct mathematical finance professor at U of T, Rosen was the first director of the Fields Institute’s Centre for Financial Industries located at U of T, where d1g1t Inc. was incubated in late 2016.

Funding: d1g1t has raised about $35 million from investors including CI Financial Corp., Purpose Investments Inc., Sagard venture capital arm Portage Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Illuminate Financial and MissionOG.

Service: d1g1t provides cloud-based wealth management software with analytics and risk management tools originally developed for institutional investors. The advisor portal lets users “see everything about their clients or portfolios,” Rosen said, adding advisors can “look at the entire book of business in one place.” The portal integrates onboarding, know-your-client reviews, investment policy statements, financial and investment planning, portfolio and client reporting and monitoring, portfolio rebalancing, trading and compliance.

Problem it’s trying to solve: “When a client comes in and asks a question, there’s very little information that the advisor has at their hands to answer the question,” Rosen said of some advisory shops. The d1g1t software is meant to replace a “patchwork” of legacy systems with one system and an easy-to-use workflow. Many wealth management firms’ systems (trading, reporting and portfolio analytics, for example) do specific tasks but in silos, Rosen said.

When a client calls with a question, d1g1t allows the advisor to access all the client information on a single platform. Rather than having to set up a meeting at a later date — and spending a lot of time preparing for that meeting by putting together material from multiple places — the advisor is in a better position to provide an answer right away, Rosen said.

Wealth management firm adoption/partnerships: More than 60 clients in Canada (including CI Financial, National Bank and Raymond James Correspondent Services) and the U.S., with nearly $200 billion in assets under management, are using d1g1t’s software. CI Financial deploys the technology across its Canadian wealth management businesses and has a nearly 10% equity investment in d1g1t.

Pricing: Custom pricing by enterprise licence depending on the size and type of firm, how many users and book size.

Look for more profiles of fintechs working with wealth management firms.