InvestCloud Buys Client Relationship Solutions Provider rplan

The acquisition brings London-based rplan’s direct-to-consumer solutions to the InvestCloud ecosystem for institutional asset managers and allows InvestCloud to expand its offerings, says CEO and chairman John Wise.

“Our core business sits in supplying technology to small and large asset managers and they were concerned over providing mobile and cloud services to clients,” Wise says. “We’re offering them other multiple channels to reach their clients and rplan’s technology allows that.”

Wise says InvestCloud also gets access to rplan’s customers in Europe, particularly in the UK, a part of the company’s plan to expand its presence. Rplan’s direct-to-consumer CRM platform will also be deployed to the more than 700 customers of InvestCloud in North America.

The solution is application programming interface (API)-based and hosted in the cloud. It lets asset managers support more digital channels to reach out to and engage current and potential clients. Wise says direct-to-consumer platforms like rplan have long been popular in the UK but have slowly gained interest in North America.

Andy Creak, rplan CEO, says his company’s view that asset managers will need strong digital partners to be able to attract clients was closely aligned with InvestCloud’s.

“We think that in three to four years, asset managers are going to need a digital partner because the amount of money they need to keep current is bigger,” Creak says. “We saw that our thinking and technology were very complementary with InvestCloud. They have the scale so we believe that by merging we can add more value to not just InvestCloud but to customers as well.”

Both Wise and Creak point out that the asset management space must embrace digital solutions and other client channels to remain competitive.