Savvy Wealth, an AI-native registered investment advisor nearing seven billion dollars in client assets, plans to offer proprietary alternative investment strategy options on its platform in the third quarter of this year, Chief Investment Officer Anshul Sharma said on the sidelines of Wealth Management EDGE in Boca Raton, Florida. Sharma, who has already built out a proprietary traditional investment allocation for Savvy, is working with his team on what he described as an institutional quality alternative offering that will likely be focused on private markets.
The firm's in-house investment team is simultaneously working to curate alternative options for its one hundred thirty-five advisors across private markets, private equity, private debt, hedge fund solutions and direct real estate investments. The effort is designed to offer Savvy advisors options beyond the third-party marketplaces they already have access to on the firm's platform. Sharma indicated that navigation, rather than scarcity, is the central challenge facing advisors seeking alternative exposures.
Sharma joined Savvy in August from Bank of America, where he was a managing director and senior portfolio manager at Merrill Lynch. At that time, Savvy's platform had third-party, customizable options for its advisors to choose from. Since his arrival, Sharma has built out Savvy's own strategic investment allocation, along with market views and commentary led by a monthly investment committee. The investment strategy, called Savvy Total Portfolio, was made available for Savvy advisors in January, while the commentaries, called Savvy Portfolio Perspectives, were made available in February.
Sharma's team, which began as two investment operations managers, has grown to six employees, with job openings for another three positions. The expansion reflects the firm's broader ambition to establish itself as an institutional-grade investment partner. Sharma characterized the traditional-side buildout as having moved the ball forward with Savvy's capabilities, demonstrating to the market that the firm is building institutional infrastructure.
The alternative investment project remains in the design phase. Sharma said his team is still working through the design element in terms of what the firm can do and what is possible, aiming for what he called a truly differentiated alternatives solution that checks a lot of boxes. The proprietary offering will complement the curated third-party options, which are intended to simplify advisor decision-making in a marketplace Sharma described as containing four hundred individual solutions.
A few days before Sharma's comments on the alternatives project, larger RIA platform Dynasty Financial Partners announced its own move to make a third-party private markets allocator a preferred choice for its advisors. Dynasty advisors will have access to private-market investments and a related platform from the Silicon Valley-based Allocate, according to the firms. The announcement underscores a broader trend among RIA platforms seeking to expand alternative investment access for wealth advisors.
While a smaller player than Dynasty, Savvy has been announcing a steady drumbeat of new deliverables and advisors under founder and Chief Executive Officer Ritik Malhotra. In April, Malhotra told Wealth Management about the firm's new Savvy Intelligence, an AI-driven product offering that integrates advisors' investment, tax and financial planning data into a single, reconciled system. The technology infrastructure is part of the firm's positioning as an AI-native advisory platform.
Advisors' use of the firm's internal investment strategies varies, Sharma said, which aligns with the platform's ethos of a customizable approach to financial advice. Some advisors on the platform delegate everything to Sharma's team, including investment authority and trading authority, while others choose to retain all of that themselves. The middle segment consists of advisors who select individual solutions, individual strategies, and individual ways of engaging with the investment team. Sharma emphasized that the firm respects the full spectrum of advisor preferences.