Savvy's new platform has 150 users, no outside clients and no price

Savvy Wealth's new platform has 150 users, no outside clients and no published price, and on Wednesday the firm began marketing that trading, billing and reporting system to RIAs beyond its own advisor force through a new broker-dealer, Savvy Wealth Management, while Fidelity's National Financial Services handles clearing, execution and custody. Outside firms can put their names on a waitlist today, but they will not be onboarded until early-to-mid 2027, and external pricing has not been finalized, according to Savvy chief executive Ritik Malhotra.

Savvy is not becoming a custodian. It will not hold client assets; it is the introducing broker and the technology interface, and Malhotra has said the firm has no plans to self-clear or custody assets at this time. This builds on what Savvy already does rather than departing from it—the firm, launched in 2022, provides back office, compliance and technology support to advisors who keep equity in their own practices—and what is new is that the buyer no longer has to sit inside the firm. The announcement lands two weeks after Savvy closed a $100 million Series C at a $600 million valuation, the capital that makes an outside-facing platform plausible.

At the desk, the change is narrower than the headline, because nothing about an advisor's underlying custody moves: assets continue to sit at Fidelity, Schwab Advisor Services, or wherever the client's accounts already live. Savvy is instead selling the layer directly above custody—order entry, billing, reporting, the introducing broker of record—on the argument that the layer, rather than the vault, is where daily friction accumulates.

The economics of that layer are what an RIA cannot yet evaluate. Fidelity is paying Savvy a percentage of the revenue it receives on client assets held in cash sweep programs, securities-backed loans and certain other services, but the announcement does not say whether any of that money is passed through to the advisor or the client as a concession, nor does it publish what the platform charges for its own work. The two figures an RIA would need to compare Savvy against the custody it already has—what the platform costs, and what it gives back—are both unwritten. The arrangement does show one way a custodian buys distribution, by paying the introducer, and whether that produces cheaper custody or a more expensive version of the same thing depends entirely on where the payment stops.

Introducing brokers are not new, and the lineage is useful for calibrating the pitch: Altruist ran on Apex Clearing from its 2020 launch until it became self-clearing in 2023, Vanguard last month agreed to buy Altruist for a reported $4.6 billion, and State Street launched State Street Wealth Services through Apex, according to an announcement two weeks ago. The pattern holds—begin as a front end on somebody else's clearing and custody, prove the software, then decide whether to own the plumbing. Choosing a custody platform is now a technology bet as much as a service contract, and Savvy is asking to be judged on software that outside firms cannot yet touch.

Inside Savvy, the platform has been available for several months to the firm's 150 affiliated advisors, who are not required to use it, and those advisors already custody with Fidelity and Schwab Advisor Services, among a few others, on systems they chose, so the new one has to win the trading, billing and reporting work against tools already in place. Malhotra's goal, as he describes it, is a processing experience that is more modern, slick and faster—a claim about feel rather than a service level—and no converted-account count, no account-opening time and no billing-error rate appears in the announcement. A waitlist is a hard place for an advisor to run that test alone.

For an outside RIA, the operational questions are the ones left open: whether accounts open on the platform or through the custodian's own onboarding, how household-level fee schedules reconcile in billing, and what a firm takes with it on the way out. Those answers separate a platform that removes work from one that adds another layer to manage, and none of them will be available to a firm sitting on a waitlist.

Savvy is also in talks with Schwab about a comparable introducing broker arrangement, which would put a second clearing relationship behind the same interface if it comes together. The source carries no terms and no timetable, so for now the Schwab leg is something Savvy is negotiating toward rather than something an advisor can plan around.

As this publication has argued, the recruiting arms race has become a custody-and-package race, and the platform that can show the whole move decides where the next breakaway lands; Savvy's launch is a wager on exactly that proposition, and it arrives in the wrong order for the advisor being sold to. Our read of Vanguard's Altruist agreement was that advisors should lock pricing and product independence before the standalone promise expires. The Savvy waitlist asks an RIA to register interest and plan a 2027 migration while the fee schedule that would justify the move sits unfinished. Joining a waitlist costs an RIA nothing, but it is not a term sheet, and there is no basis yet for modeling the move.

Three items decide whether this becomes a real option: the external fee schedule, whether any part of the Fidelity revenue share is passed down to the advisor, and whether the Schwab talks produce a second clearing arrangement. Introducing-broker economics tend to favor the advisor only when the platform shares some of what the custodian pays it, and until Savvy publishes a schedule, the skeptical assumption is the one to model. With the earliest outside onboarding set for 2027, the next custody decision most RIAs make will happen with this platform outside the comparison set.