Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Flourish Crypto,1 giving independent Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs) a simple, secure, and compliant way to offer direct bitcoin investing to their clients, with the flexibility advisors need around trading, transfers, billing, and integrations. As one of the most important launches in our company’s history, we wanted to provide context as to why we believe Flourish Crypto fills a critical gap for advisors and fits into our mission.
Flourish launched in 2018 with a single product: Flourish Cash,2 a cash-management solution built for financial advisors. Nearly 3 years later, we count ourselves fortunate to work with over 400 independent RIAs representing over $1T in assets under management. We believe that fiduciary financial advice is critically important, and we are proud to work with advisors as they help their clients secure their financial futures.
Over these past few years, through our constant dialogue with our clients, we saw that the advice advisors give is constrained by the products available to them. In parallel, we witnessed as startup trading firms, wirehouses, and robo-advisors continue to broaden their products and services in order to compete with RIAs. We sharpened our vision to focus on providing advisors with innovative access to financial products that they cannot easily access today, whether they are blocked by regulatory, technology, or business-model constraints.
Over the past decade, cryptocurrencies have emerged as a multi-trillion dollar asset class. There has been an explosion of interest among technologists in the underlying blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency investing has gone mainstream: tens of millions of Americans are already investing in crypto, while one recent study shows that 8 out of 10 financial advisors have recently received questions about crypto from their clients.3 Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency investing space has become increasingly institutionalized; another one recent study shows that over 50% of institutional investors are already invested in cryptocurrencies.4
Despite this growth, advisors were almost entirely left on the sidelines. A number of our clients told us they had limited options: they could ignore crypto, they could leverage overly-complicated, often-high-fee, and illiquid financial products, or they could send their clients to retail exchanges, where they would lose sight of those assets, leaving clients to fend for themselves and creating siloed investments and fragmented visibility to risk and tax liabilities.
We saw that we could help advisors address these challenges by providing a solution in this space. We decided to build Flourish Crypto to open new opportunities for advisors:
The entire Flourish team is excited for this next, foundational step in our journey. We look forward to helping RIAs bring cryptocurrency investing into their practice with a solution built for advisors.
As always, we thank our current clients for their continued partnership and support. We cannot wait for advisors to experience Flourish Crypto for themselves.
-The Flourish Team