Four words describe our newest investment in Range: AI for wealth management. Great investments start like this—a straight-forward concept, a simple description, and a massive market.
Wealth management may take the prize for the most massive incumbent industry that mostly fails to serve their customers nor deliver the value proposition promised. The truth is, wealth management is an amalgamation of multiple products, and therein starts the issue. The ultra-wealthy get an incredible product that bundles financial planning, budgeting, investing, estate services, tax planning, and tax filing through a single advisor. But even most of the two percent are left cobbling together multiple vendors, leaving them under-served, and over-charged. And, no matter what level of service you’re experiencing, the tech stack is stuck in 1998. Two-thirds of wealth managers still do not have an online portal.
Ambitiously, Range is bringing together all these services for a consumer, and therein expanding the audience that such services are accessible for. Range brings visibility into all of your financial accounts, which alone is a significant value add (the average customer connects over twenty accounts). Through this consolidation, Range is able to see the bigger picture and provide better recommendations. Need to know which fixed income strategy you should pursue, Range considers your tax position in its proposition. Need a human to talk to explore a second-home purchase, skip hours on the golf course and message real time with your advisor team.
Other entrepreneurs pursued this vision, though without the leverage of this current moment in technology. LLMs have increased engineering productivity allowing Range to build their own CRM, financial planning application, and tax engine. Historically, your choice was to build each of these for minimum $10M, or purchase legacy vendors with disparate data structures. Range’s technology stack was designed so that these components talk to each other and are accessible by humans plus agents.
The customized needs of wealth management will mean that there will always be some need for human communication with the customer, but Range is already demonstrating that it can get unprecedented leverage in the number of customers each advisor can support. Their recently released chatbot Rai is customized for wealth management and tailored to your personal financial profile. Events consolidating IRAs across multiple vendors will soon be handled by agents, a task most customers hate so much that there are millions of stranded accounts.
Fahad, co-founder of Range, presents this incredibly powerful vision, but at a price point of $6,000 per year I almost dismissed the company after our initial meeting. Few consumer services price at such a level, but given the value delivered, and the opaque fees of the incumbents, this message resonates with end customers. I’m glad I pursued because, as he subsequently shared traction, my perspective drastically changed from suspicion to immediate desire to invest. Simple math suggests that ~80K customers results in a half billion in revenue for an industry that has over 50M customers. Not only does Range need to capture only a tiny fraction of its industry but is already on escape velocity to scale.
Fahad was instrumental in helping Convoy scale, resulting in a specific skillset customer-tailored for the task at hand. It will require brilliance in product innovation and joy in operational intensity. I love these considered-purchase consumer financial products, my last being Root Insurance where we invested when they were a nascent carrier and enjoyed the journey through IPO. I look forward to that same milestone here, and feel very fortunate to partner with Fahad and the rest of the Range. Onwards and upwards.
