Fidelity backs Savvy Wealth's RIA custody platform, expected in mid-2027

Fidelity Investments has agreed to back a custody platform run by one of its own custody clients, an arrangement in which Fidelity will collect all revenue from the accounts and share a portion back. Savvy Wealth, the New York firm with $9 billion in custody assets, expects to open the Savvy Custodial Platform in mid-2027, with Fidelity, the No. 2 RIA custodian, supporting the effort; Fidelity put the announcement on its corporate website rather than in Savvy's release, which does not quote the firm.

Savvy founder and CEO Ritik Malhotra frames the appeal around firms that have already built their operations but remain unhappy with their custodian: "They're already at some scale, they're running their operation, but they do have a lot of complaints about their custodian." Savvy today runs a W-2 model and a 1099 affiliation model for investment adviser representatives, and the new service would add a less intensive custody affiliation for firms that want the infrastructure without the rest of the platform.

Because Fidelity earns on cash sweep, loans and the like, the split determines what the platform keeps, and RIABiz, citing unnamed sources, says platform-on-platform arrangements of this type typically run close to 50/50. That means an RIA comparing custodians in 2027 would be weighing terms set by two parties whose revenue interests align with each other more than with the account.

Savvy's release targets the complaints RIAs tend to voice: clunky onboarding, an old-fashioned desktop experience, software repurposed to do work it was never built for. In place of that, it promises instant digital onboarding with no paperwork or multi-day delays to fund an account, software built for how advisors actually work, and white-labeled control of the client experience.

Scale pulled the timeline forward. Multi-billion-AUM prospects leaning in hastened the launch, and RIABiz reports the firm grew fourfold to $9 billion in 15 months, with a $5 billion recruited-assets pipeline and a $100 million raise, mostly from a billionaire who came looking. Malhotra calls Savvy and Fidelity a strong team to target Commonwealth's assets, reasoning that those advisors lived on Fidelity's clearing and can now attach as RIAs; three Commonwealth advisor moves have been logged since mid-August, according to WAD's records.

Fidelity's own custody business has been contracting at the small end: it has given custody clients under $100 million until June 2027 to move, and Savvy's platform is due around that same point on the calendar. Schwab has already put its Claude integration in front of 16,000 RIAs, which suggests access to AI tools will not, by itself, separate one custodian from another; the numbers an RIA will want before committing accounts are what Savvy charges and how the revenue split is disclosed.