Envestnet has acquired fintech innovator Harvest Savings & Wealth Technologies, which provides automated goals-based saving tools and wealth solutions to banks, credit unions, trust companies, and other financial institutions.

“We are striving to empower intelligent, connected financial lives, creating a holistic view for investments, banking, or savings account balances. Advisors’ clients expect smart and efficient digital solutions, and automated goals-based savings tools can help them create better financial habits while on the path to financial wellness,” said Stuart DePina, President of Envestnet. “With this acquisition, we are one step further in delivering fully on this vision. This acquisition optimizes our API-based financial wellness ecosystem, and also helps strengthen our foothold to enable embedded finance, which we see as a key driver of the future of financial services.”

Harvest’s platform unifies a bank’s retail and wealth offering, and includes capabilities such as:

• Automated Micro-Savings: Harvest’s innovative goals-based savings technology solves a major problem facing traditional banks. It enables clients to digitally engage customers looking to save more money, offering them an opportunity to save for anything and everything—from a new sweater to a dream vacation. By typing in a goal name and selecting a corresponding image, end customers can create any goal they wish.
  
  Through the use of algorithms, it automates a customers’ savings, and at the same time allows banks to hold onto their deposits. To date, the most popular goal across Harvest’s platform is an emergency savings bucket.
• Digital Account Opening: Harvest’s account opening tool enables clients and end-investor customers to open accounts seamlessly across savings, wealth, and trust systems. This innovation turns a process typically measured in weeks into one measured in hours.
  
  Harvest’s streamlined technology automates forms and processes, improving account success rates and compliance. This enhanced offering will be adapted and made available to users throughout Envestnet’s unified financial wellness platform.

Harvest’s automated micro-saving technology delivers data to the bank or firm, which can then signal when it’s time to move someone from a savings solution to the right wealth offering, making it an ideal fit for Envestnet’s holistic, connected financial wellness ecosystem.

“The right financial advice and investment strategies can make a great difference for one’s financial future. However, the path to financial wellness begins with saving,” said Dani Fava, Head of Strategic Development at Envestnet. “It is no secret that the U.S. has a savings problem, as a recent Bankrate survey found that fewer than four in 10 Americans had enough savings to cover the cost for even a four-figure car repair bill. Through this acquisition, our technology can now help reverse the tide, while enabling banks and credit unions to evolve and keep pace with the ongoing fintech disruption in the industry as we incubate tomorrow’s advisory clients.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.