The California-headquartered investments firm says it is marking a significant milestone for its FinLife Partners division.

California-headquartered United Capital Financial Advisers, which says it is the first national financial life management firm, is celebrating $3 billion in assets under contract signed with its FinLife Partners division in less than one year. That figure means the firm has tripled its initial one-year target of $1 billion of assets under contract.

The firm expects to sign an additional $10 billion to $15 billion in assets under contract in 2017, it said in a statement yesterday.

Last April, United Capital launched FinLife Partners, an integrated wealth management operating system.  Independent advisors can license the firm’s proprietary Financial Life Management suite, open architecture investment platform and integrated middle office with personalized on-demand coaching.

FinLife Partners makes the United Capital wealth management operating system available to select third-party firms, it said. 

The initial 10 firms have been established as a Founders Group that represent a national footprint from east to west, including Boston, Houston and Sacramento. They range in size from below $200 million to upwards of $1 billion in assets under management. Each of these firms has chosen FinLife Partners’ platform. 

“We built United Capital with the help and insight of the advisory firms we acquired and have taken the same approach here. These early adopters represent a diverse range of firms that share United Capital’s vision of moving financial advice beyond money management to measure, track and benchmark people’s entire financial lives,” Joe Duran, founder and CEO of United Capital, said.

United Capital said firms using the FinLife Partners offering are already seeing results, adding more than $1 million in expected top-line revenue growth in just four months, simply by changing how they charge existing clients. On average, United Capital offices that joined after 2011 have realized top-line revenue growth of nearly 25 per cent, and pretax earnings increases of about 28 per cent in the first 12 months after transition.

“What they have produced with FinLife Partners is a couple generations more advanced than what I last saw as a reporter, which was still really internal to the United Capital firms. FinLife provides a syndicated technology template that RIA firms can apply with pretty sophisticated client-facing tools and solid advisory technology stack,” Davis Janowski, senior analyst, digital wealth management eBusiness and channel strategy, Forrester, told this publication. (Janowski is a former journalist.)

“A great many large advisory firms have put together their own "platforms" of best of breed third-party software and services but few have the consistency of approach to the client-facing tools or tying things together in the way that UC has done here,” he added. 

United Capital has approximately $17.9 billion in assets under management and 80 offices nationwide.