Inspire Investing has taken the wraps off its not-so-secret secret with the formal announcement of the launch of its Inspire Advisors RIA platform aimed at Christian financial advisors.
Based in Hollister, Calif., Inspire Investing’s forte is biblically responsible investing. That has been the guiding light for its indexes and exchange-traded funds, and it's the foundation for its RIA platform.
That platform had a soft launch in January, and despite the lack of fanfare it has attracted $130 million in assets in its first nine months, the company said in a press release this week.
“We were very strategic and deliberate with the soft-launch of Inspire Advisors,” Robert Netzly, Inspire’s CEO, said in the press release. “We wanted to be very careful in reaching out and recruiting very specific financial advisors who share our core beliefs and passion for the biblically responsible investing movement to help lay the foundation of a strong culture dedicated to glorifying God in every aspect of their financial advisory practices.”
The company says its platform is designed to support Christian financial advisors who want their practices to be 100% aligned with biblically responsible investing, and it does so by addressing both investments and practice management.
Regarding the former, Inspire says its platform provides several dozen biblically responsible separately managed account strategies ranging from passive, index-based portfolios to actively managed, tactical, sector rotation and other strategies. Some strategies employ Inspire’s suite of five biblical ETFs, while others are built using only individual stocks.
The Inspire Advisors platform also offers customizable unified managed accounts and tax-loss harvesting capabilities.
As for practice management, Inspire Investing says its platform shares corporate-generated leads with advisors based on geographic location, and it intends to create a lead-generation program to provide a conduit of faith-based investor prospects to advisors in their local area.
In addition, Inspire Advisors provides a 100% payout on advisory fees to every advisor regardless of their production level. This is possible, Inspire Investing says, due to its ability as an asset manager to earn revenues from portfolio management fees instead of relying on a traditional advisory fee override program.
Netzly has big plans for the Inspire Advisors platform. "We plan to turn up the juice on our recruiting efforts big time in 2020 and, God willing, grow this platform to several hundred advisors and $10B+ in AUM within the next few years," he said in an email.
Inspire Investing was founded in 2015 and has more than $600 million in assets under management. The company says it annually donates 50% or more of its corporate profits to Christian ministries.