It was another very busy week in wealthtech, with a long list of financial advisor technology headlines to report, but it was—again—a less active week on the wealth management side of things.
Maybe the discrepancies in activity are a sign that technology is starting to eclipse traditional wealth management. Maybe it’s just two fluke weeks in a row where there’s more happening on the technology side of things than the human side of things. I won’t make a guess one way or another, only time will tell, right?
But there was one wealthtech/wealth management headline from this week that I think is worth some deeper thought and discussion: as you’ll see below, robo-advisor Ellevest is winding down and selling its automated investing operations to Betterment, which is already the biggest stand-alone robo-advisor of the bunch, leaving Ellevest with a traditional wealth management offering targeted towards high-net-worth clients.
Now, the incumbent wealth management press, and wealth management thought leaders alike, all seem in pretty strong consensus that this is evidence of the failure of robo-advisors and the ascendancy of traditional, human financial advice.
I wouldn’t be so hasty to draw that conclusion.
Let’s consider what Ellevest’s value proposition was from the outset, about 10 years ago, when it was co-founded by BoA veteran Sallie Krawcheck: automated investment management for women. Ellevest’s claim was that women, because of their longer-lives, different career cycles and (more often than not) lower pay, need significantly different financial advice than men, and therefore, existing automated investing options were unsuitable for women. Ellevest acted like women are terribly different from men—yet, women still work with the same money, are the same species, living on the same planet and in the same society, as men.
So out of the gate, Ellevest needlessly cut its potential client base in half on a gamble, without asking whether enough women actually thought they needed money management tailored solely and specifically towards women to justify its own existence.
Here’s where I’ll make a bold claim: The financial, investing and planning needs of any social, racial, sexual orientation or gender/sex identity group, outside of those with specific prohibitions against certain financial behaviors like the proscription on usury/debt in Islam, do not differ significantly enough from the needs of any other group to justify a segregated planning and wealth management service.
An excellent generic advisor—or AI-enabled robo-advisor—can provide tailored and personalized advice to a person of any identity appropriate to their needs.
The same goes for fintech and wealthtech—sure, you can orient technology towards specific identity groups, but there’s usually no good reason to do so and in fact there may be disincentive to do so, as potential users may be alienated. If you believe everyone deserves financial advice, then design technology to deliver advice to everyone, not just groups that you think look like you or love like you.
In other words, financial advice offerings “tailored” to groups like women, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ people, specific or broad populations of Asian Americans—for the most part they’re really little more than marketing gimmicks, often with extra charges and fees attached. Now, members of these groups might prefer to receive advice from someone that looks, worships or behaves similar to themselves, but that’s a preference, not a need.
That, in my opinion, is the real reason that Ellevest’s offering failed to resonate: they weren’t offering anything that significantly differed from other, less expensive providers with significantly more reach and depth in the market. It wasn’t that Ellevest was automated, it’s that—despite the brilliance of Sallie Krawcheck and her co-founders—it was a dumb idea in the first place.
If robo-advice itself had failed, it would be Betterment looking to get rid of its automated advice operations to the Vanguards or Fidelitys of the world.
Let’s get to your headlines.
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401GO
Next-generation retirement plan provider 401GO, announced its strategic partnership with isolved®, an industry-leading human capital management (HCM) technology provider. The new offering, isolved 401(k), powered by 401GO, simplifies compliance, reduces administrative burdens, and delivers impactful benefits—all while potentially maximizing savings through tax credits and deductions for the more than 189,000 employers leveraging isolved People Cloud™.
With nearly 1 in 4 employees leaving jobs for better benefits and 90% comparing benefit plans before making a career move, offering competitive retirement options is critical for attracting and retaining talent. This partnership provides isolved customers—ranging from sole proprietors to established businesses—with flexible, automated 401(k) solutions that reduce complexity and ensure compliance.
The integration of 401GO’s cutting-edge technology within isolved People Cloud ensures a seamless 401(k) experience—from automated plan setup and payroll integration to built-in compliance and investment flexibility. Additionally, businesses leveraging this partnership can maintain their existing financial advisor relationships, making it a uniquely flexible and scalable solution.
Betterment
Betterment, the largest independent digital investment advisor in the United States, today announced that it has acquired the automated investing business of Ellevest, the investing and wealth management company built by and for women.
Betterment today serves more than 900,000 customers throughout the United States and manages more than $55 billion in assets. This announcement follows other recent Betterment acquisitions, including the acquisition of Wealthsimple’s US advisory accounts in 2021 and Goldman Sachs’ Marcus Invest accounts in 2024.
Betterment offers a combination of powerful technology and personalized support to meet customers where they are. Ellevest clients who transfer their accounts to Betterment will enjoy automated investing, diversified portfolios, and valuable tax-smart tools. They will also have access to a range of account types, planning tools, educational resources and human advisors.
Bitwise
Bitwise Asset Management, a premier crypto-specialist asset manager with over $12 billion in client assets, today announced the completion of a $70 million equity raise. The round was led by Electric Capital, with participation from MassMutual, Highland Capital, MIT Investment Management Company, Haun Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Blockchain Coinvestors, and Nikesh Arora, among others.
Bitwise experienced tremendous growth during 2024, with client assets increasing more than 10x to over $12 billion across the firm’s three core business lines: beta, alpha, and onchain solutions.
Today, Bitwise’s broad suite of 32 investment solutions includes yield and alpha strategies, multi-strategy solutions, separately managed accounts, onchain staking, index funds, bitcoin ETPs, and more. By serving as a specialist partner, Bitwise enables clients to access the opportunities that meet their objectives.
BlackRock
BlackRock Inc. (NYSE:BLK) today announced the successful completion of its acquisition of Preqin, a premier independent provider of private markets data. This strategic transaction strengthens BlackRock’s ability to serve clients’ whole portfolios — across public and private markets — by combining investment, technology, and data solutions in one platform.
Private markets are the fastest-growing segment of global investing, with alternative assets projected to reach $30 trillion by the end of the decade, according to Preqin data. As capital markets evolve, private markets are playing an increasingly important role in financing global growth. Institutional and wealth investors continue to increase allocations to these markets as they seek to optimize returns and diversify their long-term capital, yet these allocations have been artificially limited by a lack of transparency. With Preqin, BlackRock takes a major step forward to address this need, positioning its private markets platform to deliver investments, technology, and data holistically to power next-generation investment solutions for clients.
From the outset, Preqin will extend BlackRock’s suite of technology offerings, with clients continuing to use Preqin with the same level of expert service. Preqin will remain available as a standalone solution, while joint customers will benefit immediately from product integrations, such as access to Preqin benchmarks within Aladdin. Over time, BlackRock will integrate Preqin’s proprietary data and research tools with Aladdin and eFront. This unification of data, research, and investment processes will transform private markets investing across fundraising, deal sourcing, portfolio management, accounting, and performance reporting.
CAIS
CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, today named Tim Shannon and Brad Walker as Co-Presidents, effective immediately, to support the company’s next phase of growth.
The new leadership structure was designed to accelerate advancement of strategic priorities by enhancing alignment between growth-focused initiatives and operational excellence. In these newly created roles, Brad will continue to build on his existing leadership by overseeing all client-facing initiatives, while Tim will remain focused on optimizing CAIS’ operational infrastructure. Together, they will ensure that both sides of the business maintain continuity while executing the company’s long-term vision. Both Brad and Tim will continue to be based in New York City and report directly to CAIS Founder and CEO Matt Brown.
Brad joined the firm in 2012 and has been integral to expanding the platform and deepening the firm’s relationships with independent financial advisors and asset managers. Tim, having served as President for over a decade, has been instrumental to building the company’s operational infrastructure and governance.
Capitalize
Capitalize, the industry’s first platform for online retirement account transfers, today announced a new partnership with Webull, a leading digital investment platform. Through this partnership, Capitalize will empower Webull clients to locate and transfer old 401(k)s into Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) conveniently within the Webull platform.
This partnership combines Webull’s leading online brokerage platform and advanced trading tools with Capitalize’s Embedded Rollover API, the industry’s first API to help financial institutions power rollovers natively for their users. By integrating Capitalize’s digital rollover technology, Webull users will enjoy a simplified and streamlined process to transfer legacy retirement accounts, like 401(k)s, into IRAs at Webull. This enhancement enables Webull customers to more efficiently manage their retirement savings on a single platform.
Webull joins a growing list of providers using the Capitalize Embedded Rollover API to help their users find and transfer retirement accounts and grow their platform assets in the process. Capitalize’s proprietary technology helps retirement account providers and their users instantly locate left-behind 401(k)s and consolidate them efficiently – avoiding the historically cumbersome ‘401(k) rollover’ process.
Foundation Source
Callan Family Office, a registered investment advisor (RIA) managing more than $7 billion for U.S.-based ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, foundations and endowments, today announced a partnership with Foundation Source, the nation’s largest provider of cloud-based charitable giving solutions, to enhance its philanthropic offerings.
Through this partnership, Foundation Source will provide a ‘private label’ philanthropic platform that enables Callan Family Office advisors to streamline and improve overall management of clients’ charitable activities in lockstep with its core investment and planning services.
Foundation Source’s enterprise PhilTech solutions address the capabilities, workflows, and requirements of private foundation administration, donor-advised funds (DAF), and planned giving programs. Callan Family Office will have access to an enterprise dashboard providing a comprehensive view of the firm’s total philanthropic assets, grants, and expenses that it manages on behalf of clients.
GReminders
GReminders, a leading end-to-end meeting and automation management platform for financial advisors, announces the launch of its “Ask Anything” assistant. This next-generation natural language interface allows advisors to seamlessly interact with their calendars, CRMs and wealth planning tools using simple, everyday language. The feature eliminates the need to navigate between different software to get answers about a client and initiate tasks.
The new feature complements GReminders’ existing suite of productivity tools, designed to streamline advisors’ everyday operations by leveraging their existing systems with compliance in mind. The system only uses client data from integrated platforms and excludes external market data, minimizing the risk of inaccurate or irrelevant responses.
The “Ask Anything” assistant will be available in March and will be included at no additional cost for subscribers of GReminders’ Base Business plan.
iCapital
Award winning Coherence Credit Strategies proudly announces the firm’s partnership with iCapital1, the global fintech platform driving the world’s alternative investment marketplace for the wealth and asset management industries. Starting today, Coherence Credit Strategies will be available on iCapital Marketplace, the industry’s destination for alternative investments.
The move for Coherence to participate on iCapital Marketplace marks a significant step in making the strategy more accessible to a broader range of qualified investors seeking innovative credit strategies.
Coherence is a liquid alternative fixed income credit strategy with long and short exposure focused on investment grade, crossover, and high yield corporate credit markets mainly in North America and Europe. Its unconstrained approach seeks to capitalize on both improving and deteriorating changes in credit valuations and ratings trajectories with an emphasis on risk-adjusted absolute returns, capital preservation, and low volatility of returns. Coherence is a division of Tiptree Advisors, which manages $1.8 billion in assets and serves as the asset management arm of Tiptree Inc. (TIPT), a publicly traded company.
Libretto
Libretto, the innovative advice platform empowering financial advisors and family offices with total wealth financial planning and investment software, today announced a new feature enabling advisors to generate personalized, graphic-rich, white-label client letters with the click of a button.
The client letter is designed to help advisors deliver personalized advice at scale. From within any client’s strategy, advisors can open the client letter builder, select a template, and create a custom table of contents with topics addressing the client’s specific needs. From there, Libretto takes care of writing the narrative and inserting client-friendly charts and graphics so that the client receives a bespoke whitepaper addressing their unique situation. Beneath the hood, the letters combine the consistency and accuracy of Libretto’s proprietary knowledge engine with additional personalization enabled by generative AI. The resulting letters help clients understand and visualize their financial situations, and advisors can use these materials to embed personalized narratives into post-meeting follow-ups, quarterly reports, and annual reviews.
Margarita Finance
Margarita Finance, a blockchain-based platform reimagining structured investment products by bringing them natively on-chain, has today announced the world’s first-ever AI-powered agent to trade institutional-grade derivative strategies on the blockchain.
Heralding a new era of DeFi where AI agents can execute investment strategies, Margarita Finance aims to bridge the gap between TradFi and DeF by making complex investment products more accessible. By eliminating the human prescription involved with traditional trading, the AI agent will participate in derivative trading using advanced strategies. Each trade is entirely verifiable on the blockchain and a dedicated AI-powered X profile will provide real-time updates on key trades. With transparency at its core, Margarita Finance establishes a new benchmark for AI-driven, trustless financial management.
Beyond institutional trading, this world-leading breakthrough will have tangible benefits for everyday investors. The technology enables greater access to institutional yield and sophisticated financial strategies, through transparency and explanations that require no deeper TradFi background. By being able to automate complex decision-making, and ensuring full transparency on-chain, Margarita Finance’s AI agent champions greater financial control and unlocks additional investment opportunities.
Merchant
Merchant, a global operating company providing growth capital, management resources, strategic opportunities, and guidance to independent financial services companies, today announced a strategic growth partnership with Venning Advisors, a full-service CPA and advisory firm with 150+ professionals across 15 U.S. offices.
Originally founded in New England in 1978, Venning is dedicated to helping SMBs and enterprise businesses, individuals, governments, non-profits, and trusts/estates with a comprehensive approach to their financial, tax and operational complexities and taking the industry forward with several AI-based initiatives to help solve for “what’s next” in the financial services arena.
As part of the firm’s U.S. growth strategy, Venning presents a compelling succession planning opportunity for CPA professionals, providing a customized pathway for seasoned CPA practitioners to transition their practices to Venning while preserving their clients, staff and legacy. By leveraging this platform, CPAs can transition their practice to a fellow CPA to ensure the most optimal continuity of service with a seamless integration.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze), the leading developer of integrated risk tolerance, proposal generation, investment research and planning software for financial advisors, has partnered with Shaping Wealth, a pioneer in behavioral finance education, to offer curated learning experiences that help advisors to compete and thrive.
Through this partnership, Nitrogen advisors will gain access to Shaping Wealth’s industry-leading content, including CFP® approved courses delivered via joint webinars and sessions offered at Nitrogen’s Fearless Investing Summit.
The first CFP® approved webinar in this collaboration is set for March 12, providing advisors with actionable insights into the psychology of financial planning. Shaping Wealth’s expertise in applied behavioral finance and psychology has already impacted firms ranging from independent RIAs to Fortune 500 companies. This partnership makes that knowledge more accessible to Nitrogen’s advisors, further bridging the gap between financial planning and human behavior.
Psympl
Psympl, the leader in the application of Psychographic AI, is excited to announce the launch of the Motivation Decoder. This revolutionary tool is designed to transform client engagement in the consumer financial services, wealth management, and consumer insurance industries by predicting consumers’ psychographic profiles with an impressive 90% accuracy using a short series of questions.
Psychographics focus on consumers’ attitudes, values, and personalities, and the Motivation Decoder equips financial services providers with deep insights into the motivations, priorities, and behaviors of their clients, enabling highly personalized service and communication strategies. This level of customization is key to increasing client acquisition, satisfaction, and loyalty in a competitive market.
Designed for easy integration into existing systems, the Motivation Decoder enhances the capabilities of marketing and sales teams without disrupting ongoing operations, making it an essential addition to any client-focused strategy.
Savvy Wealth
Savvy Wealth Inc., a digital-first platform for financial advisors centered around modernizing human financial advice, today welcomes Eric Hurkman as its first chief technology officer (CTO). Hurkman joins Savvy Wealth to lead the continued evolution of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology platform, which powers the growth of independent advisors and advisory teams and helps them serve the comprehensive needs of high-net-worth clients.
As Savvy Wealth’s national affiliate registered investment advisor (RIA), Savvy Advisors (Savvy) has grown its team to over 40 financial advisors. Hurkman will be responsible for driving product innovation within the Savvy Wealth platform, supporting its growth and scalability, and improving the user experience for Savvy’s advisors and their clients. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Hurkman will also lead the expansion of Savvy Wealth’s product development, design, engineering and AI teams.
Hurkman is a career software engineer with over a dozen years’ experience building and leading engineering teams and developing software in the fintech industry. Most recently, he spent over four years as a vice president of engineering at Carta, where he led the development of its venture capital solutions. Hurkman had previously joined Carta early on, where he built out its equity management and investor services platforms and engineering teams. His prior experience includes CTO at Say Technologies, a financial services platform acquired by Robinhood, and DrChrono, an electronic health records platform for doctors. He also served as vice president of engineering at Maven Clinic, a women’s and family health company.
SS&C
SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSNC) today announced that LPL Financial Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: LPLA), a leading provider of investment and business strategies for financial advisors, has broadened its relationship with SS&C Technologies. LPL Financial (LPL), which uses SS&C’s Brokerage Solutions, will leverage SS&C ALTSERVE™ to grow its alternatives business.
LPL will be able to offer its advisor network a better client experience through the ability to onboard and transfer more alternative investment positions to LPL custody; increased capacity to transfer positions in both taxable and tax-exempt registrations; expedited subscriptions, redemptions, transfers, distributions, capital call processing, and more; and improved timeliness and accuracy of position valuations and reconciliation on LPL’s platform and on account statements.
Taktile
Taktile – a category-defining decision automation platform – has raised $54 million in a Series B funding round, to continue empowering teams at fintech companies and financial institutions to optimize their risk management strategies across the entire customer lifecycle. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures, Visionaries Club as well as Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury, bringing Taktile’s total funding to date to $79 million.
In 2024, Taktile quadrupled its customer base and grew over 3.5x in ARR. Its customer base spans 24 markets, encompassing sophisticated fintech companies such as Mercury, Kueski, and Zilch, as well as some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including Allianz and Rakuten Bank.
The company has been recognized as a category leader by G2, a leading user review platform, for three consecutive quarters, most recently earning over 12 accolades in its Winter 2025 report. Reflecting its impact once implemented within an organization, Taktile has also gained industry recognition. At the 2024 Banking Tech Awards USA, hosted by FinTech Futures, Taktile won the “Tech of the Future – Decision Making” award.
TaxStatus
TaxStatus, a fintech leader providing frictionless permission-based IRS tax data, planning insights, and ongoing IRS account monitoring, today announced the launch of its Financial Baseline Report – a tool that empowers financial professionals with a comprehensive view of a client’s financial standing with data sourced directly from the IRS.
Designed to revolutionize financial planning, advice, and client onboarding, the Financial Baseline Report eliminates the inefficiencies of traditional data collection required to render advice. With an easy permission-based process, advisors no longer must obtain and upload tax returns.
The tax data is available for individuals, businesses, and trusts.
Vanilla
Vanilla, the leading platform in modern estate planning, today announced the appointment of Joe Abbott as Chief Marketing Officer and Hanna Grokenberger Byers as Chief of Staff and Vice President of Operations. This comes just weeks after the company ended its fiscal year with 293% year-over-year platform growth and the release of V/AI Copilot, the first AI agent for estate advisory.
In the last year, Vanilla has cemented its position as category leader in estate planning, adding hundreds of new advisory firms to the platform and raising $35M in additional capital led by Insight Partners and new strategic investors, Edward Jones Ventures, Nationwide, and Allianz. These new appointments come at an inflection point in Vanilla’s growth as the company takes on the emerging estate software category that has seen 259% growth over the last two years with financial advisors.
Abbott brings over a decade of marketing and startup experience, focusing exclusively on fintech for the last five years. Most recently, he served as VP of Product Marketing at Brex and helped drive over 100% year-over-year revenue growth for new financial services and software products. Prior to Brex, Abbott was an early marketing leadership hire at Ramp, where he helped grow revenue from $10M to $120M and scale the business to over 7,500 customers. He also previously held advisory roles with WealthTech unicorn Altruist and enterprise product marketing roles at Zendesk and ThoughtSpot.
WealthFeed
WealthFeed, an AI-powered Money-in-Motion platform for financial advisors, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with NewEdge Advisors, a growth-oriented financial advisory services and wealth management firm. The collaboration provides advisors with advanced prospecting and client engagement tools, enabling them to identify new prospects and drive organic growth.
This partnership combines WealthFeed’s cutting-edge technology with NewEdge Advisors comprehensive wealth management expertise, allowing advisors to easily access and act on high-value Money-in-Motion insights. By enhancing workflows, driving revenue growth, and elevating prospect engagement capabilities, the partnership supports NewEdge Advisors’ efforts to provide successful financial advisors access to tools and resources to grow their businesses.
