They sound like they’re something out of The Matrix, and some industry observers believe that over the long term they will present a challenge to traditional wealth management.
Welcome to your weekly Advisor Tech Talk, and once again we have a good deal of wealth management technology news to get to, but to get started, let’s talk about another not-so-new technological challenger to traditional wealth management and other financial services.
I’m speaking today of neobanks. Neobanks, in this case, is a neologism—ha!—for fully online digital financial services firms that offer banking or banking-like services and may or may not offer a menu of other financial offerings, but do not operate under a banking charter. The terms neobank and challenger bank can pretty much be used interchangeably. Today, popular neobanks include Chime, Revolut and Current. Ally is not a neobank—while it is a totally digital, online-only bank, it is also a traditional chartered bank and has operated as one for the duration of its existence.
By not operating under a charter, neobanks are able navigate around some of the regulations restricting traditional financial services firms—but can still offer access to banking-like services through partnerships
As they grow and mature, neobanks may or may not become full-fledged banks—companies like Varo and SoFi started out as neobanks but eventually became chartered traditional banks via an acquisition or their own evolution, and have expanded to offer many different kinds of products and services linked both to the new digital ways of doing business and the more traditional side of the industry.
Neobanks have introduced some features to the industry that have proven to be popular with consumers, including easy electronic money transfers, mobile check deposits, rewards programs, financial wellness tools, credit-building tools, budgeting tools, higher interest rates on savings and early access to direct deposits. Most of these entities started as apps for mobile devices, but many have evolved to offer web access and some physical financial services, like debit cards.
In case you couldn’t tell, the “neo” in neobank has become something of a misnomer—many of these businesses are hardly new and some have accumulated not only a track record, but a good reputation. Over time, the breadth and depth of services offered by neobanks has grown, and many already offer some form of wealth management or wealth-adjacent services, but overall, these businesses are a little like the ubiquitous investing apps in their forays into wealth management—they still haven’t really taken the plunge.
As of right now, neobanks like Chime and Revolut stand no more as challengers to traditional wealth management than apps like Robinhood and Webull, or robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront. They offer some of the same services, but largely fish from a different pond than the traditional wealth management industry.
The issue for wealth managers, especially young ones, is a future where for an increasing number of people, more and more of our financial services are reduced to icons on an app menu versus relationships with actual people. Neobanks, and their growing popularity, certainly accelerate us towards that future.
Let’s get to your headlines.
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Alpaca
Alpaca, a self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure API, today announced its intended acquisition of WealthKernel, a wealthtech firm specializing in digital investment infrastructure and tax-advantaged products. This strategic acquisition will bring WealthKernel’s UK and EU licensed brokerage infrastructure to Alpaca, supporting their rapid global expansion to achieve its mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet.
WealthKernel brings wealth management capabilities, including ISAs, SIPPs, and other tax-advantaged accounts, complementing Alpaca’s trading infrastructure. Alpaca, which has long supported their UK and EU partners, now gains the ability to act as a fully authorized broker-dealer through WealthKernel’s licenses.
The deal unites a strong team with deep expertise in brokerage operations, compliance, and financial technology—leveraging shared tech and compliance frameworks. Further strengthening this foundation, Alpaca’s recently appointed CFO, Nadia Asoyan, brings seasoned fintech leadership from prior executive roles at Robinhood and Square. The combined organization will continue global operations, with key hubs in North America, Europe, and Asia.
F2 Strategy
F2 Strategy (“F2”), a leading wealth management technology and marketing services company, today announced its acquisition of Aliter Investment Services (“Aliter”), a Boston-based professional services firm specializing in operations and technology transformation for investment managers and asset servicing providers such as global banks, data integrators and technology firms. The acquisition expands F2’s capabilities into asset servicing for pooled investment vehicles, complementing its existing Bank Trust and Wealth verticals. Asset Servicing becomes F2’s third core vertical, enhancing the firm’s strategic consulting, execution and delivery across the financial services ecosystem.
Founded by Dan Ahern and Keith Totten, Aliter brings decades of leadership experience spanning top-tier investment and asset servicing firms. The firm is recognized for its agile, boutique approach to consulting, combining strategic insight with execution-focused delivery. Aliter’s culture–defined by flexibility, structure and measurable outcomes—closely aligns with F2’s client-centric ethos and commitment to delivering practical solutions.
This is F2 Strategy’s second acquisition of 2025 and its fourth since announcing a majority investment from private equity firm Renovus Capital Partners two years ago. In an environment where wealth and asset servicing firms are under increasing pressure to modernize operations and deliver more agile, client-centric solutions, F2 Strategy’s acquisition of Aliter Investment Services reflects a strategic move to meet that demand.
iCapital
iCapital, the global fintech company shaping the future of investing, today announced it has raised over $820 million with the completion of its latest financing round co-led and funded by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc. (“T. Rowe Price”) and SurgoCap Partners, bringing the company’s valuation to over $7.5 billion. With $945 billion of assets serviced globally on its platform, including $257 billion in alternative platform assets, $203 billion in structured investments and annuities outstanding, and $485 billion in client assets reported on, iCapital continues to transform the wealth and asset management landscape through technology, data infrastructure, and end-to-end enterprise solutions that power investing at scale.
The capital will be used to support strategic acquisitions that improve the advisor and client experience, empower asset managers to expand their reach and attract a broader range of investors, and create opportunities to reduce friction in the ecosystem for all participants. As the only integrated platform for alternatives, structured investments, and annuities, iCapital delivers a complete portfolio of management capabilities for education, transactions, data flows, analytics, and client support throughout the investment lifecycle. The integration of iCapital’s technology on both a modular and comprehensive basis simplifies the portfolio investment experience for clients globally and engineers better connectivity and automation for all participants in the ecosystem.
According to BlackRock’s 2025 Private Markets Outlook, the wealth channel is expected to significantly increase allocations to private markets – to an estimated $20 trillion by 2030 and beyond – underscoring the need for modern infrastructure to support this growth. iCapital’s technology enables wealth managers to learn, manage, and invest in private markets, structured investments, and annuities alongside traditional holdings through a seamless interface that unifies onboarding, document workflows, performance data, and regulatory compliance. For asset managers, iCapital provides end-to-end enterprise solutions, a digital marketplace, tailored distribution capabilities within the wealth management channel, data management, AI-powered services and tools, and sales distribution support and reporting.
Mission Wealth
Mission Wealth, a nationally recognized wealth management firm headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, is proud to announce the launch of MissionForward™, a forward-thinking digital platform designed specifically for the evolving needs of young professionals, entrepreneurs, and emerging affluent families.
Recognizing a growing demand among digital natives for financial advice that is flexible, cost-effective, and conveniently accessible, MissionForward is a mobile app that extends Mission Wealth’s commitment to personalized, expert guidance to those who may not yet meet the firm’s traditional high-net-worth profile. This new offering reflects the firm’s strategic initiative to broaden its reach and support the next generation of investors at earlier stages of their financial journey.
Built for convenience and empowerment, MissionForward provides a subscription-based model for financial planning and investment management, with no minimum asset requirement. The app offers secure, on-demand communication with dedicated CFP® professionals, goal tracking, budgeting, financial planning updates, and access to Mission Wealth’s investment strategies—all in a user-friendly, mobile experience.
The Oasis Group
The Oasis Group, a leading consultancy for the wealth management industry, recently released a new research report on Wealth Platforms serving the wealth management industry. The comprehensive study evaluates the role of wealth technology platforms in how wealth management firms serve clients and examines 10 of the top platforms serving the wealth management community: Addepar, Advisor360°, AdvisorEngine, Advyzon, d1g1t, Envestnet, Masttro, Orion, Private Wealth Systems, and SS&C Black Diamond. Collectively, these platforms represent over $25 trillion in assets under administration.
The goal of the Peaks Research for Wealth Platforms, which is the third research report in The Oasis Group’s Peaks Research series, is to review the leading wealth management platforms based on The Oasis Group’s experience working with Registered Investment Advisor, Broker Dealer, and Family Office firms, with the intent being to educate the wealth management buyer.
The study compares each platform based on their observable capabilities across 11 focus areas and scores each platform using a standard scoring method. This in-depth and fact-based analysis provides wealth management firms with a comprehensive analysis of each platform’s capabilities that cannot be found elsewhere. Wealth management firms reviewing wealth platform options in the marketplace can use this research to create a short list of providers based on their requirements.
Opto Investments
Fi3 Advisors (“Fi3”), an independent, fee-only Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and multi-family office serving high-net-worth (“HNW”) families, executives, and business owners nationwide, today announced its strategic partnership with Opto Investments (“Opto”), a comprehensive, technology-led solution to simplify private markets investing and servicing for independent investment advisors and family offices. Opto will enhance Fi3’s longstanding private markets program by simplifying private investment workflows, centralizing performance data for end-client reporting, and helping establish an annual vintage funds program customized to the needs of Fi3’s clients.
Fi3 manages approximately $1 billion in assets for around 130 families, serving as a single point of contact for all areas of their financial affairs. Through an institutional portfolio construction process, Fi3 integrates their clients’ investments with their financial plan, building bespoke portfolios that balance liquidity needs and tax circumstances. The partnership with Opto will further modernize and institutionalize Fi3’s private markets offerings, which typically represent 15-25% of client portfolios.
Leveraging Opto’s end-to-end private markets solution, Fi3’s advisors and clients will benefit from a streamlined operational experience with a single K-1, automated subdoc creation, digital signatures and smooth integration with its reporting software, Addepar. Further, Opto’s advanced portfolio construction tools strengthen Fi3’s ability to align private and public markets investments to optimize after-tax returns, while its robust pacing solution enables Fi3 to more thoughtfully build private markets allocations over time that complement public market exposures.
Pontera
Pontera, the fintech company empowering retirement savers to receive financial advice from their trusted financial advisors, and Snowden Lane Partners (“Snowden Lane”), an independent, advisor-owned, wealth advisory firm dedicated to providing client-focused advice in a values-driven culture, today announced a strategic partnership.
Snowden Lane’s advisors will now have access to the Pontera toolkit to manage their clients’ 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and other held-away accounts. By leveraging Pontera’s platform, which includes products for rebalancing, compliance, and billing, Snowden Lane will be equipped with a holistic assessment of their clients’ financial portfolio to improve long-term financial outcomes.
SMArtX Advisory Solutions
SMArtX Advisory Solutions (“SMArtX”), a leading innovator in managed accounts technology, has announced the addition of 25 new strategies from seven leading asset management firms to its Manager Marketplace. SMArtX’s continuously growing platform now offers 1,553 strategies from 323 distinguished asset management firms.
Newcomers GQG Partners, Liquid Strategies, and VanEck respectively added global ADR and U.S. equity strategies, overlay and hedged equity strategies, and real asset, thematic, and asset allocation ETF strategies. Allspring Global Investments, F/m Investments, Innovator Capital Management, and T. Rowe Price also expanded their current offerings to respectively include custom equity and emerging markets strategies, a municipal bond ladder strategy, a buffered ETF strategy, and a suite of equity blend strategies.
SS&C Technologies Holdings
SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSNC) today announced the addition of Black Diamond Investment Management Services—a suite of integrated capabilities designed to transform how wealth management firms streamline portfolio management, trading, and client engagement. More than 2,700 firms use the cloud-native SS&C Black Diamond® Wealth Platform to meet complex needs of modern advisors.
Key highlights of Black Diamond Investment Management Services include Managed Account Services, Model Marketplace, Proposal Generation and Human-Centered Investing.
TIFIN
TIFIN, an AI-powered platform for financial technology, has launched a new multilingual LLM innovation hub in India to expand access to financial AI across global markets. This move strengthens TIFIN’s capabilities in natural language AI and enables around-the-clock development from its teams in the U.S., Spain, and India.
As financial services become increasingly conversational, as enterprise clients have a geographically dispersed user base, and as personalized interactions become increasingly important, the ability to serve users in their native languages is a strong advantage to building AI applications that drive adoption and trust. This capability is also allowing TIFIN to start serving clients in regions such as Japan.
This growth reflects TIFIN’s strategy to tap into globally dispersed AI talent. The newly formed 10-person team in India adds to the existing AI talent in the US and brings deep specialization in financial LLMs and multilingual capabilities — a foundation for expanding TIFIN’s AI products to international markets. The India team has already contributed to breakthroughs in agent-driven productivity tools and multilingual experiences in the finance domain. A recent paper published by the team also won 3rd place in SemEval (solving a multi-lingual challenge).
TradeStation Securities
TradeStation Securities, Inc. (“TradeStation Securities”), an award-winning†, self-clearing online brokerage firm for trading stocks, options, futures, and futures options, today announced its integration for equities and equities options trading* with TipRanks, a provider of retail investor tools powered by data-driven market research and analyst insights.
This integration highlights both companies’ commitment to enhancing the retail investor experience by offering TipRanks’ data-driven analytics along with seamless access to TradeStation Securities’ brokerage services. Through this integration, equities and equity options investors can now trade directly on the TipRanks platform, exclusively through TradeStation Securities. Users can connect, view, and manage their TradeStation Securities brokerage account right from the TipRanks’ interface – an experience built for born traders, offering the precision needed to help navigate today’s markets.
