Just go ahead and consider the whole world a hot mic.
Welcome to another Advisor Tech Talk, and it was a pretty active week in the wealth management universe, which means we had a lot going on in wealthtech, too.
First, though, we’d like to dwell for a bit on the news that MarketCounsel, a superlative law firm and wealth management consultancy, is distancing itself from former financial journalist Jim Pavia in fallout from comments allegedly made online regarding a recent tragedy.
We’re not going to discuss the specifics of the comments or the tragedy itself here. It’s sufficient to just say that the alleged comments would pretty offensive to most people.
Having similar coverage areas over the past decade, we’ve crossed paths with Jim Pavia on a few occasions, we did not really speak to each other or know each other, but he always seemed like a level-headed, nice person—definitely great editor material at first blush. He’s also a strong writer, particularly for someone who has spent so much time as a trade journalist.
Not too long ago Pavia announced a semi-retirement from journalism, ostensibly to take a gig in media and public relations at MarketCounsel after a career which included long-duration roles at the top of the Investment News editorial department and helping to cover financial advisors somewhere firmly in the middle of CNBC’s news operation.
As a journalist, it is hard for us to imagine why someone who has spent a career being careful about their words, and choosing which words are placed into the public eye, would suddenly spout off on social media. Discussing politics online is (generally speaking) a no-no for news people. Most responsible journalists—meaning newsroom leader types—are also of the “don’t read the comments” persuasion, preferring to exist above the fray.
As a human being, however, we completely understand. For one thing, it’s hard not to say something when the rest of the country is responding emotionally to a pivotal event. In the immediate aftermath, people were posting their responses in the blind, informed by speculation and fueled purely by political and emotional passions—and many of those responses were regrettable.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination played out on social media like a Rorschach test. In the instantaneous, uninformed responses, we could all see in a bare instant who many of the most dangerous and misanthropic people among us were.
It was like a scene from a horror movie, where the lightning flashes and we see for a moment all of the monsters that were gathering around our protagonists in the dark.
Remember the Warren Buffet line about how when the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked?
Morally speaking, the tide went out last week, and Jim Pavia, like many, many others, was caught without his suit on.
Now here’s our problem: we’ve been skinny-dipping, too. In fact, most anyone under the age of 50 has probably done their share of online skinny-dipping. The people in our generation have been having discussions online for 30-plus years now. While many of us, including most practicing financial advisors, are mature enough not to use a social media platform as a political soapbox, somewhere well down the internet rabbit hole—maybe as a young adult or even as a teenager—almost every one of us has made a comment or joke that would represent a moral failure similar to the ones currently costing people like Pavia their jobs and reputations.
There was a time, 20 years ago or more, where for a lot of people the internet sometimes felt like a place where one could howl out negative emotions into some kind of void, and then return to the real world in a decent mental state. Now we know that not only can that kind of negativity fester and help catalyze destructive, antisocial behavior, but it was also possibly recorded and will be accessible for all time for someone to find.
Thanks to tools like Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, we can dig deeply into the past and uncover things others might assume have been deleted. It’s all there, waiting to be found. Decades worth of angry comments and blogs and bulletin board posts and messages, there for the picking.
And almost everyone in Generation X, the Millennials and Generation Z, including the very people who usually create these moral panics online, are themselves ripe for the cancelling.
When are the digital thought police coming for us?
Let’s get to your headlines.
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Advisor Logistics
Advisor Logistics, a rapidly growing outsourced trading solution built exclusively for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), today announced a strategic change in ownership along with the appointment of a new executive leadership team to guide the firm through its next stage of growth.
Brett Wheeler, the founder of the firm, remains the CEO and is joined at the board level by Eric Martz and Damon Deru, and at the executive level by Jupiter Bridge (Head of Growth) and Jessica Pohto (VP of Technical Product). Together, this team brings decades of experience in financial services innovation, trading operations, and advisor-focused solutions.
Martz, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, formed a strong partnership with Deru through a key investment in AdvisorPeak. Martz brings deep strategic expertise to the team. He will focus on scaling operations, advancing the firm’s product roadmap, and driving continued innovation in advisor-facing services.
Betterment Advisor Solutions
Betterment Advisor Solutions, an all-in-one custodian for modern RIAs, today announced a new partnership with Vanilla, the modern estate planning solution for advisors. Through this partnership, advisors who custody assets with Betterment Advisor Solutions will have special access to the Vanilla platform in addition to exclusive educational opportunities with Vanilla’s team of estate planning experts. Vanilla’s tools enable advisors to offer customized estate planning services at scale to clients across all wealth levels.
In addition to accessing the Vanilla platform, the partnership will provide both product education and estate planning best practices for Betterment Advisor Solutions customers. Through exclusive webinars and workshops, advisors using the Betterment platform can leverage insights from Vanilla’s team of experts, who collectively have over 180 years of estate planning experience.
As wealth holders increasingly opt for advisors who offer comprehensive financial planning services, technology that enables advisors to understand and manage the complete financial picture will lead the way into the next era of wealth management.
Broadridge Financial Solutions
Global Fintech leader Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR) is making strategic investments to enhance its advisor marketing solutions to more effectively empower wealth firms and their advisors to build their book of business. Launching improved website creation tools with Wix, and new video marketing capabilities will provide advisors with the critical digital front door experience needed to attract, engage, and retain today’s investors.
Investor behavior is evolving, with rising demand for personalized advice, mobile-friendly platforms, AI-driven insights, and video content. At the same time, trillions of dollars are shifting to younger, more digitally native investors during the great wealth transfer, making a strong digital presence critical to standing out and reaching the next generation of investors. By combining Broadridge’s proven wealth tech solutions with website technology from Wix.com Ltd. (NASDAQ: WIX), a leading global platform for creating, managing, and growing a complete digital presence, advisors will be equipped with the modern tools they need to serve the evolving needs of investors.
A recent Broadridge study found that 62% of advisors find their website ineffective at generating leads, and only 4 in 10 advisors are embracing personalization to share content targeted to client interests and life events. To help wealth firms adapt to the changing needs and expectations of investors, Broadridge is building the future of advisor marketing.
Broadridge Financial Solutions
Global Fintech leader Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR) today announced that it has acquired iJoin, a leading retirement plan technology provider specializing in participant onboarding, engagement, and analytics solutions for the retirement industry.
Broadridge’s retirement plan investment servicing, custody, analytics, and participant communications solutions will be complemented by iJoin’s participant onboarding, managed accounts, retirement income, and data-driven engagement services. The combination will enable Broadridge to more holistically serve providers across the retirement ecosystem with leading retirement enrollment, data, and insights solutions.
iJoin’s capabilities enable record keepers to streamline participant enrollment into 401k plans, asset managers and insurers to more efficiently deliver managed account and income solutions, and advisors and their home offices to better identify participant cohorts and execute personalized education and outreach campaigns.
Collaborative Capital Advisors
Collaborative Capital Advisors (“Collaborative Capital”) today announced the launch of its business as a technology-forward SEC-registered investment advisor serving ultra-high-net-worth families, individuals, and entrepreneurs seeking differentiated, tailored wealth solutions, including high-quality private and public investment opportunities, tax strategy, estate planning, philanthropy and family office services. The firm’s comprehensive suite of services will be delivered with a high-touch and personalized experience, and a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities faced by its client base, which includes billionaire investor, Henry Swieca, Co-Founder of Highbridge Capital Management and Founder of Talpion Fund Management, and John Brice, Co-Founder, Previous President, and CIO of CarVal Investors LLC (now AB CarVal).
Built by financial professionals for financial professionals, Collaborative Capital’s approach is rooted in providing differentiated, bespoke offerings for its clients through a range of disciplines that support long-term financial and personal well-being. The firm was founded by Co-Chief Executive Officers Nathan Romano, former President of Atalaya Capital Management and York Capital Management, respectively, and Goldman Sachs executive, and Jonathan M. Bergman, former President of multi-family office TAG Associates, and Chief Operating Officer Charles Friedberg, an entrepreneurial investment management and fintech executive with proven experience in scaling financial service and technology businesses. Together, the founders have been responsible for more than $50 billion of alternative investments and have an average of 30 years of experience building successful financial institutions and seeding innovative companies in the alternatives and fintech sectors.
Dispatch
Dispatch, the first wealthtech solution to enable effortless client data management for registered investment advisors (RIAs), today announced that Chris Cook has joined the company as head of solutions and security engineering. Cook is a veteran leader in RIA technology, data strategy and cybersecurity, with more than a decade of experience helping financial advisory firms leverage technology to scale and serve clients.
At Dispatch, Cook will help RIAs move beyond data storage to true data activation. He will lead initiatives in system integration, real-time data orchestration, AI applications and information security, ensuring firms can surface and act on the right information at the right time. By bridging gaps between core systems, automating workflows and strengthening security, Cook will help Dispatch clients operate more efficiently, scale with confidence and deliver faster, more personalized experiences.
Cook spent nearly a decade transforming one of the industry’s largest RIAs, Mariner, into a digital-first powerhouse, leading cloud migrations, mobile-first initiatives and enterprise security frameworks. In early 2025, he founded Obsydian, a consultancy that helped firms of all sizes activate their data, streamline operations and adopt emerging technologies such as AI and orchestration layers. Drawing on his experience scaling technology organizations from lean teams to departments of more than 75 professionals, Cook brings the expertise to bridge systems, automate workflows and deliver real-time, actionable insights.
Envestnet
Envestnet today, during the Future Proof Festival, unveiled its five-year strategic vision, designed to transform the advisor experience and solidify its role as the leading adaptive wealthtech platform for broker-dealers, RIAs and institutional partners. Over the next five years, the company plans to invest $1 billion in research and development to bring this vision to life; equipping advisors with advanced, integrated and configurable tools for all their workflows from trading, reporting, financial planning, portfolio management, client engagement and more.
Backed by the recent acquisition by Bain Capital, Envestnet’s roadmap signals a strong continued focus: toward critical areas of platform unification, enhanced Unified Managed Account (UMA) infrastructure, flexible household modeling, the integration of multiple investment types, and expanded tools to help advisors deepen and expand client relationships.
Research1 shows that as an investor’s wealth increases, the top reason they choose to work with a financial advisor shifts from Retirement Planning to Investment Management, with nearly half of HNW and UHNW investors citing investment management as the number one reason they work with an advisor, prioritizing asset growth and optimization as they feel more comfortable in their wealth level.
FMG Suite
GTCR, a leading private equity firm, announced today that it has closed the previously announced acquisition of FMG Suite (“FMG” or “the Company”), a leading provider of advisor-led marketing automation software to financial advisors and insurance agents, from Aurora Capital Partners.
As part of the Leaders Strategy™ investment approach, Mark Casady, former Chairman and CEO of LPL Financial (NASDAQ: LPLA), will join FMG as Executive Chairman. Mr. Casady will work closely with FMG President and CEO Scott White and other members of the management team to help drive strategy and growth initiatives. These include developing AI-enabled products that cater to the evolving needs of the advisor, deepening FMG’s relationships with enterprise-scale wealth management firms and insurance agencies and evaluating organic and inorganic growth opportunities.
Founded in 2011, FMG provides marketing automation solutions to wealth advisory and insurance professionals, helping advisors and agents drive organic growth through omnichannel marketing solutions while ensuring compliance with industry regulation. The Company’s purpose-built platform, robust content library and integrated compliance workflows create a mission critical “one stop shop” for advisors, facilitating client engagement and prospecting. FMG serves over 50,000 financial advisors and over 3,500 insurance professionals, spanning large blue-chip wealth advisory firms and smaller boutique providers.
Foundation Source
Foundation Source, the premier provider of philanthropic solutions for donors, nonprofits, institutions, and the wealth advisors who serve them, today announced a strategic partnership with WealthTech leader Envestnet. The collaboration will equip advisors with innovative tools to streamline and scale charitable giving services across their practices.
Through this partnership, Envestnet will integrate Foundation Source’s modern, enterprise-grade technology – designed to support private foundations, donor-advised funds, and planned giving programs – alongside a full suite of administrative, compliance, and tax services. These capabilities will allow advisors to better meet clients’ holistic needs, strengthen relationships, boost retention, and drive firmwide growth. Key features include configurable dashboards providing aggregate views by firm, team, and advisor, along with comprehensive reporting, integrated collaboration tools, and intuitive workflows for grants management and impact measurement. Foundation Source will also enhance compliance oversight for participating firms.
Envestnet joins a growing roster of recognized leaders in wealth management innovation that have selected Foundation Source to develop a more well-rounded offering that seamlessly embeds philanthropy. The collaboration deepens Foundation Source’s commitment to bridging the gap between philanthropy and wealth management with modern, scalable software that makes charitable giving a more accessible and cost-efficient offering for advisors and their clients.
Franklin Templeton
Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and users, and Franklin Templeton, a global investment leader with $1.6 trillion in assets under management, announced a collaboration to build digital asset initiatives and solutions tailored for a broad range of investors.
The firms will explore ways to combine Franklin Templeton’s expertise in the compliant tokenization of securities with Binance’s global trading infrastructure and investor reach. The goal is to deliver innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of investors by bringing greater efficiency, transparency and accessibility to capital markets with competitive yield generation and settlement efficiency.
GreenHill Investment Reporting
GreenHill Investment Reporting announced that its ReportQuest platform has been selected by Integrated Partners, a $22 billion AUA registered investment advisor (RIA) network.
ReportQuest will be a part of Integrated Partners’ new unified technology stack, which is powered by Invent, the open-architecture wealth management platform.
This partnership underscores GreenHill’s position as a top-tier performance reporting solution and a trusted partner for leading financial institutions. Integrated Partners, known for supporting independent advisors with technology, accounting, and operational resources, chose Invent to deliver a flexible and modern digital wealth experience. Within Invent’s curated ecosystem of providers, GreenHill was selected to deliver independent and customizable performance reporting, empowering advisors and strengthening client relationships.
iCapital
iCapital, the global fintech company shaping the future of investing, today announced a strategic investment in, and partnership with, Tangible Markets, a leading liquidity solutions provider for private market positions held via wealth management channels. Together, the firms will develop scalable liquidity solutions for alternative investment funds – helping wealth managers, asset managers, and institutional investors unlock value from illiquid holdings. The partnership also supports the longer-term evolution of private markets, as enhanced liquidity becomes increasingly essential to expanding participation for advisors and their clients. Tangible’s liquidity solutions are expected to be available through iCapital’s platform by the end of 2025.
This partnership introduces a range of liquidity solutions for alternative investment funds, and access to Tangible Markets solutions will be facilitated through iCapital’s platform. The result is a seamless, transparent experience that connects a robust buyer-seller network, enhances price discovery, and streamlines transaction execution – making alternative investments more accessible and dynamic. The liquidity solution creates digital experiences for managing liquidity across a broad range of strategies, including private equity, private credit, real assets, and hedge funds. Through regular auctions, advisors and qualified investors can efficiently rebalance portfolios, access liquidity when needed, and adjust exposure to alternative investment funds.
This partnership will reduce friction in secondary transactions and accelerate time-to-liquidity for advisors and clients. Sellers benefit from curated auctions, real-time pricing insights, and portfolio analytics that help unlock value from traditionally illiquid assets across both closed-ended and semi-liquid funds. For buyers, the platform offers access to high-quality alternative investments and a frictionless closing process, supporting faster deployment and more diversified portfolios.
Orion
Orion, the premier provider of wealthtech solutions for financial advisors and the enterprise firms that serve them, today announced three major innovations at Future Proof Festival – headlined by the debut of AI assistants designed to put real-time data and insights directly at advisors’ fingertips.
The company unveiled: Orion’s Report Assistant and Query Studio AI assistants – giving advisors and operations teams instant, natural-language access to complex data and report creation, Orion Summit Experience – a concierge-level digital platform tailored for firms serving ultra-wealthy investors or those looking to deliver a truly holistic representation of their client services, and Orion Strategic Insights – a real-time growth intelligence experience for C-suite leaders.
Together, these new tools reflect Orion’s commitment to delivering a unified, scalable, and deeply personalized wealthtech ecosystem built to empower fast-growing advisors with smarter tools, actionable data, and AI-driven insights.
ROffice
ROffice, a platform where financial advisors and talented service providers converge to seek and provide assistance, along with HiveOne, an intuitive business-in-a-box software solution provider, today announced the launch of AnchorPoint to help advisors remove the “Frankenstack” of one-off solutions. Built with a compliant mindset, it provides a robust set of tools that can be administered without multiple logins or subscriptions.
ROffice’s AnchorPoint enables the parent company RIA to set controls and parameters around what the advisor’s website disclaimer, financial planning billing, client communications, and email marketing can be while the advisor gains opportunities to build and manage their marketing and client experience. The RIA parent company can create and lock global compliance settings, ensuring advisors each adhere to set standards.
Tandems
SigFig, a leading digital wealth management solutions and technology provider for financial institutions and their advisors, today announced that it is changing its company name to Tandems, and launching an expanded product ecosystem centered around an AI-native wealth operating system for financial advisors. Its new WealthOS helps advisors run more efficient and effective meetings, turns every new client conversation into an asset-gathering opportunity, and helps deliver personalized advice at scale. This new evolution reflects SigFig’s growth beyond investment management tools deployed by large financial institutions, to providing full “finance with intelligence” to banks, insurance companies and large wealth management firms.
Founded in 2006, SigFig launched initially to democratize access to financial advice, and soon expanded its focus to building digital wealth solutions deployed by major financial institutions to help manage billions of dollars in investments. As a pioneer in the rise of robo-advisory and digital wealth technology of the last decade, its platform serves over $60 billion in assets across two million accounts and 6,000 advisors. Tandems has now leveraged this scale and deep industry expertise to build powerful new verticalized AI solutions tailored to the unique workflows and needs of financial institutions and their advisors.
Tandems’ new brand and expanded product set is designed to transform a financial advisory industry where core platforms have not kept up with the wider velocity of technological change. It wants to use “finance with intelligence” to transform a sector of commoditized products, basic services and outdated infrastructure, through reimagined intelligent solutions and personalized advice that can amplify and augment human expertise. The Tandems product ecosystem automates the manual work that takes up 90% of an advisor’s time, and lets them focus on what they do best: building meaningful relationships and providing strategic guidance. At the core of its new AI-native WealthOS is a verticalized approach to AI, that is pre-integrated with most major financial and software data platforms, meets stringent security and privacy standards and is finetuned for over 200 real world financial use cases. This verticalized approach to AI significantly outperforms horizontal AI when compared against accuracy benchmarks.
TIFIN Give
TIFIN Give, the first donor-advised fund (DAF) platform designed for growth, today announced the launch of Tax Intelligence. This new capability helps financial advisors identify tax-efficient security contributions and use DAFs to drive better wealth outcomes for their clients.
This innovation marks a major step in enabling advisors with real-time answers to strategic tax planning questions. While tax loss harvesting is routine, tax gain harvesting remains underutilized by the broader investor population despite being well suited for DAFs. By realizing capital gains intentionally, investors can reset cost basis, reduce concentrated positions, or enhance their overall tax strategy while also giving charitably. This is a particularly effective strategy especially during years where a client may have liquidity events.
With Tax Intelligence, advisors can, in-real-time, proactively address questions such as “Who stands to benefit most from opening a DAF?” while also helping their clients answer questions such as “”Which part of my portfolio should I donate to a DAF?”. The platform analyzes client holdings and generates tax-efficient security contribution proposals. These recommendations account for variables like portfolio deviation and restricted security lists, giving advisors a sophisticated, personalized way to engage high and ultra high net worth families, especially as advisors discuss these topics towards the year end.
Trade Republic
Trade Republic, Europe’s largest savings platform, continues to grow, surpassing 10 million customers, across 18 European markets and more than 150 billion euro in assets under management. Through strategic partnerships with Apollo and EQT, Trade Republic expands its services to offer access to Private Markets. In the coming months, the bank will roll out two additional asset classes, each 30 days apart.
This new offering gives Trade Republic customers the unique opportunity to invest in private companies, which account for 88% of the economy. It allows retail investors to participate in the performance of these companies and further diversify their portfolios. This asset class has outperformed public markets over decades.
In a professional wealth management strategy, stocks and ETFs typically make up only about 60% of a portfolio. Private markets can help investors achieve greater diversification. With this new offering, Trade Republic is enabling its clients to structure their wealth in a way that was previously only accessible to very wealthy and institutional investors.
Transient.AI
Transient.AI™, a New York City-based disruptive technology firm founded by former Wall Street executives and backed by the global alternative investment management firm Hurricane Capital, today unveiled Clarity.AI, a sleek subscription-based AI platform that transforms dense SEC Form ADV RIA filings into an innovative AI-powered, data and event-driven lead generation engine. By combining geospatial heatmaps and conversational AI, Clarity.AI provides instant visibility into the $100 trillion+ RIA marketplace.
For decades, financial professionals have drowned in regulatory filings that are lengthy, text-heavy, and difficult to analyze. Transient.AI™ changes the game. With a few clicks—or a single question—users can surface who manages billions, where assets are concentrated, and which firms are on the move.
From targeting high-value prospects to scanning the market for growth trends or red flags, Transient.AI™ delivers speed, clarity, and control. It’s regulatory data, reimagined.
Valmark Financial Group
Valmark Financial Group has announced a powerful new technology enhancement to its in-force life insurance business. The new feature, called the Opportunity Engine™, integrates directly into Valmark’s InForce Insurance Hub, which was launched last October at Valmark’s annual Member Summit meeting. The InForce Insurance Hub is supported by the broader infrastructure of Valmark’s Policy Management Company (PMC) and InForce Insurance Solutions Division.
This enhancement represents the latest in a series of innovations that underscore Valmark’s commitment to helping independent firms build value by actively managing in-force policies and transforming traditional policy servicing into proactive insurance management. By leveraging a variety of data feeds and artificial intelligence (AI), the expanded platform helps ensure that insurance policies continue to meet the financial security needs they were originally designed to provide.
These advancements reflect Valmark’s ongoing investment in data and AI and its unwavering commitment to providing Member Firms with the tools and resources they need to protect policyholders through proactive insurance management and thrive in today’s competitive market.
