The days are awfully short, and so is the wealth management industry news.
It’s just that time of year.
Welcome to another Advisor Tech Talk, where, relatively speaking, we do have quite a bit of wealth tech news, but this comes as our eyeballs tell us that wealth management itself has entered a slowdown. Most of the activity happening in the industry at the end of the year is not the sort that is reported in the trade media, and so, it happens quietly.
What the trade press does to fill in the gaps in content is publish an endless stream of “year-in-review” post-mortem pieces, which gradually morph into “year-in-advance” prediction pieces as the year dwindles and we hit January.
We don’t think readers need us to tell them that both the year-in-review and year-in-advance type stories are more suitable as birdcage lining than reading material. In the former case, they’re stories you’ve already read and had reported to you, and in the latter case, they’re just so-called experts and thought leaders shooting the breeze—these stories are nothing that a reasonable person should set their watch—or portfolio allocation, or wealth management business strategy, for that matter—to.
Looking around the web, there’s been a bit of post-Schwab IMPACT conference reviews, with some of the AI scuttlebutt emerging as a potential reduction or elimination of the entry-level client-service associate role in wealth management firms. That’s something to look out for as AI does more of the note-taking and data-related “gopher” work in wealth management firms.
As we’ve said, these conferences have become less and less important to the wealth management zeitgeist, but there was another wealth management AI-related panel discussion this week that was reported on, from the Benzinga Fintech Conference, where a group of wealthtech and fintech executives argued that AI is making trust—particularly the trust of human clients for human financial professionals—more important as time goes on, thus making it unlikely, if not impossible, that AI will displace financial advisors.
Rather than a struggle between traditional wealth managers and client-facing technology, these executives saw the real lines of competition being drawn between wealth management firms who were deploying AI effectively, and those who were not.
Their argument boiled down to the idea that a person might automate investment management within a fintech brokerage account, but not within their nest egg. You know, because people don’t trust technology with their retirement, right? Sometimes it seems like these conferences feature the same four or five panel discussions over, and over, and over again.
We’re not sure where these executives are getting their information, but in our experience, most people appear to be automating their retirement accounts with target-date strategies and technology-driven portfolio rebalancing, while they’re using digital platforms like Robinhood and Webull to express their own views on investing by personally buying stocks, crypto and ETFs.
The retirement industry has never identified its brand of automation with technology, rather, automation in retirement accounts is more often associated with outcomes—better outcomes. Among the high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth cohorts, the situation isn’t significantly different to our knowledge—retirement accounts are more likely to be automated than non-retirement accounts.
Again, these executives also present us with a monolithic, immutable take on trust, rather than with a more realistic view of trust as something that evolves and changes over time. If businesses powered by humans can win over the trust of consumers, than so can businesses powered by technology.
And they already have! People now go online to manage some or all of their health care services, looking up very personal laboratory results without suffering a crisis of trust. We enter personal information—dates of birth, social security numbers, mothers’ maiden names—online sometimes dozens of times a year with hardly so much as a shrug. Millions of us are linking our fintech directly to our bank and brokerage accounts.
Is trust in technology—or lack thereof—really that much of an issue? The volume of negative press about human financial advisors dwarfs the negative press about financial technology and automation. Was Bernie Madoff a robo-advisor? Was Jeffery Epstein an artificial intelligence?
In our view, making a prediction that technology won’t ever replace advisors due to so-called trust issues has about as much value as the year-in-advance predictions that will be published over the next six or seven weeks.
Let’s get to your headlines.
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AllocateRite
AllocateRite, a deterministic AI-powered wealth management platform, today announced the appointment of Matt Pollard as Chief Executive Officer. Pollard brings nearly three decades of leadership across financial services, fintech, and artificial intelligence, with a proven record of scaling technology businesses and driving transformation across regulated markets.
Before joining AllocateRite, Pollard held senior executive roles at SS&C Technologies, Slalom Consulting, Forsythe Solutions, and IBM. He is known for leading large-scale digital transformation, AI adoption, and managed services initiatives, uniting strategic vision with operational execution to consistently drive growth, efficiency, and innovation.
Under Pollard’s leadership, AllocateRite is entering a new phase of intelligent expansion. Its deterministic AI platform unifies and structures data from banks, custodians, and investment platforms into a single, trusted source of truth. Firms gain a real-time view of clients and portfolios, while the platform streamlines portfolio construction, automates rebalancing, optimizes taxes, and delivers transparent reporting in a fully compliant environment.
Bank of America
Bank of America is launching 401k Pay, a unique new solution designed to simplify and conveniently convert 401(k) account assets into a retirement income. Available November 17 at no incremental charge to the company’s corporate plan sponsor or plan participant clients, the new digital solution provides 401(k) recordkeeping, flexible deposit options and advice in a single centralized hub. This enables plan participants to easily set, deposit and track their income throughout retirement.
Building upon the success of the company’s Personal Retirement Strategy program, 401k Pay is the next evolution in retirement planning, developed to address the concerns of both employees and employers. The recent 2025 Bank of America Workplace Benefits Report shows two key areas where employees say they need financial wellness resources are retirement education and planning (36%) and learning how to generate income in retirement (33%).
Betterment
Betterment, a trusted wealth and savings platform, today announced the launch of self-directed investing, a new offering that allows retail customers to buy and sell thousands of stocks and ETFs commission-free.
Through self-directed investing (SDI), Betterment extends its hallmark customer-first, intuitive experience to investors seeking greater choice and flexibility. According to Betterment, more than 75% of its customers currently hold self-directed investments off platform.
A standout feature of the new product is Tax Impact Preview, a tool that helps customers make smarter, more tax-efficient trading decisions. The feature provides insights into how a potential sale could affect an investor’s taxes, including capital gains and potential wash sales, before executing a trade.
Corastone
Corastone, the hyperscaler for private market investing, today announced that its platform is now live with Apollo, Morgan Stanley and a leading transfer agent supporting the process with integrated services, with Franklin Templeton and KKR set to follow.
As exposure to private markets becomes increasingly popular, broader participation will be achieved by continuing to streamline processes and lowering costs. Corastone’s digitally native and efficient infrastructure connects all participants in the investment lifecycle with end-to-end automation, real-time data and unparalleled speed and scalability. Through partnerships with leading institutions, Corastone is transforming the client experience for alternatives by condensing manual workflows.
Built on permissioned blockchain technology, Corastone serves as the new fabric of the private markets, delivering smoother counterparty access and institutional-quality security and accuracy. By concentrating exclusively on digital infrastructure, Corastone provides technology that is neutral and conflict-free, ensuring its platform operates in full alignment with the interests of every participant.
Hexure
Hexure, the leader in digital sales solutions for the insurance and financial services industry, today announced significant enhancements to its platform, strengthening support for life insurance carriers and distributors. These advancements build on Hexure’s proven foundation, delivering a unified, powerful digital experience that enables seamless quoting, illustration, and application and beyond for life insurance, all within a single platform.
Hexure’s platform supports a wide range of life insurance products. With 37% of transactions through Hexure already life business, these enhancements deliver greater efficiency and a more seamless advisor experience.
Hexure’s platform drives measurable growth by streamlining pre-sale, quoting, illustration, application, and post-issue servicing, all in one ecosystem. This approach eliminates complexity, accelerates sales, and empowers carriers and distributors to deliver the modern experience advisors and clients expect.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen, the industry’s only provider of client-facing AI advisor software for specialized planning, investment research, proposal generation, and meeting preparation, today announced its star-studded slate of speakers for the Fearless Investing Summit. Taking place from February 18th – 20th at the Hyatt Regency Denver, industry-leading speakers, including Ritholtz Wealth Management’s Josh Brown, Hamachi.ai’s Eric Clarke, Michael Kitces, and Nitrogen Co-founder and Board Member Aaron Klein, now also the founder of Contio, and many others, will share their knowledge to help advisors bring their A-game to client meetings in 2026.
Now in its eighth year, Nitrogen’s flagship event, the Fearless Investing Summit brings together more than 1,500 advisors as well as fintech and industry leaders for three days of hands-on learning and real-world collaboration. This year’s theme, Crush it in Every Meeting, centers on helping advisors master the modern client conversation by turning technology, planning, and communication into the ultimate competitive advantage.
Attendees will also get an exclusive look at Nitrogen’s Winter 2026 platform innovations, revealed live on stage, and insights on how Nitrogen is embedding AI throughout its platform to enhance advisors’ meetings.
OneVest
OneVest, a fintech wealth operating system delivering a unified, modular, no-code solution powered by intelligent workflows for wealth managers, RIAs, and banks, today announced a significant expansion of its multilingual capabilities, with additional languages designed to make wealth management more accessible, inclusive, and globally scalable.
While many fintech platforms focus narrowly on interface translation, OneVest is transforming what accessibility looks like by delivering true multilingual integration across the full advisor and client experience.
OneVest’s localization feature supports English, French, and Spanish today, with Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Portuguese launching in early 2026. This expansion will enable RIAs, home offices, and enterprise firms to serve increasingly diverse households and regions with ease.
Pitchbook
PitchBook, the leading provider of private capital market intelligence, today announced the upcoming launch of PitchBook Navigator, a generative AI feature that delivers best-in-class private capital market insights through simple, natural-language prompts directly within the PitchBook Platform. Navigator will be generally available to subscribers in late November. PitchBook also announced a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector integration with OpenAI, enabling PitchBook subscribers to securely access its proprietary private market data within ChatGPT. This integration is expected to be available in the near future. Together, these launches bring private capital market intelligence into the age of trusted AI, transforming how financial professionals access, analyze, and act on data.
Embedded in the PitchBook Platform, Navigator enables users to ask natural-language questions and instantly surface insights on companies, deals, and market trends, powered by PitchBook’s data and proprietary AI + HI (Artificial Intelligence + Human Insights) methodology. This approach pairs advanced AI with human expertise, ensuring every response is fast, objective, and backed by the industry’s most accurate and timely data. At launch, Navigator delivers data and research across companies, transactions, and market themes to accelerate deal sourcing, due diligence, and market analysis. Over time, it will expand to include the full scope of PitchBook’s data, insights and IP.
Additionally, PitchBook is expanding its growing network of enterprise AI and MCP integrations with OpenAI. Within ChatGPT, PitchBook subscribers will be able to surface PitchBook’s proprietary insights through secure, conversational prompts, without switching platforms or cross-checking sources. OpenAI and PitchBook share a focus on surfacing premium, high-quality data to its users, enhancing the accuracy and trustworthiness of AI-driven financial analysis.
Pontera
Arete Wealth, a national independent broker-dealer and registered investment adviser, today announced a new partnership with Pontera, the fintech platform that enables financial advisors to securely connect to held-away retirement plans.
The collaboration allows Arete advisors to monitor, analyze, and reallocate 401(k), 403(b), and other employer-sponsored retirement plans alongside clients’ other investments—creating a unified, transparent view of each client’s financial picture, including assets that have historically been left unmanaged.
For decades, most Americans’ largest investment accounts have remained inside employer-sponsored plans that advisors could not directly manage. This limitation has often resulted in fragmented financial planning and portfolios that drift out of alignment with clients’ goals.
SEI
SEI® (NASDAQ:SEIC) today announced a significant expansion of its tax management and overlay capabilities for separately managed account (SMA) and unified managed account (UMA) solutions. The enhancements provide advisors with greater control, transparency, and optionality for tax-management customization, in an effort to support both immediate and long-term tax benefits for investors.
Built on the foundation of nearly two decades of tax overlay services, this expansion advances SEI’s commitment to tax minimization, which matters most according to high-net-worth advisor practices. In fact, 73% of them consider tax minimization as their top investment objective priority¹.
Designed to help advisors optimize tax outcomes, SEI’s Tax Management and Overlay capabilities now feature a more robust process. From tax transition analysis, through implementation and portfolio design, to portfolio management and client-centric reporting, these capabilities are designed to integrate tax considerations through multiple phases of the wealth management process and add value to advisor-client relationships.
Syntax Data
Syntax Data, a financial data and technology provider offering data-optimized index solutions, and PM Insights, a leading independent market data provider for venture-backed private companies, today announced a strategic partnership that combines Syntax’s proprietary company classification system with PM Insights’ comprehensive private market dataset. As institutional investors increasingly allocate to private markets amid extended IPO timelines and the rise of late-stage ‘private IPO’ rounds, the need for standardized classification and benchmarking across public and private assets has become critical.
The partnership unlocks analytical transparency by combining PM Insights’ extensive coverage of mid-to-late stage venture-backed private companies with Syntax’s patented Functional Information System (FIS®) classification framework. Syntax has codified the business models for private companies with more than $3 trillion in market value alongside 12,500 public companies. FIS® also provides the ability to look at both private and public companies through multiple dimensions and thematic lenses. This represents the first integrated classification system to apply institutional-grade indexing methodology across both public and private company universes, enabling institutional investors, registered investment advisors (RIAs), and asset managers to conduct more accurate, competitive benchmarking and derive actionable insights across traditionally siloed markets.
The combined solution addresses a critical gap in the market by providing structured, transparent data for private company analysis, a segment that has historically lacked the standardization and depth available in public markets. RIAs and institutional asset managers can now access enhanced benchmarking capabilities, including sector-specific performance metrics, revenue multiples comparisons, and cross-market competitive intelligence.
TIFIN
Alera Group, a top national insurance and financial services firm, today announced a partnership with Give, a leading digital philanthropy platform within the TIFIN ecosystem, to launch a modern white-labeled Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) platform for Alera Group’s advisors and clients. The new Alera Charitable offering integrates charitable giving seamlessly into the firm’s growing wealth management and retirement planning capabilities.
The new DAF will be the flagship charitable giving vehicle offered through Alera Group Wealth Services, representing a strategic milestone in the expansion of the firm’s comprehensive wealth platform.
The Give platform, which processed over $90 million in charitable grants and more than 15,000 transactions in 2024, enables Alera Group advisors to deliver a personalized, modern donor-advised experience. Advisors enable clients to seamlessly contribute, invest, and grant to the causes they care about, all within one intuitive, advisor-led interface.
Webull
Webull (NASDAQ: BULL), an online investment platform, today introduced Vega, the next evolution of its AI-powered decision partner, with added features to enhance the investing experience. Vega delivers real-time, personalized insights and analysis for investors, helping them better navigate the complexities of modern trading.
Named after one of the brightest stars in the northern sky, Vega is a true decision partner and built to evolve alongside each investor. Going beyond surface-level stock analysis, Vega’s bespoke offering dives deeper into why market movements matter for each investor’s specific circumstance and outlines clear, actionable insights.
Built for both new and experienced investors, Vega offers streamlined guidance for newcomers while providing the depth and precision seasoned investors need to navigate complex strategies. Available at no cost to users, Vega makes powerful investing intelligence accessible to everyone, reinforcing Webull’s vision of democratizing markets. This feature is available exclusively to Webull’s U.S. customers.
Zocks
Zocks, the privacy-first AI assistant for financial services, and Kestra Financial, an industry-leading wealth management platform, today announced an agreement to make Zocks available to Kestra’s network of more than 1,300 financial professionals.
With the new agreement, financial professionals affiliated with Kestra have built-in access to the Zocks AI assistant platform, specifically for the use of automating client meeting preparation, notes, and updates to CRM and planning systems, all while providing enterprise-grade security and compliance. With the Zocks system handling much of the administrative work associated with client notes, financial professionals supported by Kestra will have more time to spend with clients.
Prior to selecting Zocks, Kestra completed a months-long pilot of several AI note-taking capabilities with about 25 representatives from across its community of advisors. Each week, pilot members shared feedback, discussed experiences, and surfaced challenges.
