What a difference a week makes.
If you were with us last week—and we forgive you if you weren’t–you were treated to a paltry three financial advisor technology headlines in our Advisor Tech Talk roundup. The holidays really took their toll on news activity.
Well, now our cup runneth over: we have nearly 20 items of note to report to you.
But first, let’s talk about some data and some outlooks and consider what it might tell us about the state of wealth management and wealthtech in 2026.
Optimism is in the air in a survey of middle-market companies and private equity firms, where 58% of respondents in a Citizens Financial Group survey called the current M&A environment strong, and 54% expected improving economic conditions this year. Citizens expects AI to be one of the factors driving M&A dealmaking. For wealth management, it seems to us like this could mean that industry consolidation should continue apace, if not accelerate through the early part of 2026.
Where we’re going to spend more time is a “2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report” from advisor AI provider Jump, which was based, in part, from a massive amount of data gathered from thousands of advisor-client meetings—and because Jump accumulated and closely analyzed data from so many conversations, it offers insight into client relationships those of us who merely write about the wealth management industry rarely see.
For example, Jump measures a client sentiment index, which results a simple 1-10 representation of client sentiment, before and after each client meeting. Using its data, Jump can not only tell us to what extent an advisor is improving each client’s sentiment during a meeting, but what time of year advisors are having the biggest net positive effect on client sentiment—which seems to be right before the U.S. income tax filing deadline, closely followed by the end of the calendar year.
Jump has also kept track of why clients meet with advisors, and what advisors are talking about with their clients—and what resonates. While life events, particularly negative life events (think: death and divorce), are what drive clients towards engaging with their financial advisors, the fears and concerns brought up in conversation are often macroeconomic or market oriented, according to Jump.
Oh yeah, and advisors are the ones doing most of the talking in these meetings, said the research, which kind of makes sense, but Jump’s findings suggest that they might want to spend more time listening.
The advisors who are creating the strongest outcomes—measured by an average 17.5% increase in client sentiment throughout a meeting—are considered “emotionally intelligent.” According to Jump, emotionally intelligent advisors spend more time on goals, planning and relationship building, and less time on service and compliance.
Of course, service and compliance happen to be two of the problems today’s wealthtechs are solving for.
Let’s get to your headlines.
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AltsIllustrator
Concorde Investment Services, a leading independent broker-dealer and registered investment adviser platform serving financial advisors nationwide, today announced the firmwide adoption of AltsIllustrator™, an innovative analytics and comparison platform developed by two financial advisors within the Concorde system. The new tool is now available to all Concorde-affiliated advisors to support deeper due diligence, clearer investment comparisons and more informed client recommendations regarding Section 1031 exchange investments via Delaware statutory trust offerings.
AltsIllustrator was created by experienced advisors who recognized the need for a standardized, data-driven way to evaluate alternative investment programs. The platform aggregates key offering details – including strategy, asset type, leverage, fees, distributions, historical performance, liquidity terms and sponsor-provided metrics – and presents them in a clear, sortable format. Advisors can compare multiple offerings side-by-side with consistent calculations, color-coded scoring and visual analytics that streamline research and enhance documentation for compliance.
With alternative investments playing a growing role in portfolio construction, advisors increasingly rely on efficient, accurate research workflows. AltsIllustrator reduces the burden of manual spreadsheet analysis and allows Concorde advisors to quickly match investment characteristics to client objectives, risk profiles and suitability considerations.
Apex Fintech Solutions
Apex Fintech Solutions, Inc. (“Apex”), an innovation launchpad for the global investing ecosystem, today announced a strategic agreement with Allfunds (AMS: ALLFG), a leading wealthtech platform with over €1.7 trillion in assets under administration. The agreement delivers an extensive technical integration of the Allfunds platform within the Apex AscendOS™ infrastructure, providing U.S. (for their U.S. offshore business) and international firms the ability to support global investors with seamless access to a large universe of offshore mutual funds, ETFs, and alternative investments.
By connecting U.S. and international firms to a vast universe of offshore funds, this integration will simplify access to international investing and eliminate the need for firms to manage countless individual connections with different fund houses. For broker-dealers, RIAs, and fintechs, this expands their investment offerings both on a global scale and for their U.S. offshore business, enhancing operational efficiency and providing a robust set of offerings to diversify portfolios. The integrated solution is anticipated to be available to AscendOS clients in Q1 2026.
Through this technical integration, Allfunds gains a direct channel into the Apex ecosystem, significantly expanding its footprint in the U.S. offshore market.
BizEquity
American City Business Journals, the country’s premier publisher of local business news, today announced a landmark collaboration with BizEquity, the global leader in private business valuation data, to launch the Private Company Valuation Index—the first benchmarking tool designed specifically to track valuation trends across the private market.
Built on BizEquity’s unparalleled proprietary dataset, which includes millions of historical valuations, the Index delivers real-time insight into how private company values are shifting across industries, regions, and revenue bands.
The Private Company Valuation Index gives financial advisors, wealth managers, M&A professionals, and other financial service providers a powerful, data-driven resource to ground their client conversations in a macro-level market context.
Broadridge Financial Solutions
Building on its strategy to harness AI and harmonized data to optimize global post-trade operations, global Fintech leader Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. (NYSE: BR), today announced a strategic investment and expanded partnership with DeepSee, a leader in agentic AI technology based in Utah, U.S. The agreement includes Broadridge taking a minority ownership stake in DeepSee and marks a significant milestone in Broadridge’s strategy to leverage AI and harmonized data to optimize global post-trade operations.
Along with the investment, Tom Carey, President of Broadridge Global Technology and Operations (GTO), will join DeepSee’s Board of Directors, further aligning the two companies’ shared commitment to accelerating AI transformation across capital markets. The collaboration will initially focus on deploying AI-powered email orchestration, turning traditional inboxes into intelligent, automated workflows for post-trade operations teams.
Broadridge is a leading provider of post-trade processing technology, clearing over $15T in daily trades across global markets every day. By embedding AI into workflows such as fails research, inventory optimization, and now email orchestration, Broadridge is further empowering clients to simplify complex ecosystems, improve decision-making, and unlock new levels of efficiency.
Edgen
With over 481,000 registered users, the platform introduces a new “Zero-Prompt” architecture that monitors markets 24/7, replacing manual chat interfaces with proactive, personalized intelligence.
Edgen today announced the public release of its Personal AI CIO, a market intelligence system designed to move financial AI beyond the constraints of the chatbot. Unlike current Large Language Models (LLMs) that sit idle waiting for user prompts, Edgen’s AI CIO functions as an autonomous, always-on analytical layer.
For the 481,000+ investors already registered on the platform, this release signals a shift from asking questions to receiving answers. The system continuously analyzes equities and digital assets through a coordinated network of 17 specialist agents, pushing critical and actionable insights to users before they even think to ask.
Envestnet
Envestnet, a leading provider of connected technology, advanced insights, and comprehensive wealth management solutions, today announced the appointment of Sue Burton as its Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
In this role, Burton will report to Chris Todd, Chief Executive Officer, and lead Envestnet’s global marketing organization, spanning brand, communications, demand generation, channel marketing, and product marketing. She has been charged with building an integrated marketing engine, strengthening Envestnet’s market leadership, and accelerating performance across digital experience, content strategy, and multi-channel engagement through paid, earned, social, and owned programs.
A senior marketing and growth executive with more than 20 years of experience, Burton is widely recognized for transforming financial services organizations into high-performance growth platforms. Most recently, Burton served as Senior Vice President of Marketing, Digital, and Member Experience at Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU). Under her leadership, DCU delivered double-digit deposit growth, accelerated digital engagement through AI-powered personalization, and reengineered its lifecycle marketing model to drive sustained member value.
Envestnet
Envestnet has launched Inside WealthTech, a new blog and video series featuring onsite interviews with WealthTech innovators and industry leaders on the trends reshaping wealth management – and how advisors and enterprises can stay ahead of client expectations.
Episodes available now include interviews with leading voices in wealth management who share insights on the biggest challenges facing the industry today, how advisors and investors can adapt, and what it will mean to be a competitive advisor in the next three to five years.
Envestnet
Northern Trust Asset Management, a leading global investment management firm with $1.4 trillion in assets under management as of September 30, 2025, announced today it will make its institutional-quality, tax-managed direct indexing solution available via Envestnet, a leader in Adaptive WealthTech for financial advisors.
Financial advisors utilizing the Envestnet platform will now have access to Northern Trust Asset Management’s more than 35 years of expertise in customizing tax-aware portfolios for the ultra-high-net-worth market. Northern Trust Asset Management’s direct indexing solution offers a diverse lineup of equity investment strategies, giving advisors the ability to seamlessly blend indices, incorporate quantitative factor tilts, and select exclusions to reflect client values and preferences.
Hubly
Hubly, a powerful workflow management platform that provides efficiency and visibility to registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth management firms, today announced a transformative expansion of its ecosystem. Leveraging a brand-new GraphQL API developed with accelerated engineering resources post-acquisition, Hubly partnered with the leading AI assistant Jump, as well as other industry providers GReminders and Pulse360 to turn meeting insights into real, executed client work.
These integrations represent a fundamental shift in how financial advisory practices operate: moving beyond isolated point solutions to a synchronized ecosystem where AI insights and events automatically trigger comprehensive operational workflows, simplifying work delegation and task routing, creating measurable gains in advisor productivity and client service capacity.
While artificial intelligence has rapidly changed how advisors capture conversations and client information, the challenge has been moving that data into the back office. Hubly’s new API solves this “last-mile” problem, turning static AI summaries into dynamic work that is automatically completed and/or assigned to the right team member at the right time.
Infosys
Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next generation digital services and consulting, and Cognition, the leading AI coding agent company and makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, today announced a strategic collaboration to scale Devin across global enterprises. The collaboration will deploy Devin across Infosys’ internal engineering ecosystem and client engagements worldwide. Infosys Topaz Fabric is a purpose-built agentic services suite – a multi-layer AI fabric that unifies infrastructure, models, data, applications, and workflows into a composable, agent-ready ecosystem. Combining the secure, modular architecture of Infosys Topaz Fabric with Cognition’s advanced agentic and autonomous engineering capabilities, the collaboration aims to help enterprises achieve accelerated time-to-market, enhanced developer productivity, and reduced modernization timelines.
After using Devin for the past six months and seeing significant improvement across both engineering quality and efficiency, Infosys will integrate Devin into its internal engineering teams, embed Devin within client delivery models, and enable deployment within customers’ engineering environments. To scale adoption, Infosys and Cognition are collaborating on shared engineering frameworks and enablement programs designed to bring the integrated capabilities of Infosys Topaz Fabric and Devin to engineers across industries.
Infosys Topaz Fabric and Devin will automate brown field engineering, tech debt reduction and modernization, while creating virtual engineers to resolve complex production and maintenance challenges. To ensure secure, enterprise-grade adoption, Infosys and Cognition will jointly develop industry-specific solutions, AI-native modernization blueprints, and scalable engineering frameworks, supported by co-innovation labs and enablement programs. Leading the first wave of joint client engagements, Infosys’ Financial Services practice is already using Devin to transform engineering delivery across banking, payments, capital markets, insurance, and wealth management.
Ledgible
Ledgible, the enterprise digital asset tax, accounting, and data-reporting platform, today announced a strategic partnership with Ownera, the global leader in the application layer for institutional tokenization. Through this partnership, Ledgible’s institutional reporting and compliance capabilities are now accessible on the Ownera SuperApps Platform, enabling financial institutions to scale digital asset activity with clarity, control, and regulatory confidence.
The collaboration addresses a fundamental requirement for institutional digital asset activity: standardized, auditable reporting that meets regulatory expectations. By joining Ownera’s SuperApps Platform, Ledgible reaches major financial institutions processing over $5 billion in monthly trading volume through a single technical integration.
Institutions operating across multiple blockchains, asset classes, and counterparties can now maintain consistent reporting and compliance workflows through Ledgible’s application, accessing real-time tax calculations, regulatory data pipelines, and audit-ready accounting records across their entire digital asset footprint.
martini.ai
martini.ai, a leader in AI-driven credit risk analysis, today announced a major update to its corporate credit research assistant, now allowing users to upload financial statements and receive instant, AI-generated credit insights directly within the chat. The new integration combines martini.ai’s Financials Agent with its AI-powered Research Assistant, creating the most comprehensive real-time platform for analyzing credit risk and financial health.
The integration transforms how professionals interact with corporate credit data. Users can upload 10-Ks, financial statements, or credit memos, and the assistant automatically extracts key metrics, including leverage, liquidity and profitability, before generating a detailed credit score and analysis. Through natural-language chat, users can then explore those insights, compare companies, or ask follow-up questions across sectors, trends and risk drivers.
Using martini.ai’s proprietary knowledge graph and graph attention networks, the assistant brings together real-time credit risk estimates for more than 3.5 million companies. These models pull in news signals, quantitative estimates, financial filings, and other documents, then weigh and connect that information to build a fuller understanding of a company’s credit profile. By combining all of these sources inside a single reasoning layer, the assistant can explain how each signal influences the final assessment and provide credit insights that are both current and easy to trace.
NDEX
NDEX Systems (“NDEX”), North America’s leading multi-custodian data utility and wealth-management platform today announced a new integration designed to simplify advisor workflows: an enhanced single sign-on (SSO) connection and a fully integrated client onboarding experience with Schwab Advisor Center’s digital onboarding workflow. The collaboration brings together Schwab’s industry-leading custody infrastructure with NDEX’s advanced data and workflow automation, giving wealth managers, RIAs, and family offices a more seamless, secure, and efficient way to manage client accounts.
Advisors can now move instantly and securely between NDEX and Schwab using a unified authentication flow. This removes redundant logins, enhances data security, and accelerates daily tasks across both platforms. An end-to-end onboarding enhancement builds on NDEX’s core mission: giving advisors clean, compliant, and actionable data across every custodian and asset type.
The enhanced SSO and onboarding integration expands the collaborative work already underway between Schwab and NDEX, reinforcing both companies’ commitment to innovation, operational efficiency, and advisor empowerment. Advisors using NDEX can now combine Schwab’s leading custodial services with NDEX’s advanced data engine, including multi-custodian normalization, reconciliation accuracy, and downstream integrations into CRMs, planning tools, and reporting platforms.
Papilio Collective
One Washington Financial (OWF), a wholly owned subsidiary of WSECU, and Papilio Collective today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership designed to strengthen collaboration between credit unions and fintechs to transform banking. The alliance means not only will OWF continue to invest in innovative fintechs serving credit unions, but also will provide essential early-stage fractional services to help them grow and thrive, through partner Papilio Collective’s human-centered financial services consulting expertise.
The partnership helps to bridge a gap that has historically existed between credit unions and fintechs, allowing both to benefit more. Credit unions are great laboratories for new offerings when working in collaboration with fintech companies. Funding alone only goes so far to get products and services to market quickly. Rather than simply providing capital, OWF and Papilio will deliver a suite of services to help overcome challenges often encountered in early-stage startups. Papilio Collective brings experienced advisors and proprietary technology that combines AI, data science, and human insight to deliver sharper member understanding through an emotional lens—creating a data-driven foundation for all fractional services offered.
Quility
Quility, an award-winning insurtech company transforming insurance distribution through technology and innovation, announced today the appointment of Eric Brickman as Chief Product Officer. Brickman will lead Quility’s product vision, strategy and execution as the company accelerates its investment in scalable, intelligent platforms that empower agents and drive distribution growth.
Brickman brings more than 30 years of experience building and scaling technology-enabled financial services and insurance solutions. He joins Quility from a nationally recognized TPA in the workplace retirement market, where he served as Chief Operating Officer, leading global operations, technology and business transformation, positioning the company as a leader in the workplace retirement plan marketplace.
Previously, Brickman was Chief Operating Officer at Candidly, where he scaled AI-powered debt management, savings and financial wellness solutions, helped drive record year-over-year growth, including a 10x increase in revenue, and established strategic partnerships with major financial institutions such as Vanguard, Empower, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, UBS, Lincoln Financial and TIAA, extending the company’s reach to more than 35 million Americans.
Rivvit
Rivvit, an AI-powered data management and analytics platform for asset managers, today announced the appointment of Bret Bange as Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer. A results-driven executive with more than 25 years of experience in data, financial services, and technology, Bange has a proven track record of building high-growth sales organizations and executing go-to-market strategies.
Bange will lead Rivvit’s global revenue strategy, including sales, partnerships, and customer growth, as the company scales to meet increasing demand from asset managers seeking a more trusted, flexible, and AI-ready data foundation.
Most recently, Bange served as Chief Revenue Officer for Delta Data, where he directed sales and relationship management teams to drive sustainable growth and market expansion. He was instrumental in building the company’s modern sales infrastructure and establishing its reputation as a market leader. Prior to Delta Data, he held senior positions at Goldensource, First Derivatives, SciVantage, and ADP.
SEI
SEI® (NASDAQ:SEIC) today announced the appointment of Jeff Benfield as Chief Product Officer. Reporting to Zach Womack, Chief Technology Officer, Benfield will lead SEI’s enterprise product strategy, development, and execution. In this new role, he will be responsible for overseeing the full product lifecycle—from ideation and creation to execution and optimization—and ensuring alignment with SEI’s business goals, growth opportunities, regulatory requirements, and the evolving needs of clients.
Benfield previously served as Head of Platform Strategy and Operations for SEI’s Asset Management business. In that role, he led the strategic vision, roadmap, and execution of the investment and technology suite of solutions for SEI’s independent advisor, institutional, and private wealth management businesses, with a focus on tools used by client-facing professionals at financial advisory firms.
Benfield first joined SEI in 2014 in a strategy, transformation, and product management role for the company’s global Private Banking business. He has more than 18 years of experience in the finandcial services industry, serving in a range of product management and program management roles over his career—including positions at Vanguard, BNY Mellon’s Pershing/Albridge, and Axa Advisors. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University, an MBA degree from Texas A&M University, a Certificate in Financial Planning from Wake Forest University and is a Certified Financial Planner™.
Wealth Management
WealthManagement.com, the leading media, events, and research platform serving financial advisors and wealth management professionals, this week announced its rebrand to Wealth Management, reflecting a modernized identity while maintaining its long-standing commitment to the industry.
The transition from WealthManagement.com to Wealth Management reflects the brand’s evolution beyond its digital-first media roots and reaffirms the commitment to be a trusted resource for financial advisors, RIAs, and wealth leaders, whether online, in print, or in person.
The change also coincides with the adoption of parent company Informa’s new unified visual identity, meant to reinforce the strength of the global One Informa brand.
Wealthbox
Wealthbox, the highest-rated CRM platform for financial advisors, today announced that Gradient Financial Group, a financial services enterprise headquartered in Minnesota, has selected Wealthbox Enterprise CRM and the Wealthbox AI Notetaker for rollout across its network of financial professionals and employees throughout its family of 13 companies. The implementation will begin immediately with 700 users, with plans to expand to more than 2,000 users over time.
Gradient Financial Group (Gradient) offers comprehensive services, including marketing, compliance, technology, and practice management, to independent financial professionals nationwide. Unlike many of its competitors, Gradient supports a wide variety of office structures and sizes within the financial services landscape, focusing on helping financial professionals meet their own unique goals. Wealthbox’s emphasis on simplicity, collaboration, and ease of adoption aligns perfectly with Gradient’s approach.
Gradient sought a CRM platform that met a wide array of needs while still offering low administrative overhead, an intuitive user experience, and seamless AI-powered capabilities out of the box.
