Happy New Year and welcome to the first Advisor Tech Talk of 2026!
We don’t know about you, but we’re a good five days into writing the wrong year on checks, invoices and anything else that requires a dated signature, and it will probably be another week or two before we’re reliably writing 2026.
Now, we did take a rare two-week break from reporting your financial advisor technology news headlines and, well, we didn’t miss much from the looks of things, particularly in wealthtech.
There was a bit of wealth management M&A activity towards the end of the year, with deals announced by United Capital and Genesis Wealth, and Wealth Enhancement Group enjoying a particularly strong years-end. There were also a few hires and promotions announced.
On the technology side of things, there were a few overseas wealth management-adjacent fintech announcements. Interactive Brokers launched an upgraded mobile trading app.
But overall, not much was happening while we were away… and 2026 isn’t exactly starting out with a bang on the wealthtech front. We’re chalking it up to the holiday doldrums, since our sample period is Dec. 22, 2025 through the early morning hours of Jan. 5, 2026.
Around the web, we do have a couple of items worth noting. T3 (Technology Tools for Today) announced that their next conference will include an “AI University,” and we can’t help feeling the highest form of flattered by their announcement – Joel Bruckenstein and company always do a wonderful job. Also, Fortune has an interview with Vanguard CIO Nitin Tandon about that company’s involvement in AI-driven financial services, including wealth management (but it’s behind a paywall if you want to read it).
And that won’t be the last we’re going to hear about AI and wealth management this year by a long shot, but we’re not going to try to make a ho-hum two weeks of wealthtech anything more than what it was.
So here are your headlines, all three of them!
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Envestnet
Envestnet, a leading provider of Adaptive WealthTech for financial advisors, today announced the rollout of its fourth-quarter platform technology updates for the Envestnet | Tamarac platform, delivering meaningful improvements designed to help RIAs scale more efficiently, reduce operational risk, and deliver a more consistent client experience across growing books of business.
As RIAs face rising client expectations, margin constraints, and increasing regulatory complexity, the Q4 Tamarac release is squarely focused on removing friction from daily workflows: particularly across trading, reporting, data management, and security, while preserving the flexibility RIAs need to run differentiated practices.
A central enhancement in the quarter is the modernized Trade Review experience, built for RIAs managing increasingly complex portfolios across hundreds or thousands of accounts. The redesigned page delivers faster processing, a compact default view that surfaces more data at once, enhanced column filtering, and support for up to 1,000 accounts per page, enabling advisors and operations teams to review and implement strategies across their entire book with significantly less friction.
Orion Digital
Mogo Inc. (NASDAQ: MOGO; TSX: MOGO) today announced its corporate name change to Orion Digital Corp. (“Orion Digital”), marking the company’s evolution into a founder-led, disciplined, multi-engine digital finance platform operating across wealth, payments, and digital assets. The Company’s common shares are expected to begin trading under the new ticker symbol ORIO on Nasdaq and TSX on January 2, 2026.
Orion Digital is built on a foundation of recurring platform revenues, global infrastructure with embedded operating leverage, and a capital framework focused on disciplined capital allocation. It operates across three integrated engines: Intelligent Investing – a next-generation behavioral-edge wealth platform; Carta Worldwide – global payments infrastructure powering billions in annual processing; and Bitcoin Treasury – a long-duration digital asset reserve with early-mover credibility.
Intelligent Investing builds durable long-term investing practices through behavioral design, education, and automation. In a retail landscape dominated by speculation, prediction markets, and dopamine-driven trading apps, where research suggests many retail investors underperform market returns, Intelligent Investing is designed to help investors compound over time rather than react to short-term noise.
Schwab
The Charles Schwab Corporation (Schwab) today announced it will match the U.S. government’s one-time $1,000 contribution to eligible newborn children of Schwab’s U.S. employees, providing an additional $1,000 per eligible child.
The children’s saving account program, known as “Trump Accounts,” was signed into law by President Trump and provides a $1,000 pilot contribution from the U.S. Treasury into a tax-advantaged account for eligible children born in the U.S. between 2025 and 2028. The program is designed to help build the long-term financial security for millions of children by encouraging saving and investing from day one.
Schwab’s contribution reflects its longstanding mission to champion clients’ financial goals with integrity and to promote financial literacy and participation in the markets. A key element of getting invested at a young age is increasing financial literacy and providing greater access to educational resources on the fundamentals of saving and investing. Through programs like Moneywise America and partnerships with schools and nonprofits, Schwab is committed to providing trusted financial education to empower the next generation to achieve their financial goals.
