Do we have your attention now?
It was a huge week for financial advisor technology, we have the headlines below, but we need to talk in detail about our very first news item.
That headline, about the launch of an AI-powered tax tool for financial advisors from Altruist, helped wipe more than $20 billion in market capitalization from publicly wealth management stocks like LPL, Schwab and Raymond James in a single day.
For a moment, wealth management technology jumped into the greater financial news of the week, and writers everywhere were asking—and trying to answer–”what happened?”
From our perspective, Altruist’s news seems kind of innocuous. It’s not a new financial AI agent or model, it’s a new bit of functionality for Altruist’s existing AI platform, Hazel. The functionality itself is not all that new, there have been standalone tools in the market offering similar results to advisors for a number of years, like FP Alpha and Holistiplan. Yes, from Altruist’s description, it does sound like Hazel is more robust, but the things it does are definitely not entirely novel to those of us who pay attention to wealthtech and wealth management.
But on Tuesday, LPL and Raymond James each saw their market cap drop more than 8% after the Altruist announcement.
And this week, wealth management professionals and technology thought leaders continued to insist that technology is no threat to incumbent wealth managers, even with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence.
Investors clearly disagreed. The market declared, very loudly, that it sees AI as a threat to the wealth management as it stands today.
The talking-head arguments out of both industries this week were the rough equivalent of Lt. Frank Drebin shouting “Nothing to see here!” while smoke, sparks, fire and explosions rage behind him.
Perhaps it is different this time: Something in the technology-wealth management relationship has shifted, and financial markets may have picked up on it.
One shift, in our opinion, is that power and potential in the industry are no longer found in metrics like AUM and headcount, but in data—not just the amount of data an enterprise has accumulated, but the ease of use and access of that data.
Another shift is that transactional relationships, the kind people have with their financial services providers, are moving entirely onto technology. The pressure is now on the Raymond James and LPLs of the world to pivot from growing advisor headcount to moving towards more technologically oriented, AI-driven services.
Or more 8% down days are sure to come.
Pay attention—the investors are!
Let’s get to your headlines…
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Altruist
Altruist, the tech-forward wealth platform for independent advisors, today announced the launch of a new tax planning offering within Hazel, its transformative AI platform. The new capability helps advisors create fully personalized tax strategies for clients by reading and interpreting their 1040s, paystubs, account statements, meeting notes, emails, and custodial and CRM data, and applying deep tax logic to the analysis. All of this is done within minutes.
Hazel also delivers interactive scenario modeling, allowing advisors to explore “what-if” questions, such as the impact of a bonus, home sale, retirement transition, or family lifestyle changes, and see projected tax outcomes updated in real time. Advisors can export polished reports or walk clients through findings live, creating a more engaging and transparent planning experience.
Like all Hazel features, tax planning is governed by zero data retention agreements with Hazel’s AI model providers, meaning they are prohibited from retaining any data from Altruist or its customers. And this data is not used to train AI models. Hazel also operates on the same secure infrastructure as Altruist.
ARTDAI
ARTDAI announced the launch of its Collection Data Management System (CDMS) designed specifically for family offices, private collectors and collection managers. This platform eliminates the persistent operational challenge of collection documentation: multiple file types scattered across digital and physical archives, often spanning multiple properties and decades of acquisitions.
ARTDAI’s CDMS platform automatically ingests collection records from any format: appraisals, insurance schedules, purchase invoices, Excel files, PDFs, scanned paper records, photographs, and more. Proprietary AI technology identifies objects, structures data, flags duplicates, and builds a comprehensive, searchable database without manual data entry. Every subsequent transaction — purchases, updated appraisals, restoration work, loans to museums, relocations between properties — tracks automatically in one interface with complete audit trails.
The platform generates carrier-ready insurance schedules, estate planning reports for trustees and beneficiaries, cost basis documentation for tax attorneys, portfolio concentration analysis, geographic exposure reports, and loan collateral documentation on demand. Family offices gain immediate visibility into where high-value works are concentrated across properties, complete provenance tracking for multi-generational transitions, and the ability to respond to requests same-day rather than spending weeks reconstructing information.
BitGo
BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association, the digital asset infrastructure company and OCC-chartered federal trust bank and its affiliates (“BitGo”), and InvestiFi, the leading digital asset investing platform purpose-built for credit unions and community financial institutions, today announced a partnership designed to support secure digital asset solutions for financial institutions nationwide.
Through the partnership, InvestiFi will offer digital asset trading capabilities to participating banks and credit unions across all 50 states, supported by BitGo’s Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) infrastructure. InvestFi’s integration with its network of banks and credit unions now enables account holders to trade digital assets from their existing InvestiFi accounts. This institutional integration requires secure custody, scalable infrastructure, and regulatory alignment.
As a federally regulated digital asset trust bank supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), BitGo provides a compliant fiduciary framework. InvestiFi will also leverage BitGo’s institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure to support consistent availability across all 50 U.S. states, including complex jurisdictions such as New York, Texas, and Idaho.
Claro Advisors
Claro Advisors, a wealth management firm with approximately $1.5 billion in assets under management1, today announced the launch of its new AI-native wealth management platform to help financial advisors use technology to become more efficient and better serve clients.
The platform utilizes technology from NDVR, a wealth management technology company that Claro Advisors acquired in November 2025. With the acquisition of NDVR and its technology, Claro Advisors now offers a suite of proprietary AI tools designed to help financial advisors with CRM and practice management, portfolio management, and tools to manage day-to-day tasks – all through a single integrated system under one roof.
Claro Advisors was founded in 2012 by Belanger, a former financial advisor at Morgan Stanley. NDVR was founded in 2019 by Michael Simon, the former Chairman and CEO of LogMeIn, who led the company during its 2009 IPO on the Nasdaq. As part of Claro Advisors’ acquisition of NDVR, Simon joins Claro Advisors as Executive Chairman and Founder.
Dispatch
Dispatch, the universal data orchestration layer for wealth management, today announced development of Schwab Advisor Services’™ (“Schwab”) latest digital workflow technology integration to perform API-based account onboarding directly from Dispatch within minutes, removing the need to manually log in to Schwab Advisor Center® or wait multiple day processing time for DocuSign-based account onboarding.
With this new integration, Dispatch will become one of the first platforms to support end-to-end Schwab digital account opening natively within their own platform. The integration moves beyond pre-filling forms to achieve fully automated workflow execution. Without ever needing to leave Dispatch’s interface, advisors can open Schwab accounts in as little as a few minutes, a process that previously could take multiple days via traditional DocuSign-based processing. Account details of those newly opened accounts are also made available almost instantly, eliminating the need for firms to pivot between systems while speeding up their account funding times and time-to-revenue.
Dispatch has demonstrated that wealth management requires a universal data layer to streamline onboarding, transitions, account opening and data synchronization across advisor systems and custodians. Designed as foundational industry infrastructure rather than a standalone workflow tool, Dispatch supports larger wealth management firms in accelerating time-to-revenue and reducing operational risk through real-time data orchestration.
FinLink
Today, FinLink, the leading networking and growth platform for financial professionals, announced a strategic partnership with Rafa.ai, the leading AI transformation partner in Fintech, to rebuild its platform as an AI-native marketplace. This transformation is designed to generate measurable economic outcomes for every user on the network.
Most professional networks in financial services have become graveyards. Thousands of profiles, but almost zero transactions. Advisors sign up, scroll, and leave because the platform never delivers a single dollar of new business or valuable relationships.
The financial services networking category has followed a pattern that Andreessen Horowitz recently documented in its research on AI-era marketplaces: platforms acquire users but fail to generate sufficient value to retain them. Customer acquisition costs run high. Lifetime value stays low. The marketplace stalls.
FMG
FMG, the industry leader in marketing automation software for financial advisors and advisory firms, today announced the appointment of Matt Newman as Chief Revenue Officer. Newman will lead Sales, Customer Success and Revenue Operations, to align the system from a client’s first contact to conversation and through long-term growth.
FMG operates two go-to-market brands: FMG, serving Wealth Management firms and Agency Revolution, serving Insurance. As AI changes how clients discover advisors and agents, and how firms support advisor-level growth, enterprise firms now need to consolidate vendors, reduce point solution sprawl and implement unified systems that allow for compliant and secure growth with operational discipline.
Newman’s experience and operating discipline position the firm to further expand its relationships with mid-to-large RIAs, wirehouses, banks, insurance agencies, and regional and enterprise broker-dealers. He brings more than 30 years of global experience growing and transforming services and fintech businesses, with leadership roles spanning sales, customer success, product, and engineering.
iCapital
iCapital1, the global fintech company shaping the future of investing, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Passthrough, a leading provider of investor onboarding solutions and financial compliance infrastructure for GPs. The acquisition enhances iCapital’s support of the LP onboarding process by extending fundraising across both private wealth and institutional channels, giving GPs a unified, highly scalable platform to onboard and service investors of any type, size, or strategy. Together, iCapital and Passthrough support 1,200 GPs and product providers ranging from emerging and specialty managers to many of the largest asset management firms in the world.
In 2025, the institutional flows into alternative investments exceeded $1.30 trillion2. With the acquisition of Passthrough, iCapital expands its onboarding solution and financial compliance infrastructure to support GPs holistically, creating a scalable pathway to capture institutional demand while also tapping into the growing allocations from wealth managers—resulting in an elevated, consistent client experience.
Passthrough is a financial technology platform focused on modernizing investor identity, subscription documents, and KYC/AML compliance for private markets. Its software enables fund managers to automate investor onboarding, streamline subscription workflows, and securely manage sensitive identity data, supported by deep integrations across the private capital technology ecosystem. Passthrough’s capabilities complement iCapital’s Identity Solutions, and the acquisition enables iCapital to further enhance and tailor these tools to meet the specialized reporting, operating, and compliance needs of all LPs across the private markets landscape.
Jump
Jump, a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, today announced a strategic partnership with Wealth.com, the industry’s leading estate and tax planning platform. The integration allows advisors who use both platforms to seamlessly pull estate planning data from Wealth.com into Jump’s pre-meeting preparation experience and, over time, push structured estate-related updates from Jump back into Wealth.com.
The integration brings Wealth.com estate planning households, roles and document status into Jump’s pre-meeting experience alongside meeting history and other connected data. This gives advisors a more complete view of each client and makes it easier to identify gaps, missing roles or outdated documents. By reducing manual work around estate planning and meeting preparation, the integration builds on Jump’s mission to help advisors reclaim time for higher-value work – time that more than 90 percent of Jump users report allocating toward revenue-producing activities – and enables advisors to focus their client conversations where they matter most.
Jump’s Insights Report, released earlier this year, reveals that estate planning is discussed in roughly 45 percent of advisor-client meetings and is highly correlated with positive client sentiment. By making this information readily available during meeting preparation, the integration helps advisors engage more confidently in these conversations and deliver a stronger client experience.
Kestra Holdings
Kestra Holdings, a leading wealth management company serving independent financial professionals and firms nationwide, today announced the development of a new client portal experience for its affiliated advisors. Called the Kestra Investor Solution, the new performance reporting and client portal experience will come with elevated levels of technology and service support for advisors and their end-investor clients.
The Kestra Investor Solution is powered by Addepar, a global data and AI platform. The solution will build upon Addepar’s data aggregation, portfolio intelligence, and performance reporting expertise to achieve unparalleled integration with Kestra’s ecosystem.
The Kestra Investor Solution is currently in pilot with select Kestra-affiliated firms and is planned for a phased rollout across Kestra Financial, Kestra Private Wealth Services, and Bluespring Wealth Partners beginning in the fall of this year.
LatticeFlow AI
Switzerland has marked a new milestone in how AI is governed and deployed in financial services. In a first-of-its-kind joint initiative, Swiss-based companies LatticeFlow AI and Unique AI have delivered a FINMA-aligned technical blueprint that translates the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) principles into concrete technical assessments, providing banks with audit-ready evidence to evaluate, deploy and continuously oversee AI systems across banking-specific use cases, such as Know Your Customer (KYC), chatbot assistants, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML).
The assessment, available on this page, was conducted by LatticeFlow AI on the Investment Insights Agent, an agentic AI solution developed by Swiss-founded fintech Unique AI. The solution is designed to personalize investment recommendations and overall investment rationales for relationship managers and client advisors, enabling faster, more informed decision-making.
By mapping FINMA’s guidance (FINMA guidance 08/2024) to measurable technical controls (including testing, monitoring, explainability, and model robustness), the blueprint shows how banks can move from policy and abstract principles to audit-ready evidence.
Model ML
Model ML today announced the acquisition of Captide, the leading financial data layer that turns complex global corporate filings and disclosures into LLM-ready documents and data for AI agents.
The acquisition, just weeks after the fintech raised $75m in funding from leading US and UK investors, expands Model ML’s AI workflow builder, enabling its AI agents to reliably retrieve, reason over, and cite global filings. Earlier in 2025, Model ML bought Flippr which added automated PowerPoint generation and verification agents to the platform.
Founded in 2024 by Maurits Brinkman and Miquel Trafí Ruiz, Captide’s API takes SEC filings, earnings calls and more and structures them in a way AI models can easily and accurately understand at scale. Its platform already spans 2.5 million+ documents and supports 1 billion embeddings.
StraightLine Group
StraightLine Group LLC (StraightLine), an independent SEC Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and financial planning firm, today announced it is integrating financial wellness education with its traditional financial planning and investment advisory services. StraightLine has built this offering in collaboration with Financial Wellness Labs, Inc., the parent company of Questis, an evidence-based financial wellness platform that combines technology with access to “Certified Financial Coaches”.
While StraightLine works with employees across all types of retirement plans, 403(b) plans have become one of the firm’s core areas of expertise. The firm has a long history of serving faculty and staff at colleges, universities, and nonprofit institutions, and regularly works with plans administered by leading providers in the 403(b) space, including both TIAA and Fidelity.
Bisaro recently shared similar insights in an interview with Barron’s Advisor, where he discussed StraightLine’s niche serving retirement plan participants in higher education. The story highlighted the firm’s commitment to providing advice where it matters most – within the retirement plan itself. For many employees, especially in higher education, the workplace retirement plan represents their largest financial asset, yet it is often the area where they receive the least personal guidance.
Uptiq
Uptiq, the AI platform purpose-built for financial services, today announced it has raised $25 million in Series B funding from a group of leading strategic and financial investors across banking, fintech, and enterprise software. The round was led by Curql, with participation from Silverton Partners, 645 Ventures, Broadridge, Green Visor Capital, Live Oak Ventures, First Capital, Epic Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Evolution VC.
While financial institutions are eager to adopt AI, most struggle to move beyond pilots due to regulatory complexity, fragmented systems, and the lack of domain-ready solutions. Uptiq was built to solve this problem. Unlike horizontal AI platforms, Uptiq delivers pre-packaged, production-ready AI applications and digital workers designed specifically for financial services. These solutions deploy quickly, integrate with existing core systems, and meet enterprise-grade compliance requirements from day one.
All Uptiq solutions are powered by Qore, the company’s AI orchestration platform that combines document intelligence, a deep library of financial skills, multi-agent workflows, and secure integrations into a single system. With Qore, developers can build financial AI applications using natural language prompts and pre-built financial capabilities, without assembling fragmented AI stacks or rebuilding compliance layers from scratch. Qore handles document processing, financial reasoning, permissions, auditability, and integration with core systems out of the box.
