Most financial advisors need to periodically earn continuing education (CE) credits to keep their professional marks and certifications current. For most designations, earning CE credits doesn’t really mean that advisors actually need to receive education, however.
But maybe they should.
Welcome to another full week of wealth management technology headlines, bolstered by a bumper crop of announcements out of Orion’s Ascent conference last week, another conference hosted by a fintech or wealthtech firm that seems to be growing and thriving.
Speaking of conferences, as you may know, we’ve cast a critical eye on the business of financial services industry conferences before in our Advisor Tech Talk columns, and we’d like to do so again here, on the topic of always-needed continuing education credits. Financial advisors, of course, have many ways to earn their CE credits, including reading certain articles in industry magazines and websites and answering CE exam questions, attending seminars or webinars, self-study programs, and, of course, attending certain conference sessions.
Professional organizations generally require attendees and marks holders to prove some sort of mastery of the material in magazine articles and self-study programs by answering exam questions.
But for the most part, those requirements do not exist for conference sessions. While professional organizations do in some way review and approve the content within sessions as being worthy of CE credit (more on that later), advisors at financial conferences merely have to attend a session to earn their credits. In fact, many conferences measure attendance at sessions that offer CE credits via RFID tags in attendees’ lanyards.
We don’t know how many of our readers have been to industry conferences, but attendee behavior is all over the map. Some of us who go to conferences really are there for the content and the networking possibilities and maximize our time going to sessions and meeting people. Others are more interested in the open bar during cocktail hour and the nightlife. That’s okay, too, there’s no reason business travel shouldn’t involve some leisure and pleasure. Let’s just agree that not everyone at industry conferences is there to learn and grow professionally.
However, the behavior inside conference sessions is similarly all over the place. Some attendees are engaged with presenters and their content, attentively taking notes and asking questions. Others are playing on their smart phones or having side conversations.
A simple sign-in sheet or scan on an RFID tag doesn’t tell us, or a credentialing organization, anything about whether financial advisors actually receive continuing education or not. Furthermore, using RFID tags and signups doesn’t tell us whether the advisors even attend the session in the first place—we have personally witnessed advisors carrying each others’ lanyards into sessions and signing each other in for CE credits.
And that doesn’t get us into the content, which wealth management and adjacent professional organizations only ever seem to lightly review. We’ve seen blatant sales pitches for ETFs, private BDOs and REITs, masquerading as educational content, offer CE credit at conferences that were supposedly carefully curated.
Maybe, if wealth management organizations really want to upstand the financial advice profession, they should stop permitting financial conferences, or at least conferences hosted and curated businesses and organizations outside their direct control, offer CE credits to their members. Or, at least, they should spend more time vetting proposed content, and/or require some form of exam questions to be submitted and answered for conference sessions to qualify for credit.
Let’s get to your headlines…
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AdvisorEngine
AdvisorEngine®, a leading provider of wealth management technology solutions, recently unveiled its reimagined Client Portal, developed with human-centered design principles to deliver the sophisticated, intuitive client experience that today’s independent advisory firms need.
The release represents AdvisorEngine’s strategic commitment to design thinking as a core differentiator in wealth management technology. AdvisorEngine recognizes that exceptional user experience is a strategic imperative for firms seeking to attract advisors and clients of all generations, reduce service friction and demonstrate their commitment to innovation.
Today’s wealth management clients expect a modern, robust, engaging experience with their financial information wherever they are. The Client Portal provides a single, unified platform where clients of Investment Advisors can review portfolio performance, track progress toward financial goals and access and share important documents, all from their smartphones or desktops.
Altruist
Altruist, the tech-forward wealth platform for independent advisors, announced that Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management (Gerber Kawasaki), a Santa Monica-based registered investment advisor managing more than $4 billion in client assets, has selected Altruist as a custodial partner.
Gerber Kawasaki chose Altruist for its enterprise-ready infrastructure, self-clearing custodial model, fractional share trading capabilities, and unified platform for account opening, trading, portfolio management, billing, and reporting.
Gerber Kawasaki will also use Hazel, Altruist’s AI platform, to deliver high-impact services, such as tax planning, to more clients.
Altruist
Sowell Management (Sowell), a leading Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) serving financial advisors and their clients nationwide, today announced that it has partnered with Altruist to offer custodial services and support to the firm’s advisors. Through the new enterprise partnership, Sowell’s advisors will also have access to Hazel, Altruist’s AI platform that was built to help advisors expand their businesses while deepening client relationships and seeking better overall outcomes.
Altruist is a tech-forward wealth management platform focused on delivering better results for independent registered investment advisors (RIAs). Hazel is the AI platform built by Altruist to help unify and automate a firm’s knowledge from conversations, emails, documents, CRM data and calendars, with market, regulatory and custodial insights. Hazel can help create personalized tax plans, capture and summarize discussions, draft follow-ups, answer questions instantly, and prioritize tasks.
Partnering with Altruist is the latest step Sowell is taking to enhance its technology offering and continue integrating AI responsibly into the firm’s tech stack. Leveraging advanced capabilities will benefit the entire firm and enable small- to mid-sized advisors throughout Sowell to compete on a level playing field with larger practices.
Apex Fintech Solutions
Apex Fintech Solutions Inc. (“Apex”), an innovation launchpad for the global investing ecosystem, today announced its collaboration with Coinbase, through Coinbase Capital Markets Corp., to power the stock trading capabilities of their groundbreaking “Everything Exchange” platform. Through Apex’s comprehensive clearing, custody, and execution services for equities, Coinbase users can now trade leading stocks and ETFs alongside their cryptocurrency holdings, all in a single, unified experience.
This collaboration exemplifies Apex’s mission to help fintech innovators expand their platforms to include a broad array of asset classes with the digital, cloud-native investing experiences that crypto customers expect. With Apex’s advanced infrastructure, Coinbase now offers equities, ETFs, and other traditional securities alongside digital assets.
The integration leverages Apex’s cloud-native AscendOS™ platform, designed to handle the demands of modern investors who cut their teeth on crypto. The platform’s intelligent automations, straight-through processing, and flexible APIs enable Coinbase to deliver the real-time, seamless experience their users expect when expanding beyond digital assets. A key feature of this integration allows users to leverage the value of their entire Coinbase relationship—including dollars, crypto, and other assets—to purchase securities in real-time, eliminating the traditional waiting periods for fund transfers.
april
april, the embedded, AI tax platform, today announced the launch of a new integrated tax platform built specifically for high-integrity wealth management and advisory firms. The first-of-its-kind platform gives financial advisors a real-time view into client tax workflows, documents and insights while enabling a more efficient filing process—turning tax planning and filing into a consistent source of growth opportunities across the firm.
The new offering is built to provide advisor visibility and practice management capabilities year-round, alongside tax preparation during filing season.
The integrated tax platform is built atop april’s nationwide tax coverage and trusted AI-powered tax engine, and originally created to help financial advisors stay in the loop while offering clients a fully managed, hands-off tax filing experience in which april’s U.S.-based, credentialed tax professionals prepare and file the return.
Avantos
The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America® (Guardian) today announced a strategic partnership with Avantos, an AI-native operating system built to modernize how financial institutions onboard and service clients.
With Avantos’ platform, Guardian’s financial advisors will soon be able to leverage next-generation technology to deepen client relationships and better support their holistic financial well-being. Over time, Guardian’s financial advisors will have access to additional Avantos-powered capabilities, with AI tools designed to help advisors support all facets of clients’ investment and protection needs.
In addition to using the platform for its advisors, Guardian is also a strategic insurance partner for Avantos and has made an investment in the company. Guardian’s early-stage investment in Avantos underscores its confidence in the transformative potential of AI and its commitment to leveraging the technology to modernize its platforms and further enhance its wealth management capabilities.
BlackRock
BlackRock has appointed Citi Investor Services to provide select middle office functions for $4.0 trillion in U.S. domiciled iShares ETFs on the Aladdin platform.
Expanding on the long-standing partnership between BlackRock and Citi, this integrated operating model streamlines the lifecycle of an ETF order, offering enhanced transparency into basket composition, order status, and settlement.
This latest asset servicing collaboration between BlackRock and Citi follows from a separate mandate in 2021 when BlackRock appointed Citi as an additional post-trade service provider for U.S. domiciled iShares ETFs. As part of the 2021 mandate, Citi provides custodial, fund administration, and transfer agency services to these ETFs.
Bloom
Benzinga, a leading provider of real-time financial data and market intelligence, today announced a new relationship with Bloom, a financial education and investing platform focused on long-term wealth building and institutional transparency. Through this collaboration, Bloom integrates Benzinga’s educational market intelligence directly into its app, giving users professional-level context around market activity while reinforcing an education-first approach to investing.
Bloom now offers key Benzinga tools within its platform, including Benzinga Why Is It Moving, which delivers real-time explanations behind stock and market price movements, and the Benzinga Earnings Calendar, which helps users learn and understand company reporting, as well as the impact of KPIs on stock price. Together, these data sets add critical context to Bloom’s institutional copy trading experience, helping users understand why markets move and not just what is happening.
Bloom’s approach stands apart by emphasizing long-term investing over short-term trading behavior. Rather than encouraging speculation, the platform is designed to help users learn how professional investors think, allocate capital, and manage risk over extended time horizons. Historically, institutional investors and professional fund managers have outperformed broader markets through discipline, diversification, and structured portfolio management. These strategies are rarely visible to individual investors, particularly those just starting out.
Carta
Carta, the world’s first fully interconnected system for private capital, today announced the launch of the Carta 401(k). The new offering brings institutional-grade retirement guidance and oversight from Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Consulting Solutions business and modern recordkeeping technology from Vestwell into the Carta ecosystem, providing a more seamless, intuitive retirement solution for private companies and their employees.
For start-up companies, attracting and retaining top talent requires benefits that go beyond salary and equity. However, traditional retirement plans are often disconnected from a company’s broader financial picture. The Carta 401(k) bridges that gap, allowing founders and employees to manage their ownership and retirement savings by combining Morgan Stanley’s trusted investment expertise with a digital-first platform.
The partnership further expands Carta’s suite of services for private companies. In the last year, Carta announced two successive agreements with Morgan Stanley—as its exclusive equity compensation provider for late-stage private companies going public and as the preferred wealth manager to help private-company founders, executives, and employees prepare for liquidity events. This deepens Carta’s end-to-end IPO Advisory for private companies going public and builds on recent partnerships in IPO support and wealth management, cementing its role as the operating system for private company growth.
Docupace
Wealth management firms are operating in one of the most demanding regulatory environments in the industry’s history. Compliance obligations are multiplying. Technology costs are compressing margins. And artificial intelligence is beginning to transform how firms supervise risk, rewarding those with deep, structured data and exposing the limits of fragmented point solutions. Today, Docupace takes a decisive step toward solving all three challenges at once.
Docupace, a leading provider of AI-enabled back-office and compliance software for wealth management firms, today announced the acquisition of InvestEdge, the trusted provider of regulatory compliance software for bank trust departments, broker-dealers, and registered investment advisors (RIAs). To lead the expanded organization into its next era, Docupace has appointed Brian Filanowski as Chief Executive Officer, effective today.
The strategic acquisition of InvestEdge and the ComplianceEdge platform significantly expands Docupace’s compliance solution portfolio and strengthens the company’s position as the industry’s most experienced provider of wealth management operations and compliance technology. Docupace will now offer one of the industry’s most comprehensive technology platforms to serve financial institutions across the full spectrum of mission-critical requirements — spanning back-office automation, advisor workflows, client onboarding, and enterprise-grade compliance delivered through a growing portfolio of complementary capabilities.
DriveWealth
DriveWealth, a global B2B Brokerage-as-a-Service platform designed to make investing easier for partners and their customers, and Kalshi, the world’s largest prediction market, today announced partnership plans. Through this collaboration, DriveWealth aims to integrate Kalshi’s event contracts into its API-first brokerage platform, enabling DriveWealth’s partners to offer event-driven markets alongside equities, ETFs, and other traditional asset classes within a unified investing experience.
As retail and digital-first investors increasingly seek new ways to express macro views and manage risk, prediction markets are emerging as a complementary and increasingly in-demand asset class. This collaboration plans to combine DriveWealth’s global distribution network and scalable brokerage infrastructure with Kalshi’s leadership in prediction markets to broaden access in a compliant, seamless manner.
Kalshi’s exchange allows users to trade on the outcome of real-world events such as elections, economic indicators, weather, sports, and more in a fully regulated environment. The platform has quickly achieved mainstream success, now attracting over $100b in annualized volume.
Equity Services, Inc.
Equity Services, Inc. (ESI), an independent broker-dealer and registered investment adviser, today announced the successful launch of Fidelity Managed Account Exchange® (FMAX) as the new technology foundation for its proprietary advisory platform, ESI Illuminations.
Completed in collaboration with Fidelity, the conversion of the advisory platform represents one of the most significant platform transformations in ESI’s history and underscores the firm’s continued investment in technology, advisory capabilities, advisor support and enhanced client value.
The launch of FMAX enhances the capabilities of the Illuminations platform by delivering a modern managed accounts framework, expanded investment flexibility, and deeper integration with Fidelity’s Wealthscape℠ ecosystem. The FMAX platform supports a wide range of advisory use cases, from turnkey model portfolios to highly customized managed account solutions.
GReminders
GReminders, a leading end-to-end meeting and automation management platform for financial advisors, today announced a major expansion of its long-standing integration with Orion’s Redtail CRM. The enhanced integration brings GReminders AI-powered meeting assistant technology directly inside the Redtail platform, embedding notetaking, pre-meeting intelligence and scheduling natively within advisors’ primary CRM workflow.
Redtail is GReminders’ most widely used CRM integration, with more than 2,500 active advisors. The enhancement represents a significant evolution of the existing partnership. By integrating directly into Redtail, advisors can manage the entire meeting lifecycle—from preparation to follow‑up—without ever leaving the Redtail interface. Together, GReminders and Redtail are providing a complete meeting lifecycle solution within a single platform for financial advisors.
Once enabled, a new GReminders meeting tab appears, giving advisors real‑time access to AI-generated summaries, scheduling activity and booking management inside each client record.
Hamachi.ai
Hamachi.ai (“Hamachi”), a regulatory-first, AI-powered Wealth Intelligence Platform built for investment advisors and asset managers, today announced a new integration with Orion’s Redtail Technology (“Redtail”). The integration helps financial advisors safely turn CRM data into actionable insights and compliant client communications within their existing workflows.
Through the integration, advisors using Redtail gain access to Hamachi’s centralized intelligence hub that transforms CRM data into artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted email drafting, household briefs, daily summaries and workflow intelligence informed by household, contact, activity, event and financial account data stored in the CRM. Redtail remains the system of record, while Hamachi applies firm-specific policies, permissions and controls to ensure outputs align with SEC and FINRA requirements and protect personally identifiable information (PII).
As regulatory expectations increase and personalization becomes more central to the advisor-client relationship, firms are seeking AI solutions that enhance productivity without introducing additional steps or compliance risk. Unlike traditional AI tools that rely on unstructured prompts or manual data entry, Hamachi uses Redtail data as structured context rather than raw prompt input. This approach allows advisors to benefit from AI-driven efficiency while preserving supervision, audit readiness and firm-defined guardrails around data use.
Intellebox.ai
Intellebox.ai, the cutting-edge AI-powered platform revolutionizing wealth management, today proudly announced the appointment of four industry luminaries to its Advisory Board: Michael Gervais, Ph.D., Jonathan Zhukovsky, Matt Falk, and Lawrence McDonald. This powerhouse group brings unparalleled expertise in high-performance psychology, institutional technology architecture, advanced AI and quantitative systems, and macro risk analysis—positioning Intellebox.ai to accelerate innovation and dominate the next era of intelligent advisory solutions.
As Intellebox.ai surges ahead with its commercial rollout—already live with leading firms and rapidly gaining momentum across wealth managers, RIAs, hedge funds, research organizations, and broker-dealers—these strategic additions couldn’t come at a more pivotal moment. The platform is transforming how advisory firms operate by supercharging client engagement, streamlining internal workflows, and elevating compliance oversight through agentic AI that delivers real-time, personalized insights without sacrificing the human touch.
The Advisory Board will play a crucial role in shaping Intellebox.ai’s product strategy, technical architecture, and market positioning, ensuring the platform remains at the forefront of AI-driven wealth management.
iPipeline
iPipeline®, a leading provider of digital solutions for the life insurance and wealth management industries, today announced the appointment of Loren Brockhouse as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Mike James as Executive Vice President (EVP), Professional Services, further strengthening the company’s Executive Leadership Team. Both leaders will report directly to iPipeline CEO Pat O’Donnell.
CRO Loren Brockhouse will lead iPipeline’s North American go-to-market strategy, overseeing sales, marketing, and revenue operations. He will also oversee customer experience – including support and customer success – with a focus on driving scalable growth and exceptional customer experiences across carriers, distributors, agents/advisors, and consumers.
iPipeline has appointed Mike James to the role of EVP of Professional Services, in which James will lead the continued transformation of iPipeline’s Professional Services offering, focusing on operational excellence, scalable delivery models, and long-term value creation for clients worldwide.
Musaffa
Musaffa, a leading fintech platform dedicated to Shariah-compliant investment research and Islamic Finance Education, recently announced the launch of its Global Halal Investment Platform. This new platform provides 600,000+ Muslim investors across 200+ countries with expanded access to US capital markets via regulated and scalable trading and investment infrastructure while embedding Shariah compliance directly into the investing experience. The launch is powered by Alpaca, a global leader in brokerage infrastructure APIs, providing access to options, stocks, ETFs, and fixed income.
Muslim investors continue to face significant barriers when attempting to access global markets, including fragmented tools, limited access, or a lack of clear regulatory oversight. The absence of a unified system can lead to classification inconsistencies, where a stock may lose its Shariah-compliant status without the investor’s immediate knowledge, putting the trust of the end-user at risk.
At the same time, demand for Shariah-compliant investing is increasing, with global Islamic finance assets projected to reach $9.7 trillion USD by 2029, marking an average annual growth rate of 10%. Islamic fintech now represents 3% of total assets, signaling opportunities for digital platforms to integrate faith-aligned financial services alongside modern trading practices.
Orion
At its annual Ascent conference, Orion today announced plans for a significant advancement in its Unified Managed Household (UMH) strategy, which will allow advisors to manage client assets across the full household. This expanded UMH service, launching in 2026, will help advisors grow and scale their businesses efficiently while delivering deeply personalized, household-level guidance for clients.
UMH is being delivered through a phased roadmap, and Orion is nearing completion on a critical piece: its Unified Managed Account (UMA) tax overlay technology, which will serve as a foundation for household-level management. When UMH is available later this year, this advancement of Household Management and tax-efficient trading will represent a meaningful expansion of Orion’s existing household-level portfolio management and tax-aware capabilities.
The enhanced UMH architecture, inclusive of Orion’s own proprietary optimization technology, will extend the power of Orion’s current Custom Indexing solution and trading tools, expanding into broader capabilities to scale across accounts and registrations within a household for tax overlay, cash and risk management, as well as values-based investment solutions.
Orion
Orion today announced a major milestone in its AI platform strategy at Ascent 2026: the enterprise version of Orion Denali AI is now live, with broader availability planned later this year to bring the same integrated AI experience to advisors and firms of all sizes. Orion also went live with two new AI Assistants – Report Assistant and Query Studio. Today’s news builds on Orion’s continued industry leadership and AI momentum, including an announcement earlier this week that it is expanding its ongoing collaboration with Anthropic.
Denali AI brings firm-approved, permissioned data together inside Orion – across portfolio management, planning, CRM, reporting, and an extensive data network – so teams can ask one question and get a clear answer in the flow of work. It’s also available as a mobile and tablet app, so advisors can get the same answers and context wherever they work. Because it’s built into Orion’s connected wealthtech platform, Denali AI delivers broader context than standalone AI tools that only see part of an advisor’s tech stack with a consistent AI experience across workflows. By turning trusted data into ready-to-use insights and first drafts, Denali AI helps firms move faster, personalize at scale, and stay in control with reviewable outputs and human oversight.
New insights from Orion’s 2026 Advisor Wealthtech Survey underscore the urgency. Only one in ten advisors is utilizing more advanced AI capabilities (agentic tools or cross-system AI integration), and nearly one-quarter (23%) report having no AI tools in place today. Meanwhile, advisors view AI and automation tools as the number one force multiplier for their firm’s growth and success, and 60% of advisors say using such tools to drive efficiency and personalization is a top priority for 2026.
Orion
Orion announced today it is expanding its ongoing collaboration with Anthropic following Anthropic’s introduction of new financial services plug-ins for the wealth management industry.
Orion has been working with Anthropic’s platform as part of its broader AI strategy, and the companies are collaborating on how these newly announced capabilities will be incorporated into future Orion innovation to deliver even more value to advisors.
Orion’s approach is advisor-first: AI that’s ready-made for advisors, enhances an advisor’s expertise, and helps strengthen client relationships through more personalized insights—while keeping governance, security, and trust at the center. Orion has built a secure, holistic, enterprise-grade data environment and is developing agents designed specifically for the realities of an advisor’s practice—helping advisors move faster, communicate more clearly, and focus more time on clients.
Phemex
Phemex, a user-first crypto exchange, unveiled the AI Bot, a tactical milestone of the Phemex AI-Native Revolution, following its landmark transition into an AI-native organization. This launch evolves artificial intelligence from a strategic vision into a high-performance “Intelligent Trading Partner,” shifting the industry paradigm from emotional manual execution to a disciplined “Human + AI Collaboration” model for its 10 million users worldwide.
Earlier this year, Phemex introduced its AI-Native Initiative, committing to integrate artificial intelligence across internal operations and external product architecture. The launch of AI Bot serves as a live demonstration of that strategy in practice, moving beyond conceptual transformation into user-facing applications.
Utilizing advanced machine learning to analyze millions of data points in real-time, the Phemex AI Bot automates complex quantitative strategies across Futures Grid, Spot Grid, and Martingale systems. Engineered with a “Risk-Aware Intelligence” , the engine prioritizes capital preservation by dynamically adjusting leverage and parameters based on historical volatility. This ensures that intelligence remains a tool for resilience, allowing traders to gain significant leverage from AI rather than losing their competitive edge to it.
QuantumStreet AI
QuantumStreet AI, a leading fintech specialized in building AI-powered indexes and forecasting models for institutional investors with more than $7.5 billion deployed globally, today announced the appointment of Marc Zieger as executive vice president of investment solutions.
Zieger co-founded Scientific Beta, the smart beta index provider established by EDHEC-Risk Institute, and served as its head of North America from 2013 to 2022. Across nearly a decade, he helped build the business from launch to more than $60 billion in assets tracking its indexes across 60-plus institutional clients. Singapore Exchange acquired a majority stake in Scientific Beta in 2020 for approximately $250 million.
He joins QuantumStreet AI from Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking, where he was director of quantitative investment solutions. His career spans more than 25 years across asset management and investment banking, with previous roles at BlackRock, Morningstar, Munich Re and Morgan Stanley.
SEI
Pravati Capital, one of the oldest litigation finance firms in the U.S., announced a strategic partnership with SEI® (NASDAQ: SEIC) to offer litigation finance as an alternative investment opportunity through SEI Access™, an enhanced, end-to-end alternatives platform and product marketplace designed for registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth managers.
By joining SEI’s platform, Pravati’s litigation finance strategies will be available to financial advisors through a more efficient, integrated experience — enabling them to evaluate, access and manage exposure to alternative investments. The collaboration aligns with Pravati’s mission to modernize access to litigation finance while supporting advisors seeking differentiated alternatives beyond traditional assets tied to broader market performance.
The global litigation funding investment market was valued at more than $20 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to more than $50 billion by 2036, according to a January report by Research Nester. Pravati bridges private capital and the justice system by providing funding to support meritorious legal claims, creating an alternative investment opportunity designed to help investors pursue diversification and risk mitigation.
Sherpas
Sherpas today announced the close of its $3.2 million seed funding round, led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with major participation from AUA Private Equity Capital, GoHub Ventures, as well as strategic investors and advisory firms from across the wealth management industry. The round comes as advisory firms increasingly adopt AI to modernize how financial advice is analyzed, produced, and delivered.
Wealth management is entering a structural shift. Client expectations are rising, planning complexity continues to grow, and advisors face mounting pressure to deliver faster, more personalized recommendations. Yet much of the industry still relies on manual analysis, numerous fragmented tools and point solutions, and time-intensive plan preparation.
Sherpas was built to change that operating model. Rather than functioning as another planning application layered onto legacy systems, Sherpas serves as an AI-native operating layer for financial advice. From initial investor intake through scenario modeling and recommendation drafting, the platform automates the analytical burden, producing structured, explainable insights in minutes rather than days.
Snappy Kraken
The Financial Planning Association® (FPA®), the leading membership organization and trade association for CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professionals, today announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Snappy Kraken to rebuild and relaunch FPA PlannerSearch as a measurable, high-trust new client lead engine. For over 20 years, FPA PlannerSearch has helped consumers connect with CFP® professionals. With this new partnership, it evolves from a directory into a data-driven platform that matches consumers with financial planners based on their needs, expertise, and shared values.
Snappy Kraken will power lead capture, scoring, routing, and automated nurturing, converting search activity into structured client acquisition workflows. It will also integrate new FPA PlannerSearch features into FPA member websites, including planner-published thought leadership and educational content designed to increase AI visibility in search and improve website lead-capture metrics.
As part of this multi-year partnership, Snappy Kraken will serve as a Feature Partner of FPA and integrate into the Association’s broader ecosystem, including national events and member programs, and will provide exclusive discounts and enhanced services to FPA members. Development is already underway, with a go-to-market launch planned for late summer, and all current FPA PlannerSearch members will transition automatically to the new platform once it goes live. Together, FPA and Snappy Kraken aim to redefine how consumers discover financial planners in an AI-driven world, anchoring the experience in trust, data integrity, and measurable results.
TradeStation
TradeStation Securities, Inc. (“TradeStation”), an award-winning†, self-clearing online brokerage firm for trading stocks, options, futures, and futures options, and Capitalize Money, Inc. (“Capitalize”) today announced a new integration designed to modernize how traders and investors move and manage their employer-sponsored retirement accounts. Building on TradeStation’s reputation for delivering advanced trading technology and reliable brokerage services for sophisticated traders, this integration underscores TradeStation’s commitment to its community of active traders.
Through this integration, TradeStation will embed Capitalize’s Rollover API, enabling TradeStation users to transfer 401(k) assets into their Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) through the TradeStation platform.* The capability allows TradeStation users to consolidate and manage their savings all in one place.
The traditional rollover process remains complex and inefficient, with many Americans leaving behind their 401(k)s during job changes due to frustration with transfers. Rollovers typically take six to eight weeks, compared to other money-movement methods — like Automated Clearing House (ACH) and Automated Customer Account Transfer Service (ACATS) — which happen online on average in just a few business days. Capitalize helps address that challenge head-on with a digital-first workflow that helps streamline the process, and TradeStation’s integration helps keep users on a single platform.
Truist Wealth
Truist Wealth, the private wealth business of Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE: TFC), announces that Truist Investment Services, Inc. (TIS) financial advisors will now be able to offer two SEC-registered spot bitcoin exchange‑traded funds (ETFs) sponsored by Fidelity and BlackRock.
These ETFs offer regulated digital asset exposure through exchange‑traded structures, giving investors a straightforward way to access this evolving asset class. TIS clients will have the opportunity to work in close partnership with their financial advisors, ensuring decisions are aligned with each client’s goals, financial situation, and risk tolerance. These ETFs are also available through Truist Trade, our offering for clients interested in self-directed real-time trading.
The addition of these spot bitcoin ETFs represents a measured expansion of Truist Wealth’s holistic portfolio of solutions and reflects the firm’s disciplined approach to evaluating emerging investment options on behalf of clients.
