Holiday weeks haven’t felt much like holiday weeks lately—in the publishing business, where we’re almost never off, holidays are often much like any other day.
Well, we decided to take a few days off last week, forgoing our AI content and enjoying a nice break from not just work, but cooler weather, too.
Then, we woke up on Monday with a few notable reminders that the news doesn’t take a break—we won’t be covering the death of Pope Francis here in Advisor Tech Talk, of course, but that’s not the only thing we refer to.
Despite most of the news-producing world taking a day off on Friday, and what seemed to be an otherwise slower than usual week, there was still a lot happening in wealth management and in wealthtech news in particular. Let’s take a quick survey.
In M&A news, Creative Planning added $1 billion AUM Monterey Private Wealth, while Bleakley Financial Group added two teams from Northwestern Mutual totaling $1 billion in client assets. Pure Financial Advisors added a $900 million Chicago-area firm. Smaller acquisitions were completed by EP Wealth Advisors and Bradley, Foster & Sargent.
Three additions, of undisclosed sizes, were announced by Rockefeller Global Family office, and a pair of additions were announced by NewEdge Wealth. Hires and promotions also occurred at UBS and Opal Wealth Advisors, in addition to other firms.
Big funding announcements in wealth management were announced by Procyon Partners, which sold a minority stake to Constellation Wealth Capital, and Cary Street Partners, which was recapitalized by a group led by CIVC Parners.
In a little bit of coincidental and thought-provoking personal finance news, a Quicken survey found that Baby Boomers were more likely to feel blindsided by inflation than younger generations—this despite Boomers being living, working adults through the last bout of serious inflation face by the U.S. in the 1970s. Maybe this is a symptom of shortening financial attention spans—we’ve gone from generations whose financial mindsets were crystalized around the Great Depression to Baby Boomers who can’t seem to hold a thought for more than a month at a time, let alone recall meaningful memories about their formative years. Then again, this is also a sign of Boomers’ transition to living on more fixed incomes versus the flexibility of generations still in their earning years.
Overall, financial and investment sentiment has changed in the first few months of 2025, as the most recent quarterly Morgan Stanley retail investor pulse survey released this past week reveals—for the first time in a while, the majority of investors in the survey said they feel bearish. Their chief concerns? Inflation and tariffs.
Let’s get to some wealthtech headlines.
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Blend
Blend today announced the formation of its Financial Services Advisory Board, a consortium of industry visionaries who will collectively help to define the future of AI transformation and accelerate adoption in financial services.
This initiative brings together experts from wealth management, asset management, retirement services, banking, cards, networks, processors – all sectors undergoing profound change driven by artificial intelligence.
The Board will reinforce and enhance Blend’s mandate for the sector, focusing on four strategic imperatives: articulating compelling visions for AI in the future financial landscape, developing breakthrough perspectives on AI transformation, influencing market narratives, and creating a powerful innovation ecosystem at the intersection of financial services and cutting-edge AI.
Boosted.ai
Boosted.ai, developers of the leading agentic AI for investment professionals – Boosted.ai Alfa™ – today announced it has appointed Christian Antaloczy as Chief Product Officer (CPO).
Antaloczy joins the Boosted.ai team from WhatsApp (parent company Meta) where he led generative AI for businesses, bringing deep expertise in product strategy, AI-driven innovation, and scaling solutions across organizations of all sizes in a highly regulated space. With a proven track record of building and launching industry-defining products, he has successfully bridged technology and business needs to help users derive value from technology like artificial intelligence.
As CPO of Boosted.ai, Antaloczy will leverage his expertise in generative AI and in bringing new services to market to extend our lead in the financial AI space, while expanding into more use cases as they see an increased demand for AI that automates large swaths of an investment professional’s day.
CAIS
As financial advisors increasingly adopt defined-outcome strategies to capture market opportunities, manage risk, and meet client goals, CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, today announced an expansion of its defined-outcome capabilities through CAIS Capital Markets, a new division. CAIS Capital Markets will centralize existing structured investments solutions, hedging and monetization, and managed solutions referral services, with CAIS Capital’s structured investments trade execution capabilities.
CAIS has provided access for independent advisors to structured investments for over a decade. With expanded capabilities, CAIS Capital Markets now offers advisors access to structured notes as well as hedging and monetization strategies—both delivered by leading bank issuers—to help diversify and manage risk in concentrated equity positions. CAIS also offers structured note execution trading services, which simplify the trading process and provide support from trade creation through to maturity. CAIS Capital Markets is fully integrated with the broader CAIS platform, allowing advisors to access these offerings alongside other alternative investment opportunities.
CAIS has seen an increase in adoption of structured investments in recent years – with significant year-over-year volume growth. On the heels of CAIS’ expanded capabilities, Focus Financial Partners (“Focus”), an interdependent partnership of wealth management, business management and related financial services firms, has recently expanded their relationship with CAIS to leverage the suite of offerings under its Capital Markets division.
Datalign Advisory
Datalign Advisory, an AI-powered company connecting Americans with trusted financial advisors, has appointed Andy Berkheimer as Chief Technology Officer. In this role, the senior engineering executive will lead Datalign’s growing engineering team and advance its generative AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities to meet surging demand for personalized and trusted financial guidance.
Across his 25-year career, Berkheimer has led teams building consumer and enterprise facing platforms that transformed how billions of people engage with technology. In his decade-plus tenure at YouTube, he guided the platform through three critical phases: scaling high-quality video delivery to billions of users, leading the transition to mobile and smart TVs, and the ensuing transformation into a highly personalized destination during a period of tremendous growth. Most recently at Meta’s Reality Labs, he applied this same expertise in the frontier of technology innovation to next-generation enterprise collaboration tools.
Datalign recently secured a $9 million investment following 300% year-over-year growth. In 2024, the company matched $40 billion in assets with over 7,000 trusted advisors. To help lead its next phase of growth, Datalign has brought on Berkheimer, an MIT graduate returning to his Cambridge roots.
GReminders
GReminders, a leading end-to-end meeting and automation management platform for financial advisors, today announced a series of new integrations with top customer relationship management (CRM) providers serving the financial advisor industry. New integrations with XLR8, Quivr, Smart Office, Envestnet Tamarac, and SS&C Salentica will empower advisors to manage their calendars and meetings, apply client-level data and intelligence and automate next-best-actions, all seamlessly within the CRM systems they are accustomed to using. The new integrations will meet the increasing demand of advisors seeking compliance-friendly solutions to streamline everyday operations within their existing systems.
By integrating GReminders AI-enabled technology, the advisor-focused CRMs benefit from enriched calendar data to seamlessly automate client emails and SMS notifications. Additional enhancements include the ability to book meetings via the GReminders enterprise-grade scheduling system, generating pre-meeting briefs based on existing CRM notes and logging post-meeting summaries and tasks back in the CRM. Numerous automations are added via the integrations, including launching opportunities and workflows after booking a meeting.
GReminders is currently listed first among “Schedule Applications” in Ezra Group’s WealthTech Integration Score ranking, with a near-perfect score of 9.30 of a possible 10. These industry-wide rankings are based on an evaluation of the “robustness of an application’s external integrations.” The GReminders score reflects the breadth, depth and quality of its integrations with advisor-focused CRMs as well as its advanced capabilities. This includes the recently launched “Ask Anything” assistant feature, a next-generation natural language interface that allows advisors to seamlessly interact with their calendars, CRMs and wealth planning tools, using simple, everyday language. The feature eliminates the need to navigate between multiple software solutions to get answers about a client and subsequently initiate tasks.
InvestCloud
InvestCloud, a global leader in wealth technology, today announced the expansion of its APL leadership team with the appointment of Josh Mayer to the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer (“COO”) reporting to APL President Cheryl Nash.
Mr. Mayer will drive strategic expansion and excellence in innovation and service delivery across all of APL’s offerings, including the delivery of the company’s new Private Markets Account™ (PMA) for managing public and private assets from a single, unified managed account on the InvestCloud APL platform. The APL managed accounts platform is the largest in the U.S., powering more than $3 trillion of assets on the platform across nearly 10 million accounts utilizing nearly 4 million investment models.
With more than 25 years of business and WealthTech leadership, Mr. Mayer has a proven track record of building and scaling enterprise platforms, leading business transformation, and architecting complex technology infrastructures. Mr. Mayer was most recently COO of Envestnet, where he played a central role in guiding the company through its IPO and is credited with designing and transforming one of the largest fintech operating environments in the industry.
Luma Financial Technologies
Luma Financial Technologies (“Luma”), a global leader in structured products and insurance solutions, announced today that it has closed a $63 million Series C financing led by Sixth Street Growth, the growth investing business of leading global investment firm Sixth Street. Existing strategic investors including Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and TD Bank Group participated in the round.
The additional capital will enable the acceleration of Luma’s expansion across key markets, deepen its investment in product innovation, and further enhance its global client support capabilities. Already on a strong growth trajectory, the funding will allow Luma to scale its impact while preserving the leadership and strategic direction that have guided its success. Additionally, Alex Goodman, Principal at Sixth Street Growth, will join the firm’s Board of Directors.
As demand for alternatives continues to grow, Luma remains at the forefront of empowering firms with the tools to adapt and excel. Building on its established momentum, this next phase of growth will accelerate Luma’s ability to drive industry-wide transformation through greater accessibility, seamless integration, and a continued commitment to advisor-centric innovation. Broadhaven served as Luma’s advisor on the transaction.
Mercer Advisors
Mercer Global Advisors, Inc. (“Mercer Advisors”), a national Registered Investment Adviser (RIA), today announced the expansion of its family office services with the national launch of Account Bridge, a proprietary program that streamlines its advisors’ ability to implement and provide advice on clients’ held-away investment accounts. Account Bridge helps advisors elevate the client experience by positioning clients’ investments in line with their financial plan while promoting appropriate diversification, alignment in time horizon and risk tolerance, and better integration with their bespoke planning strategies.
Held-away account management is now part of Mercer Advisors’ core service offering for its 32,800+ clients. The solution enables the firm’s advisors to adhere to its fiduciary commitments by better understanding the context of clients’ investments and having a view into the entirety of their financial pictures. Since initially making Account Bridge available, more than half of the firm’s advisors have adopted the solution to manage clients’ workplace retirement accounts such as 401(k), 403(b), 457 as well as 529 accounts. Account Bridge allows advisors to serve more families while also relieving clients of the burden of asset allocation and rebalancing–especially across retirement and college savings plans that were historically outside of advisors’ purview.
Mercer Advisors’ integration of Account Bridge into its platform reflects a steadfast commitment to continuously reinvesting the benefits of growth to deliver more value to clients. Last year, Mercer Advisors, through strategic collaborations, expanded the drafting of foundational estate plans at no additional fee (trust, will, power of attorney, health directive) as part of its core services to all clients. The firm also launched Aspen Partners last June, providing institutional-grade private markets access to its clients, with no additional advisory fees.
PreciseFP
PreciseFP, the award-winning client engagement and data-gathering software from Docupace, today announced a new integration with Finmate.ai, a rising innovator in AI-assisted notetaking for financial advisors, today announced a new integration engagement that allows financial advisors to effortlessly go from a discovery conversation to a generated financial plan.
FinMate AI was the first to create an advisor-focused AI notetaker, and FinMate AI is again the first to push the industry forward by allowing advisors to push financial data from a conversation to their planning software.
The first-of-its-kind integration allows financial advisors to pass client data from Finmate.ai’s platform through PreciseFP and directly into core financial planning applications such as eMoney, RightCapital and Envestnet’s MoneyGuidePro.
Savvy Wealth
Savvy Wealth Inc., a digital-first platform for financial advisors centered around modernizing human financial advice, today announced that Lisandra Wilmott has joined the company as head of legal & compliance. In this role, she will streamline Savvy’s legal operations, lead the development of its compliance program and build out legal workflows across business units.
As Savvy Wealth’s national affiliate registered investment advisor (RIA), Savvy Advisors, recently surpassed 50 advisors, Wilmott joined the company to better support advisors in their transitions to the firm. Wilmott’s appointment will centralize the firm’s legal function, reducing pain points while supporting Savvy’s advisor recruiting strategies.
Wilmott joins Savvy Wealth after departing Pathstone, where she served as general counsel for nearly five years and was a key figure in building out the firm’s legal and compliance department. She led Pathstone through multiple acquisitions as it grew from $25 billion to nearly $200 billion in assets. Previously, Wilmott held vice president – assistant general counsel roles at LPL Financial and J.P. Morgan, advising on legal matters, corporate governance and regulatory compliance. Wilmott earned a Master of Business Administration from MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2024 and holds a Juris Doctor from University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.
SMArtX Advisory Solutions
SMArtX Advisory Solutions has introduced manager-traded sleeves within its Multi-Strategy Multi-Asset Unified Managed Account (UMA) framework, enhancing its support for the complex portfolio construction and operational needs of RIAs, broker-dealers, asset managers, FinTech firms, TAMPs, and custodians.
With this enhancement, firms can now integrate manager-traded strategies, such as fixed income, into UMA portfolios. These strategies can be combined with model-traded sleeves, including interval funds, long-only, and long-short positions, alongside rep-directed, protected, and cash management sleeves. All sleeve types can be managed within a single custodial account, eliminating the need for multiple accounts and reducing administrative overhead.
With manager-traded sleeves now part of the UMA framework, SMArtX streamlines portfolio construction by uniting rep-directed, model-traded, and manager-traded strategies in a single account. This enhancement simplifies operations and reinforces SMArtX’s commitment to smarter, more scalable portfolio solutions—all on one platform.
Socure
Socure, the leading AI-driven platform for digital identity verification, fraud prevention, and sanctions screening, today proudly announced the appointment of Rivka Gewirtz Little as Chief Growth Officer. Little assumes this position after four transformative years as Chief of Staff to CEO Johnny Ayers, where she played a pivotal role in architecting Socure’s strategy, operations, and market expansion.
Under her leadership and alongside a world-class team, Socure has doubled verification volumes to 2.7 billion in 2024—spanning 370 million unique identities across financial services, fintech, government, telecom, e-commerce, insurance, gaming, and marketplaces—and now operates in over 190 countries worldwide.
Little brings to this role more than 15 years of deep expertise in fraud, identity, and payments, including executive positions at Goldman Sachs, NICE Actimize, and IDC, where she led multiple business units and shaped global fraud strategies. Prior to her role as Chief of Staff to the CEO, she served as SVP of Market & Strategy at Socure and earlier led Global Fraud Strategy at Goldman Sachs.
TruthSayer AI
TruthSayer AI, a disruptive new fintech company, has unveiled the world’s first AI Hedge Fund-in-a-Box, designed for retail investors, small hedge funds, and family offices. Available via mobile app and desktop subscriptions, TruthSayer AI offers powerful, machine-learning-based investment signals and intelligence, without the high financial and time costs associated with researching advanced quantitative strategies.
TruthSayer AI offers three proprietary indices—Earnings AI© (14.51% Alpha vs Benchmark*), Valuations AI© (16.8% Alpha vs Benchmark), and Dark Pools AI© (-5.45% Alpha vs Benchmark). The firm’s big data analytics have a win rate of 85%-95%, a significant edge especially in current volatile market conditions.
The platform employs a unique LLMaaS (Large Language Model as a Service) architecture, making it both more cost-efficient and accurate compared to other AI players. TruthSayer AI analyzes over 104 million financial statement data points, 3 million minutes of financial audio transcripts, $3.2 trillion in dark pool transactions, and more than $50 billion in insider trading activity. With 400,000+ earnings releases and valuation models covering 6,000+ U.S.-listed stocks, the app’s data insights are unmatched in breadth and depth.
Vanilla
Vanilla, the leading platform in modern estate planning, announced a partnership with Mariner, a national financial services firm, to deliver estate planning and advisory capabilities to the more than 700 advisors managing $560B in assets at the firm. Since the partnership began, Mariner has seen a 200% increase in revenue growth rates among the advisors who have adopted Vanilla for holistic planning.
Through this partnership, Mariner advisors have access to Vanilla’s comprehensive and intuitive platform, which offers assistance throughout the estate planning process. Advisors will also be able to leverage Vanilla’s suite of tools that simplify complex processes and accelerate client engagement, enhancing efficiency and driving firm growth.
Mariner is a fast-growing financial advisory firm in the United States. Deploying Vanilla’s estate automation suite to its advisors has accelerated Mariner’s growth trajectory, enabling firms to differentiate their services, deepen client relationships, and grow revenue through wallet share and new revenue expansion. Vanilla drives measurable value by helping advisors build and extract wills and trusts, connect documents into a holistic estate plan, and surface key insights to facilitate meaningful client conversations via the use of integrated AI.
Vise
Vise, the AI-powered technology platform that delivers personalized portfolios at scale, today announced the appointment of Nick Raffone as Chief Financial Officer. The announcement comes as Vise’s platform assets surpass $15 billion–a 1500% increase year-over-year—fueling the next phase of growth and innovation for the company.1
Raffone brings over a decade of financial experience in investment banking and asset management to help guide Vise through the private equity-driven transformation reshaping the wealth management industry.
The RIA landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, with private equity firms deploying unprecedented capital into the sector and fundamentally changing its structure. This shift has accelerated the consolidation of smaller practices into enterprise-scale operations, created new demands for sophisticated technology infrastructure, and introduced complex capital structures previously unseen in wealth management.
Wealth.com
The Charles Schwab Corporation today announced it has made a minority investment in Wealth.com, the #1 rated estate planning platform in wealth management1 that is modernizing how financial advisors help clients of all wealth levels with their estate planning needs.
Schwab’s investment will help Wealth.com continue to scale its capabilities to make it easier for financial firms and advisors to provide valuable estate planning services to individuals and families. Wealth.com’s platform equips advisors and financial professionals to offer estate planning solutions that are modern and sophisticated—yet approachable and easy for clients to navigate. Financial advisors use Wealth.com’s platform to help clients optimize their estate plans or give clients without an estate plan the ability to immediately self-create robust legal documents (e.g., wills and revocable trusts) in all 50 U.S. states and D.C. at a fraction of the cost of an estate attorney.
As an extension of this strategic investment, the two firms are also developing opportunities to offer access to Wealth.com’s estate planning tools to Schwab’s clients. Details and launch plans to follow.
Wealth.com
Wealth.com, the leading digital estate planning platform for financial advisors, today announced a strategic integration with eMoney Advisor, a leading provider of technology solutions and services that help people talk about money. This integration will empower financial advisors on the Wealth.com platform to deliver more efficient, accurate and holistic estate and financial planning solutions to their clients. Upon launch, advisors will be able to eliminate manual data entry and ensure real-time synchronization of financial data for a more fully integrated, AI-powered wealth management experience.
Wealth.com is the preferred estate planning platform for more than 800 wealth management firms, continuously increasing its capabilities to further enhance the advisor-client experience. In addition to this strategic integration, Wealth.com recently launched its Scenario Builder tool, the first all-in-one estate planning modeling tool designed to give advisors, wealth planners and estate attorneys insights into the potential impacts of various strategies on a client’s estate. With this partnership and recent innovations, Wealth.com continues to meet the increasing demand for premier estate planning services.
Zocks
Zocks, an innovative, privacy-first AI platform that turns client conversations into actionable data and insights, today announced a strategic partnership with Practifi, the leading CRM built for wealth management. This integration enables seamless two-way data synchronization between the platforms, allowing firms to leverage AI-powered insights while maintaining streamlined workflows and developing client relationships.
Contacts, meeting notes, and tasks will now sync automatically between systems. Zocks’ AI capabilities will help advisors enhance client engagement. Advisors can now access historical client data and email communications through Zocks’ “Ask Anything AI Agent,” enabling more informed client interactions and automated email responses. The partnership also facilitates automatic updates to client records and workflow progression within Practifi.
The partnership addresses key operational challenges faced by advisory firms, including manual data entry, meeting documentation, and task management across platforms.
