Goodbye, summer doldrums.
Wealthtech didn’t just stay hot through the whole season, it evolved.
In the early days of Advisor Tech Talk (welcome, y’all!) we almost always wound up looking for ways to pad our summer columns because… well… there wasn’t a lot of wealthtech news during the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
That doesn’t happen anymore. Yes, there are dips in activity, but week-to-week, there’s always at least ten or so solid financial advisor technology announcements to make for a good read. This year, however, was again more exceptional than the last. We’ve already spilled quite a bit of ink about Vanguard’s acquisition of Altruist, which appears at this writing to be the defining event of wealthtech’s summer. The deal creates a provocative combination of Vanguard’s scale and scope with Altruist’s AI-powered advisor custody business.
Scale was already one of the summer’s dominant themes. Bloomberg expanded its private-markets data capabilities by acquiring Canoe Intelligence. Orion pushed beyond $6.6 trillion in assets administered on its technology while promoting Denali as an AI layer spanning advisor workflows. Envestnet launched Wealth Trading as part of its effort to create a more integrated advisor environment. Across the industry, the competitive question increasingly became less about how many applications a provider offers than whether those applications can operate together as a coherent system.
Speaking of Envestnet, the company this week announced a $35 million surge investment in Tamarac, representing 2.5 times its regular annual technology investment in the RIA platform and forming part of a broader $1 billion, five-year research-and-development commitment. The spending is directed toward familiar pain points—reporting, reconciliation, portfolio management and disconnected workflows—but increasingly attacks them with embedded AI.
This summer, artificial intelligence wealthtech experienced a transition of its own. RightCapital introduced Iris AI, Salesforce launched Agentic Advisor, and Altruist began positioning Hazel as an AI environment capable of doing substantive advisory work. Wealthtech’s first wave of generative AI largely focused on transcription, meeting summaries and content creation. The emerging generation is being embedded into financial planning, CRM, compliance and operations, moving AI from an advisor’s technological periphery toward the actual production of advice.
And while we’re talking about AI, recent research released by Astraeus provided an intriguing counterpoint to concerns that this automation will necessarily eliminate advisor jobs. Its analysis of more than 6,000 independent RIAs found that firms disclosing meaningful AI use increased headcount faster than firms without such disclosures. The findings do not establish that AI causes hiring, but they support an emerging possibility: wealth managers may initially use AI productivity gains to increase capacity and growth rather than simply reduce payroll.
There was more, a lot more, and we get to some of it below, including news that Archive Intel is integrating with Zocks to capture and review AI-generated meeting records for compliance. Avantos is adding wealth-management leadership as it expands AI agents across advisor workflows. Dispatch will provide client-data infrastructure for Hightower Signature Wealth. MyVest is expanding fixed-income capabilities, while Orion has added BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and Vanguard models to its Tailored Allocation Portfolios. RedBlack has opened a new Atlanta headquarters after surpassing $1 trillion in assets managed by customer firms on its technology.
But don’t take our word for it. Let’s get to your headlines…
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Archive Intel
Archive Intel, an AI-powered communications compliance platform for financial institutions, today announced an integration with Zocks, the privacy-first AI platform for financial services.
SEC and FINRA regulations treat records generated by AI notetakers as electronic client communications that firms must review and retain for five years. Through the integration, data from Zocks automatically flows into Archive Intel, which contextually reviews AI-generated transcripts and notes, flags potentially non-compliant language and archives the records for streamlined, audit-ready access.
Archive Intel clients can activate the Zocks integration through the Archive Intel platform for $12 per user per month. Once connected, the platforms automatically sync to capture, review and archive Zocks data.
Avantos
Avantos, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native financial technology company providing an operating system designed to reimagine how financial institutions onboard and service clients, today announced an expansion of its wealth management business with the appointments of Hemang Bhojani as Head of Wealth Solutions and Thomas Moore as Head of Wealth Go-to-Market.
Bhojani will lead the development and expansion of Avantos’ wealth solutions, with a focus on helping firms unlock growth through AI-powered client intelligence, next-best-action recommendations and deeper engagement across wealth, retirement, insurance and other lines of business. Moore will lead go-to-market strategy and strategic partnerships for the company’s wealth business, helping firms realize measurable value from AI while building the relationships and partnerships that support Avantos’ continued growth across wealth management.
The appointments build on Avantos’ growing momentum in wealth management and across the broader financial services industry as traditional boundaries between wealth, retirement, workplace benefits and insurance continue to blur. Avantos helps firms establish a unified view of the client relationship through a knowledge graph that establishes context around client relationships, linking products, service teams, workflows and service expectations in a single system. This shared context enables AI agents and human teams to identify opportunities, coordinate work and deliver more personalized experiences across business lines.
Carefull
Carefull, the financial safety platform built to protect older adults and the families who support them, today announced that Gregory Samanez-Larkin, Ph.D., has joined Carefull as Research Fellow, a scientific leadership role focused on accelerating the application of new behavioral and cognitive science directly into the development of Carefull’s technology.
Samanez-Larkin is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and Professor of Marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. For over two decades, his research has examined how motivation, cognition, and the brain influence financial decision-making across the lifespan, with particular focus on aging, financial risk, and vulnerability.
Bringing Samanez-Larkin to the team is part of Carefull’s ongoing effort to fundamentally change the pace at which cognitive and behavioral science is applied to older adult financial risk.
Charityvest
Charityvest, an innovative donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsor on a mission to catalyze more generosity via modern technology, today announced the appointment of Matt Nash and James Lenhoff to its Board of Directors.
With over 20 years of experience in the DAF industry, Nash brings deep expertise in charitable giving, donor engagement and DAF operations. As Senior Vice President at Fidelity Charitable, he served on the executive team and oversaw marketing, service, operations and the private donor group. During his tenure, he also launched Fidelity’s dedicated program for ultra-high-net-worth donors.
Nash later served as the executive director of The Blackbaud Giving Fund, a DAF platform he helped establish and scale. During his tenure, the organization granted a cumulative $3 billion to 300,000 charities. He currently serves as a strategic advisor to Purposefy, an impact measurement platform, where he advises purpose-driven organizations on aligning their goals with measurable impact.
d1g1t
d1g1t, a leading wealthtech provider, today announced the appointment of Alex Strekel as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Strekel will lead d1g1t’s sales, channels and sales engineering functions as the company expands its reach across the wealth management industry. His appointment comes as firms increasingly look to integrated technology, trusted data and AI-optimized workflows to improve operational efficiency, support advisors and deliver digital-first client experiences.
Based in Connecticut, Strekel brings more than 20 years of experience in financial services, fintech and asset management, with a background spanning investment management, enterprise technology and go-to-market leadership. Most recently, Strekel served as Sales Director for North American Asset Management at Clearwater Analytics, where he drove significant growth in annual recurring revenue and was instrumental in developing and managing strategic partnerships with major industry firms.
Earlier in his career, Strekel managed portfolios at GenRe-New England Asset Management and held roles at Fidelity Investments and Thomson Financial. His experience across both investment management and financial technology provides a first-hand perspective on the operational, data and client-service demands facing wealth management firms.
Dispatch
Dispatch, the data infrastructure platform that enables the wealth industry to run revenue-critical workflows, today announced that Hightower Advisors (“Hightower”), has selected Dispatch to provide client data infrastructure for Hightower Signature Wealth. Dispatch will orchestrate the movement, validation, and synchronization of client data across custodians and advisory systems as Hightower brings advisors into its national Hightower Signature Wealth practice and manages client relationships on an ongoing basis.
Hightower Signature Wealth is Hightower’s national advisory practice, launched in late 2025 as part of a broader industry trend in which leading registered investment advisor (“RIA”) firms are unifying independent practices under a single brand to deliver a more consistent client experience, expand centralized capabilities, and position for long-term growth. Since launch, more than 100 advisors have joined the platform, which now represents more than $35 billion in assets under management across more than 30 locations. Hightower expects more to join in the second half of 2026.
As consolidation continues across wealth management, large RIAs are inheriting increasingly complex combinations of custodians, tech stacks and operating processes. Shifting these businesses into unified practices requires infrastructure that can standardize data and orchestrate workflows across systems without requiring every practice to operate on an identical technology stack.
Engageware
Engageware, the most used AI-powered customer engagement platform for regulated industries, has expanded its executive leadership team with the appointments of Steve Abramson as Chief Financial Officer, Rob Fox as Chief Technology Officer and Matt Wilson as Chief Customer Officer – three leaders who have each built, deployed and scaled AI inside regulated enterprises.
The appointments come as Engageware moves to lead AI adoption in the sectors where it’s hardest to deploy. Banking, financial services, wealth management and telecom demand accuracy, governance and trust with no room for error, and they depend on Engageware, whose platform has already powered more than 1 billion AI interactions and scheduled 1.5 billion appointments for clients and their customers worldwide.
Abramson will oversee global finance, legal and administrative functions. Fox will lead global engineering and product teams, accelerating platform innovation and advancing governed AI across the company. Wilson will oversee customer success, support, enablement and customer operations, helping clients maximize the value of Engageware’s platform while scaling customer experience initiatives globally.
Envestnet
For most registered investment advisers (RIAs), growth isn’t limited by ambition, it’s limited by time. Advisors lose hours every week to work that has nothing to do with the client in front of them: reconciling data, assembling reports, moving between disconnected systems, managing client workflows, and ensuring the information they rely on is accurate, timely and actionable.
Envestnet, the leading Adaptive WealthTech company, believes closing that gap is among the single biggest levers available to advisors today and the company is backing that belief with capital, increasing its technology investment in Tamarac, built for RIAs, by 2.5x. The investment puts AI directly into the workflows where advisors lose the most time, not as a separate tool to learn, but built into the platform they already work in every day.
The announcement builds on the five-year strategic vision Envestnet unveiled a year ago to transform the advisor experience and solidify its position as the leading adaptive wealthtech platform for broker-dealers, RIAs, and institutional partners. As part of that vision, Envestnet is investing $1 billion in research and development over five years, equipping advisors with advanced, integrated, and configurable tools across every workflow: trading, reporting, financial planning, portfolio management, client engagement and more. Today’s Tamarac investment reflects a desire to accelerate that sustained, multi-year commitment to RIAs.
Flourish
Aquiline today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to invest in Flourish, an innovative wealthtech platform currently owned by MassMutual, which equips Registered Investment Advisors (“RIAs”) with private-bank-like solutions to deliver better results for their clients. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Following closing, Aquiline will hold a controlling interest in Flourish, while MassMutual will retain a significant stake.
Based in New York, Flourish serves as a growth engine for more than 1,300 RIAs. Having grown assets under custody in its advisor-led cash-management solution from $1 billion to $8 billion in five years, Flourish recently launched the first home-lending solution designed exclusively for the independent advisor channel.
Aquiline will work with Flourish to build upon the company’s successful record of addressing the evolving needs of the independent advisor through innovative functionality and capabilities, empowering RIAs to compete with large broker-dealers and wirehouses. Aquiline’s experience investing across wealth, retirement, and investment technology and its track record of scaling go-to-market and backing consumer-friendly innovation in financial services were key to MassMutual’s decision to select Aquiline as a partner. Past Aquiline investments in the wealth and retirement space include Ascensus, Assetmark, RIA-in-a-Box, and Sageview.
FNZ
FNZ, a London, UK-based wealth-management platform provider, raised US$450m in equity funding.
Backers included La Caisse, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Generation Investment Management and Motive Partners.
The company intends to use the new capital to invest in its technology platform, people, and products.
FP Alpha
FP Alpha, an AI-powered advanced financial planning platform, today announced significant enhancements to its Tax Projector tool designed to make sophisticated, forward-looking tax planning easier and more accessible for financial advisors.
The enhancements include Tax Projector Scenario Insights, which enables advisors to generate FP Alpha’s NextGen Tax Insights based on future client scenarios rather than relying solely on historical tax returns, and the Tax Projector Agent, an AI-powered experience that allows advisors to build and optimize tax scenarios using natural-language prompts.
Together, the capabilities expand FP Alpha’s ability to help advisors move beyond identifying tax-planning opportunities to more easily modeling potential decisions, understanding their implications and identifying actionable strategies for clients.
Intellectus
Intellectus Partners today announced the launch of a dedicated Client Engagement team, a new function designed to transform how clients experience and engage with the firm across its people, technology, investment capabilities, services and broader ecosystem. The initiative represents the next stage of a strategy Intellectus has been building for years: combining increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence with an even higher standard of personal service, judgment and human engagement. Intellectus calls that philosophy Human Touch AI.
The new Client Engagement team builds on Intellectus’ multi-year investment in artificial intelligence and digital advisory technology. That work has included the development and subsequent spinout of Intellebox.ai, the AI platform that provides the technological foundation for much of this new Client Engagement model, as well as continued internal development of IntellectusIQ and other proprietary AI capabilities across the Intellectus platform.
Together, these technologies are allowing Intellectus to rethink not only how advice is delivered, but how a wealth and investment firm can engage with, understand and serve its clients.
iPipeline
iPipeline®, a leading global provider of digital solutions for the life insurance and financial services industry, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Origo following receipt of all required regulatory approvals, including approval from the UK Competition and Markets Authority.
As financial services firms face growing pressure to modernize operations, improve customer experiences, and navigate increasingly complex technology environments, the ability to connect people, processes, and data has become a critical competitive advantage.
This acquisition expands iPipeline’s presence in the UK wealth and retirement market and further strengthens its ability to help customers navigate fragmented systems, manual processes, and disconnected experiences that continue to challenge financial services organizations worldwide.
MAI Capital Management
MAI Capital Management (“MAI”), a registered investment advisor (RIA) focused on empowering clients to simplify, protect and grow their wealth, today announced it has hired Amy Brady, who will join as a Managing Partner in MAI’s Office of Managing Partners (“OMP”), the firm’s leadership team that oversees its respective business segments. She will be charged with leading forward-looking, highly strategic initiatives that can position MAI for sustained growth, greater enterprise effectiveness and long-term competitive strength.
Brady brings more than 30 years of enterprise executive experience to MAI, including roles at KeyBank and Bank of America, where she led large-scale technology, service centers, operations and digital transformation efforts, including enterprise AI adoption. As MAI continues its nationwide expansion following its majority investment from Carlyle, Brady will oversee the implementation of firmwide initiatives, including AI optimization, workflow and cost efficiencies that support MAI’s client-first culture. She will also serve as the National Leader of MAI’s strategy focused on women and wealth, bringing to market the firm’s programs and services dedicated to one of the fastest-growing segments within the wealth management industry.
Brady will report directly to Buoncore as the newest member of MAI’s Office of Managing Partners, which was expanded in November 2025 with the acquisition of Evoke Advisors to leverage the strength of the combined team across areas including wealth management, ultra-high net worth, sports and entertainment, family office and tax services, investments and firmwide operations.
Merit Financial Advisors
Merit Financial Advisors (“Merit”), a Georgia-based financial advisory firm specializing in financial planning and wealth management solutions for high-net-worth individuals and families and those navigating life transitions, today announced the appointment of John Rajes as Chief Technology Officer, further strengthening the firm’s executive leadership team as Merit continues to invest in the people, technology and infrastructure needed to support its rapid national expansion.
With more than $30.1 billion in assets across more than 55 offices nationwide, Merit has become one of the wealth management industry’s most active growth firms, completing 61 acquisitions to date, including nine partnerships in 2026. Rajes’ appointment reflects Merit’s broader strategy of building the leadership structure and enterprise capabilities necessary to support that growth while continuing to enhance the experience for its advisors and clients.
Rajes, who joined Merit on July 13, will oversee the firm’s enterprise technology strategy, including technology architecture, integrations, data, artificial intelligence and the continued development of a more unified digital experience for Merit’s advisors and employees.
MyVest
MyVest, a leading provider of enterprise wealth management technology, today announced a significant expansion of fixed income capabilities in its Strategic Portfolio System™ (SPS), giving bonds the same operational scale, automated rebalancing, and portfolio management support the platform already provides for equities.
The enhancements address a persistent gap across the managed accounts industry: most platforms still rely on manual or generic fixed income orders rather than the security-level execution that institutional bond management requires. The update, now live, was informed by input from one of MyVest’s enterprise wealth management clients.
The expanded analytics layer gives investment managers and advisors direct visibility into every bond’s characteristics alongside equities and other asset classes in a single portfolio view. The platform automatically calculates weighted averages for key metrics, delivering a consolidated snapshot of fixed income exposure without leaving the platform.
Orion
Orion announced today the addition of BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and Vanguard to Tailored Allocation Portfolios, its offering that pairs third-party model portfolios with Orion’s Custom Indexing technology to deliver tax management and personalized investing at scale. These additions bring three of the largest asset managers in the U.S. to Orion’s Tailored Allocation Portfolios.
Advisors can now access model portfolios from BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and Vanguard in addition to Brinker-Main Management, First Trust Advisors, Frontier Asset Management, Janus Henderson, and Russell Investments, growing Orion’s Tailored Allocation Portfolios to eight leading strategists since its October 2025 launch.
Choosing between the efficiency of third-party models and the ability to deliver a customized investment experience tailored to each client’s unique goals has long been a tradeoff for advisors. Orion’s Tailored Allocation Portfolios closes that gap by running each strategist’s standard or custom ETF and mutual fund models through Orion’s Custom Indexing technology.
RedBlack
RedBlack Software, LLC, an award-winning provider of rebalancing and trading technology, today announced the opening of its new U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, marking a major milestone in the company’s continued growth trajectory. RedBlack recently surpassed more than $1 trillion in assets managed by customer firms on its technology platform, reflecting continued momentum driven by strong advisor adoption, customer-led innovation and expanding market presence.
Strategically located in a fast-growing technology hub, the Atlanta headquarters will serve as the primary location for RedBlack Software’s North American operations. The investment reinforces the company’s commitment to scaling its business, attracting top talent and delivering enhanced service to its rapidly expanding community of RIAs, wealth managers, asset managers and family offices.
The Atlanta office will serve as a collaborative hub, bringing RedBlack employees together to share ideas, deepen cross-functional partnerships and drive innovation. By creating a dynamic space for in-person engagement, the company will foster creativity, enhance problem-solving and accelerate decision-making. The Atlanta location expands RedBlack Software’s growing footprint, complementing its technology development center in Kochi, India, and the New Jersey office of its affiliated outsourced investment management services provider, RedBlack Advisers, Inc. Together, these investments reflect RedBlack’s ongoing dedication to delivering exceptional service, innovative solutions and outstanding outcomes for clients.
