The managed services platform provider Ellevate, founded by industry veteran and former Black Diamond executive Michelle Odom, announced this week that it has surpassed $500 billion in assets serviced.
Founded two years ago, Ellevate and its more than a dozen staffers and consultants already serve several large RIAs, aggregators, and enterprise wealth management firms that are pursuing growth and that want to scale operations and streamline their technology stacks.
“We launched Ellevate with one goal in mind: to help advisors fix what’s broken behind the scenes so they can focus on growing their businesses,” Odom said in a statement.
“Surpassing half a trillion in assets so quickly confirms that the industry is hungry for a better way to scale,” she said of her firm, which supports thousands of advisors on its platform.
In addition to the platform administration and ongoing maintenance a firm would expect from a managed service provider, Ellevate’s platform provides back-office support that includes billing, trading, client reporting, workflow design, as well as vendor consulting, and technology project management as it relates to integrations and technology support.
The firm also specializes in post-M&A integration of technology systems and helps firms with data management planning, cloud implementation and preparations for deploying AI.
Odom is also a finalist in the 2025 Wealthmanagement.com Industry Awards for CEO of the Year for professional services organizations.
Microsoft Inks Five-Year Strategic Partnership With FNZ
Wealth management platform provider FNZ announced a major five-year “innovation” partnership with Microsoft to collaborate on transforming the wealth industry through technology, including the development of “AI-driven solutions.”
While best known in other parts of the English-speaking world, especially New Zealand (where it originated) and in the U.K., where it has a significant presence, the company has made forays into the U.S. market.
FNZ acquired a majority stake in State Street’s trust custody unit in 2020, announced a partnership with Envestnet in 2022 that was initially much hyped within US wealth circles, and acquired the fixed-income technology provider YieldX in 2023.
Currently, FNZ serves over 26 million end investors, has nearly $2 trillion in assets under administration and works with more than 650 financial institutions.
According to the announcement, the new Microsoft partnership will combine FNZ’s wealth management technology, expertise, and international footprint with Microsoft’s “advanced AI capabilities, cloud infrastructure and engineering excellence.”
Specifically, FNZ will deeply embed and integrate Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry into its platform. For now, the collaboration’s intent is to accelerate and improve how financial institutions, advisors and their clients interact through deeper, more personalized digital wealth management experiences.
In addition to creating what FNZ calls a “next-generation advisor and investor experience,” the company will use Microsoft Fabric to augment and improve its data and analytics capabilities. The two companies will also share engineering resources to speed up innovation and “strengthen risk management, compliance and resilience.”
As part of the collaboration, FNZ will deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to develop agentic, intelligent agents to support middle- and back-office processes. It will also provide GitHub Copilot to its engineering teams, which is meant to improve developer productivity.
Finally, the two plan to pursue joint go-to-market activities, including the development and deployment of what they call modular wealth solutions through multiple channels, including the Microsoft Marketplace.
Among FNZ’s many backers and shareholders are Motive Partners (which has major stakes in or has owned several U.S. financial services brands, including Fiserv, InvestCloud, BetaNXT, and Mediant Communications) and Generation Investment Management.
InspereX Appoints Ira Lehrman Chief Technology Officer
The fixed income platform provider InspereX has appointed a Chief Technology Officer: Ira Lehrman, who has joined the firm and will report to CEO Scott Mitchell.
In his new role, Lehrman will oversee the company’s technology operations and systems, including its proprietary Incapnet issuance platform and BondNav, which serves institutional investors, RIAs, banks, and broker/dealers.
He will also be responsible for IspereX’s overall technology roadmap and joins the firm after serving a little over a year in the same role at Clear Bid Global Markets. An industry veteran, he has held senior executive roles at Broadridge, Nuveen, and Athene Asset Management, among other firms.
InspereX was created out of the merger of Incapital, an underwriter and distributor of fixed income and market-linked securities, with 280 CapMarkets, a company built around fixed income price discovery and the facilitation of trading and managing bonds in 2021. It has more than 180 employees in five offices across the U.S.
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