The CTOs of a tech-forward RIA, family office, and custodian meet at a midtown conference center and no, this is not the start of a standup routine.
They comprised the CTO panel portion of the 2025 WealthManagement.com Industry Awards Executive Forums in New York City last week and were speaking to an audience of 200 wealth management technology executives, asset managers, service providers and advisors.
The top themes were how these executives and their firms were wrestling with artificial intelligence, the challenges of data management, cybersecurity, personalization and modernization.
The conversation highlighted the tension inherent between trying to scale advisory businesses while also meeting the deepening levels of personalization expected by a client base that is increasingly tech-savvy themselves.
Despite efforts to broaden the conversation, panelists, led by moderator Tim Welsh, the founder and president of Nexus Strategy, spent considerable time discussing both the promise and limitations of AI technology in wealth management.
“When we started Farther in 2019, we knew AI would get to where we are today—I was working in AI, using AI to identify growth opportunities for advisors at Goldman [Sachs], and previously, a lot of my thesis work at MIT was sort of AI adjacent,” said Brad Genser, co-founder & CTO of Farther. The fast-growing tech-driven RIA crossed the $1-billion-in-AUM threshold in September 2023, and this year has grown from $5 billion to $13 billion within the last year.
He said Farther had invested heavily in its use of AI over the last six months as new capabilities became available.
“First and foremost, we see a way to accelerate software development, and we now have fully automated software pipelines, AI software developers, if you will, who are pushing things through from requirements all the way through to production code,” he said. “It allows us to build software faster for advisor and clients, so we can satisfy more needs.”
Dan Burke, partner and CTO at Callan Family Office, said that his firm’s experience with AI has resulted in mixed responses from staff but has overall resulted in productivity improvement at the firm.
“What we have seen AI do so far, it makes our best people even better,” said Burke. He said the first layer of deployment at Callan had been with chatbots, chat assistance, digital assistants and notetaking and firm leaders had seen these tools improve efficiency and productivity among the most tech-forward employees, saving them hours per day.
A surprise in its use had been observing how staff lacking experience or exposure to the technology responded, he said.
“I had someone tell us it was broken, and actually what we realized was it was starting to become an indicator of who are the folks who were good at critical thinking and who had experience and the difference in how people were approaching problems,” he said.
Another area where the firm is seeing positive results from AI is efficiencies around alternative data management, he said.
“It’s a black hole for family offices in terms of PDFs, statements, trying to get the data out of there, tools are getting great in estate planning and with trust documents, taking all that offline data, bringing it online,” said Burke, noting that even so, the firm really still needed a human in the loop for now, reviewing them for accuracy.
“You can’t count on it or entirely or trust it completely,” he said.
Noel Stave, the CTO of RBC Clearing & Custody, which has approximately 30,000 total users on its technology platform, said that his firm has spent the last five years in the midst of a digital transformation project, building many new tools for its advisor and client base.
The firm’s focus has been on optimizing all those new tools, which include a new account opening platform, performance reporting, CRM and client portal, among other tools. Central to that process has been data management and centralizing its data.
“For us, over the next few years, it’s all about optimizing, transforming and figuring out how we take clicks out of the process and asking ourselves, can the technology work faster?” said Stave.
There has been a focus on developing an AI roadmap, nonetheless.
“Our goal is to figure out how we make our advisors more productive and serve more clients with what they have today, so we have lots of smaller proof of concepts going on with [AI firms] like Anthropic and TIFIN in the marketplace right now, we have this really cool household meeting prep solution, for example,” he said.
Stave described one of them, a money-in-motion tool that provides the advisor an alert if an opportunity to capture the assets arises and suggests the advisor get in touch.
“Maybe they’ve sold a painting, maybe they’ve sold a horse—these are real examples—paintings and horses are the kinds of things that people sell and don’t tell their advisor about, and these are the types of things we’re doing, sort of front and center in production,” he said regarding AI.
All three executives were adamant that retaining control over, testing and creating guardrails around what AI can do and has access to are crucial in each of their operations.
“Authorization and authentication for AI systems—it’s really kind of the root of what you have to get right,” said Farther’s Genser.
While discussions of AI and data management represented some of the more optimistic, future-looking buildouts among the CTOs, fears over cybersecurity were a theme in the conversation as well.
“There are a lot of really good things about working for a big, boring Canadian bank,” said RBC’s Stave.
“It means I have resources, if you look us up, we’re one of the six largest banks in the world and how we do governance, we have a really good security risk assessment and management process, and vendor assessment process —there are probably 150 people supporting those two processes,” he said, noting that it can take a couple months for the vetting and setup of a third-party technology provider on the firm’s platform.
“That’s not a bad thing, it does make sure that we are protected, our clients are protected,” he said.
The tension between delivering on the potential and ever-evolving capabilities of new technology opens up additional security challenges.
“Now we have mobile apps, we increasingly have people who want to see things through voice interfaces, access to AI, these are expanding the surface areas we have to protect,” said Farther’s Genser. He said that there are ways of doing this and that it should not be something firms fear; rather, they must keep security top of mind.
“I mean, who here would like to interact with, like Alexa for their wealth, like clients we interview do,” he said, using Amazon’s Alexa more as an example of commonly used existing voice interaction technology.
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