I came to Wealthspire Advisors from their Private Ocean Acquisition about three years ago. I was leading operations at Private Ocean and took on the role of head of M&A integration for Wealthspire. This last year, I added the additional hat of head of advisory technology. We do have a parent organization, NFP, that manages all of the infrastructure—our [data] warehouses, our Microsoft products, etc.
It has been an exciting time. We’ve just passed $30 billion in AUM. We have 375-plus employees and 26 offices as of today.
We took a pause in the last year to acknowledge that, since our formation in 2019, we have tripled in size and integrated more than nine firms. We … formally launched Wealthspire 2.0 in summer 2024. We were looking to balance innovation with our boutique-level service.
CRM: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC)
With nine firms coming together, there were best practices all over the place. I have a special eye for what those best practices are because I’ve worked on their integration. And since we are a fully integrated firm, we asked, ‘How do we let the best of the best rise up and leverage that and disseminate it across the firm?’
We were previously on [Microsoft] Dynamics, and we did try to first build the processes on Dynamics. But it’s very clear for our industry, specifically, that other vendors and other technology add-ins go to Salesforce first to build their integration. Whether it’s eMoney, Tamarac or others, they look to integrate and have an out-of-the-box solution with Salesforce first.
Also, the people and consultant ecosphere was smaller, and it was very challenging, either externally or internally, to find the experts that we needed in order to build as quickly as we wanted.
In addition, one of the best practices that emerged from one of our integrated firms was that Private Ocean founder Greg Friedman had a history of CRM development as the owner and founder of Junxure, which is now AdvisorEngine. Greg and I had partnered at Private Ocean with Salesforce FSC to build the architecture of what they call an accelerator. We could leverage much of Private Ocean’s work as the baseline for the new Wealthspire national implementation.
So far, the advisors are loving it. It’s been one of the easiest rollouts I’ve done from a technology standpoint. One long-term New York advisor reached out and said, ‘Wow, I’m finding value here. The screens are simple, clean and raising the most important things to my eyes.’ I have a handful of stories like that.
Reporting & Portfolio Management: Tamarac / Envestnet and Addepar
Wealthspire 2.0, again, is about looking at the full technology stack. So we are looking at alternatives to Tamarac as we would in the normal course of reviews. We’ve made no decisions and, in fact, have made a short-term commitment to Tamarac. We will be launching their new client portal here shortly this summer.
I think that in the next 12 to 24 months, we will fully solidify what our future needs will be, whether that’s Tamarac or others. There’s so much going on as far as investment in that space, and firms like Addepar and Orion competing. It’s important for Wealthspire to stay abreast of that and make long-term decisions based on what they’re advancing. So we’re talking to all of those players.
We also just committed to implementing Addepar into our Salesforce platform for our ultra-high-net-worth and alternative-heavy clientele. We have one firm that we acquired, GMAG, that uses Addepar, and it’s incredibly important to their client experience. We have committed to continuing that, which I think is a little different for RIAs today, to have reporting just for the reporting side and to allow the advisors to deliver on different platforms.
Financial Planning: eMoney and Envestnet MoneyGuide
We’re very solidly going to remain eMoney and MoneyGuide. The advisor experience and transitioning clients to their financial planning portal are heavy lifts that directly impact the end client.
More and more of our advisors are looking to transition to eMoney, and in a perfect world, I would be building on one platform because I can have deeper integrations. I can maybe deliver an AI solution overlay more quickly if I’m just dealing with one. We’ll probably do some of that innovative development on eMoney first because I have more actual financial plans in eMoney than MoneyGuide. But again, we’ll continue to support both because of that client experience transition challenge.
Document Management: Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint is the reason we’re in the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Our data warehouse is SQL, which is Microsoft-based, and we’re using its Copilot as our base AI solution. Copilot can very easily look across all of our Teams meetings, all of our SharePoint documents, our emails, etc.
Primary/Secondary Custodians: Schwab / Fidelity / Pershing
Our custodians are meeting or exceeding our needs and innovating at the speed we’ve needed. They’re supporting APIs into our data warehouse, and that kind of work. We’re pretty satisfied.
I think that if we were to bring another custodian in, it would be out of an acquisition.
AI Notetaking and Tools
We’re also talking to all of the AI notetaking and digital onboarding solutions. We’re planning on making a selection that moves less toward a generic co-pilot and more toward a specialized RIA financial advisor-specific AI overlay. We want to make that choice this year, so there will definitely be more to come on that.
I actually was just in a general AI training course, and I think the reality is that for the next five-plus years, we should get used to having many AI tools. We’ll have Copilot. We’ll have one of the notetakers. We’ll have digital onboarding, and eMoney and Tamarac will all have an AI component.
I also have a philosophy of buy it versus build. I don’t personally have the capacity to spend my entire day understanding everything about AI. But some of the RIA-specific AI tool creators do that all day long. They are innovating at a speed much quicker than I have the capacity to do, so I want to leverage that.
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