WealthTech Safari — Week of August 14, 2026
- 38 minutes ago
- 6 min read
WealthTech Strategy opens a free job exchange
WealthTech Strategy launched the WealthTech Job Exchange, a free listing board where people looking for their next challenge submit a casual profile that the team drafts, and where anything a candidate wants kept quiet can simply read “Upon Request.”
Trading on network rather than fees, and built to accommodate confidential searches, it targets the part of WealthTech hiring that never reaches a job board: senior operators who cannot be seen looking.
MoneyLion veterans raise $10 million for a wealth data ontology
Astraeus, a New York platform founded by former MoneyLion global CTO Phill Rosen and former MoneyLion wealth head Jon Stevenson, went live on August 6 with more than $10 million from Fintech Collective, F-Prime, Walkabout Ventures and Plug and Play Ventures.
The pitch is a semantic layer unifying clients, advisors, accounts, products, fees and regulatory requirements without a rip-and-replace, sold to advisory firms, wealthtech platforms and private equity owners rather than to individual advisors.
Knote: I'm not seeing anything new here at first glance, but I'm looking forward to digging in. F-Prime does not back things lightly.
nCino opens its mortgage suite to AI agents over MCP
nCino, the cloud banking and lending platform, launched Mortgage MCP, letting lenders connect Model Context Protocol–compatible AI agents to the nCino Mortgage Suite through pre-built Admin MCP and Loan Officer MCP tools.
Every action runs inside nCino’s existing permissioning and audit logging, with timestamped records and configurable human confirmation on higher-impact steps — the part that decides whether agentic lending clears a risk committee.
Knote: There is a lot of money yet to be made in lending infrastructure and it is a natural place for well governed AI, particularly at community banks and CUs.
eToro buys TradeZero for up to $231 million to crack US active trading
eToro, the global social investing platform, agreed to acquire TradeZero, a US brokerage built for active and day traders with roughly $80 million of trailing revenue at an 81% gross margin, in a cash-and-stock deal worth up to $231 million.
TradeZero’s broker-dealer subsidiaries and proprietary short-locator technology hand eToro US infrastructure it has been renting, with management guiding to first-year accretion on an expected close in the first half of 2027.
Knote: With Robinhood expanding crypto trading into the UK, it only seems fair that eToro expands into the US. The Company says they expect it to be accretive in year 1, which makes sense to us since we believe TradeZero is profitable and most of the deal is cash. And eToro has arguably way too much cash on the balance sheet (about $1.2B of its $2.4B market cap last we looked).
Schwab capex jumps on a $633 million software license
The Charles Schwab Corporation reported second-quarter capital expenditures of $792 million against $136 million a year earlier, driven primarily by a $633 million multi-year software license booked with a matching liability in long-term debt.
Full-year capex now runs above the guided 3% to 5% of net revenues, and the filing names artificial intelligence, digital assets and private company securities as competitive trends alongside the phased Schwab Crypto rollout and the closed Forge Global deal.
Knote: We don't have any details on the mystery vendor behind this large tech contract yet, but at $633M, I would not be surprised it rhymed with Planthropic.
eToro says it rewrote its entire app with AI and wired in trading agents
eToro posted second-quarter net contribution up 9% to $229 million and funded accounts up 18% to 4.28 million, and told analysts it rebuilt its app from scratch using AI, replacing what it claims was more than 500 person-years of prior development.
Official Grok and Claude connectors now let users authorize AI agents to trade autonomously under read-only or portfolio-scoped permissions, moving agentic investing out of the demo and into production plumbing.
Knote: The most interesting data point for me is that they say they re-wrote their entire code base with AI. So AI has replaced what they claim was 500 person-years of work in (presumably) something far less than 500 person-years. Those are some fancy numbers.
Vanguard opens its models to advisor customization at no extra fee
Vanguard launched custom model portfolios letting advisors personalize its Strategic Active/Passive and Fixed-Income models, delivered through Vestmark under SS&C Black Diamond or Orion’s Tailored Allocation Portfolios, with no additional charge for customization.
Custom model assets reached $258 billion by the first quarter, up 40% year over year, and a Morningstar survey found 47% of advisors cite insufficient customization as their reason for not using models at all.
Knote: Custom models are a huge pain point, especially in the UK. The advisor user experience is critical, though. Key points to evaluate are (1) the amount of work and thought required on the part of the advisor during the customization process and (2) how automated is the rebalancing?
Edward Jones technology spend climbs 29% as advisory assets surge
The Jones Financial Companies reported communications and data processing expense up 29% to $356 million in the second quarter and up 24% to $673 million in the first half, attributed to continued investment in new tools and technology.
Advisory program assets under care rose 29% to $1,198 billion while branches fell 3% and home office associates fell 7%, a mix showing the technology bill buying scale rather than headcount.
Centricity raises $20 million seed led by Lightspeed at a $125 million valuation
Centricity, an India-based wealth management technology firm founded in 2022, raised $20 million led by Lightspeed at a $125 million valuation, joined by the Burman, MS Dhoni, NB Ventures and MMG Group family offices.
Its Invictus and OneDigital platforms already reach more than 4,500 distributors across 26 cities, and a plan to double the technology team from 75 to over 150 specialists marks distributor-facing infrastructure as the contested layer in India.
Knote: We continue to believe that D2C advice and investing market in India is one of the hottest WealthTech opportunities globally.
LLR maps four forces reshaping wealth and asset management
LLR Partners identified AI-enabled advice, broader access to alternatives, mass personalization and an expanded advisor value proposition as the four trends reshaping the market, citing EY-Parthenon research that 95% of asset and wealth managers already run at least three AI use cases.
The supporting numbers carry the argument: BNY projects private-wealth alternatives assets tripling to roughly $12 trillion over the decade, and Cerulli expects US direct indexing to pass $800 billion this year.
Knote: Solid themes from people who know their stuff. I would add AI governance/data to the AI theme as I see that as a big topic for 2027 and 2028.
Nitrogen extends its scoring model from risk to insurance
Nitrogen Wealth, the advisor platform formerly known as Riskalyze, launched Insurance Center, built on its Nucleus AI agent and organized around a Coverage Number where a result below 100 flags a gap and above 120 suggests excess.
LPL Financial is already an approved user, and with roughly 80% of Nitrogen’s advisor base using its existing tools for insurance purposes, the company is selling into demand it has been watching for years.
Knote: Insurance should be an easy win for holistic advisors, but it was only a hard win 5 years ago. Technology is changing that.
Apex turns Kalshi prediction markets into an API
Apex Fintech Solutions launched an API letting firms offer Kalshi-powered event contracts from their own platforms without building Futures Commission Merchant infrastructure or direct exchange connectivity, with tastytrade the first firm live.
Apex handles clearing, custody, money movement and statements through AscendOS while Kalshi supplies the regulated marketplace, packaging prediction markets as something a wealth platform switches on rather than builds.
Knote: Kalshi is quietly building itself into a premier prediction-markets-as-a-service platform for WealthTech. Others using its infrastructure for prediction trading include Robinhood & Coinbase (at least partially), Webull, Moomoo, Interactive Brokers, XP International, Clear, Wealthsimple, and Clear Street.
SEC exam priorities put AI claims and Reg S-P on the clock
A Leo RegTech analysis of the SEC Division of Examinations’ fiscal 2026 priorities notes that examiners will test whether a firm’s actual AI usage matches what it tells clients and regulators, and that smaller advisers had to meet amended Regulation S-P requirements by June 3, 2026.
The required documentation — incident response program, risk assessments, incident logs and vendor oversight records, all producible on short notice — is effectively the build spec for a modern compliance platform.
Knote: We usually don't publish writeups from vendors talking about the problems that their product solves, but this one seemed refreshingly balanced.
