WealthTech Safari — Week of August 7, 2026
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Slant launches AI-built intake forms inside its CRM
• Slant, an AI-native CRM for advisors, launched Intake Forms that users create by describing what they want in plain language, with submitted responses applied to the client record in one click.
• Pulling known CRM data and extracting details from an uploaded tax return before the client is asked anything reframes the form as an output of the database rather than a separate tool bolted onto it.
Knote: More evidence of the power of AI-based CRM. Some people feel AI will kill off CRMs. I agree with that, but only if “CRMs” are defined narrowly as what traditional CRMs look like now. Either way, I do enjoy a good AI demo, especially if it is not vaporware.
Morningstar posts 9.6% revenue growth while Wealth keeps shrinking
• Morningstar, the data, research and ratings provider, reported second-quarter revenue of $663.2 million, up 9.6%, with operating income up 28.4% to $160.6 million and diluted earnings per share up 35.4% to $2.83.
• Morningstar Credit grew 23.4% while Morningstar Wealth revenue fell 6.2% to $60.3 million, leaving the advisor-facing business as the drag on an otherwise strong quarter as Kunal Kapoor pitches agentic workflows built on the firm’s data.
Knote: From a WealthTech standpoint, the drivers to watch are Credit Ratings, Private Asset Ratings (not there yet, although they might try to argue otherwise), and Public/Private Models.
Allfunds crosses €1.9 trillion in assets with alternatives up 54%
• Allfunds, the European fund distribution platform, reported assets under administration of €1,943 billion at 30 June, up 21.3% year-on-year, with net revenue up 9.9% to €337.6 million and adjusted EBITDA up 10.2% to €229.0 million.
• Alternatives Solutions assets grew 54.4% to €41.4 billion across 253 alternative fund partners, pushing open architecture toward the default even as Deutsche Börse’s acquisition waits on final approval expected in the first half of 2027.
Knote: Things to watch from a WealthTech lense: Increase in Alternatives (we believe model portfolio services will be a primary beneficiary) and increasing demand for MPS from independent advisors (we believe a significant tailwind for Allfunds).
WealthReach buys AdvisorRankings to chase AI-search visibility
• WealthReach, an AI-powered organic growth platform for RIAs, acquired AdvisorRankings, a 16-year-old search and AI-search agency built for financial advisors, which will keep operating under its own brand with founder Brent Carnduff leading business development.
• Adding done-for-you execution alongside self-serve technology is a bet that advisors need help being found by Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity rather than Google alone, and that those leads carry higher intent and net worth.
CAIS raises $170 million at a valuation above $2 billion
• CAIS, the alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, raised a $170 million Series D led by Vista Equity Partners with AllianceBernstein, Blue Owl, Carlyle, Fortress, Golub Capital, Lord Abbett and Royal Bank of Canada joining, taking total capital raised to nearly $600 million.
• The platform now serves more than 2,500 wealth management firms and 65,000 advisors overseeing roughly $8.5 trillion, and the investor list itself shows alternative managers with tapped-out institutional demand buying into the wealth channel’s plumbing.
MMnote: While $600 million raised is a crazy amount, what’s more impressive is 37% organic CAGR for such a mature platform. Some can be attributed to the functionality, but the alts market is so ripe that this can be achieved before taking wallet share from anyone else. My guess is 90% of those folks haven’t had a solution for alternatives prior to using CAIS.
Ripple invests in ZILO and Licuido to build out tokenized fund infrastructure
• Ripple, the blockchain-based enterprise infrastructure provider, made strategic investments in transfer agency technology firm ZILO and tokenization and trading platform Licuido, adding regulated record-keeping, issuance and collateral mobility to its XRP Ledger platform.
• Pairing issuance, custody and atomic settlement with the RLUSD stablecoin as the cash leg targets the unglamorous gap holding tokenized funds back: collateral sitting idle and settlement lagging.
Advisor website form submissions doubled while traffic barely moved
• Snappy Kraken, an advisor marketing platform, released its State of Digital & AI 2026 report drawn from more than 9,000 advisors, finding website form submissions up 110% between 2024 and 2025 against a 10.3% rise in traffic, and fourth-quarter conversion rates up 106%.
• Advisors with connected CRM systems saw three to four times the engagement of those without, yet only 14.2% ran referral campaigns and just 23% of awareness users added nurture sequences, concentrating the gains among the minority who wired their systems together.
Knote: There is certainly a lot to unpack here, but the general message seems to be that both inbound and outbound marketing are working. We are a bit surprised by the uptick in click and open rates on outbound. Our loose notion was that AI would create a content blunderbuss that would force those rates down. Perhaps the take-away is that it is the nurturing campaign that matters more.
WealthTech funding splits between real traction and nothing at all
• WealthTech Strategy’s H1 2026 quarterly transaction report, built from every tracked WealthTech fundraising and acquisition event, finds sub-$10 million deals at an all-time low while $10 million to $30 million rounds sit at an all-time high.
• The middle of the market has effectively disappeared: a great product no longer attracts capital on its own, and demonstrated traction now makes a round hard to avoid.
Orion brings fractional share trading to RIAs on Schwab custody
• Orion, the advisor technology and outsourced investment provider, launched fractional share trading for registered investment advisors custodying with Schwab Advisor Services, built directly into Orion Trading and its order management system.
• Investing to exact dollar amounts removes the residual cash and tracking differences that whole-share limits impose on model portfolios, and quietly lowers the practical minimum account size for model-based investing.
Knote: Given that almost 1/3 of the S&P is trading over $250 per share, this seems like a solid win for advisors.
TradePMR puts Robinhood’s retail AI in front of advisors
• TradePMR by Robinhood announced Robinhood Cortex for Advisors at SYNERGY26, bringing the AI already deployed across nearly one million retail Robinhood investors to the Fusion platform at no additional charge.
• Presenters conceded that AI in wealth management remains “middle-to-middle” rather than end-to-end, with advisor comfort still concentrated in note-taking and form completion rather than anything client-facing.
Knote: Don’t forget about AI governance.
Edward Jones targets January for its in-house bank
• Edward Jones, the branch-based brokerage, is on track to launch its own bank in January under President Andrea Moss, having received Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Utah Department of Financial Institutions approval in March.
• The bank is built for lending rather than checking, eventually extending the firm’s Reserve Line of Credit to all 50 states and feeding its private client service division and Edward Jones Generations as margin lending hits record highs.
Knote: The mission is to not give your clients an excuse to get within 50 meters of a Chase or Bank of America branch.
Latin America’s largest seed round goes to a WealthTech
• Decade, a Brazilian AI personal finance platform founded by former Nubank CTO Vitor Olivier, raised $85 million, roughly 440 million reais, from Benchmark, Diffusion, Greenoaks, Atlantico and Norte Ventures in what is identified as Latin America’s largest seed round.
• At 200 reais a month for AI-driven portfolio analysis backed by human consultants over WhatsApp, Decade is testing whether direct-to-consumer advice scales in a market where Olivier says only 7% of Brazilians could retire on their own resources.
Knote: Just to remind us that India is not the only game in D2C town, in steps the other “BRIC”.
Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss any of the above or if you just want to chat about WealthTech. We love talking WealthTech!
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