WealthTech Safari — Week of October 9, 2026
Zocks packages seven Claude skills into an Advisor Intelligence plugin
Zocks launched an Advisor Intelligence plugin bundling seven Claude skills, including Next Best Action, Household Review Pack, Client Attrition Risk, Held-Away Radar and Tax Opportunity Scan, running on its read-only MCP connector across client data captured from past meetings.
With more than 5,000 firms on the platform, including 7 of the 9 Barron's Top Mega RIAs, Zocks is moving from notetaker to client-intelligence layer: a single prompt such as "prep the annual review" produces a summary, client letter, branded presentation and briefs for the client's accountant and attorney.
SEC proposes letting RIAs self-custody client crypto, and the industry splits
The SEC proposed custody rule changes that would let RIAs self-custody clients' crypto assets when no permitted custodian is available, rechecked quarterly, with requirements including two-person transaction authorization, private key management and at least annual cybersecurity reviews.
The lighter-touch proposal replaces the stricter 2023 approach after the CLARITY Act failed in Congress last month; the Investment Adviser Association welcomed it while Better Markets warned of a very high risk of loss, and comments run 60 days from Federal Register publication.
Knote: Why would an advisor do this? It's like taking custody of the egg from Alien: kind of cool but lots of unknowns and downside.
Altruist brings donor-advised funds in-platform through Endaoment
Altruist added donor-advised funds that advisors can open, fund, invest and manage alongside the rest of the household, powered by Endaoment, with no account-opening, balance or grant minimums and fees starting at 50 basis points versus a typical 60 to 65.
Letting DAF assets sit in any model in Altruist's marketplace, including custom and personalized-indexing strategies, removes the fixed-menu constraint that has historically pushed charitable assets off the advisor's investment platform.
Knote: It makes me wonder if any of the soon-to-be millionaires will use DAFs to donate some of their pre-IPO shares.
KKR to acquire fund administrator Gen II for $5.1 billion
KKR agreed to acquire Gen II Fund Services from Hg, General Atlantic and other minority investors at a $5.1 billion enterprise value; Gen II serves more than 275 investment managers and oversees over $2 trillion of private fund capital, with closing expected in 2027.
Gen II has quadrupled revenue and EBITDA since 2020, a sign that the reporting, tax and compliance plumbing behind private markets now commands infrastructure-grade valuations as wealth channels widen access to private funds.
Alto to acquire Forge Trust from Schwab to widen private-market access in IRAs
Alto, a Nashville-based self-directed IRA custodian and broker-dealer, agreed to acquire Forge Trust from Charles Schwab on undisclosed terms; the combined business will hold more than $20 billion in assets under custody across 60,000+ self-directed IRA accounts and 3 million+ Custody-as-a-Service accounts, pending South Dakota approval.
With more than $19.9 trillion in IRAs largely closed to private markets, per Alto, pairing a 40-year alternative-asset custodian with Alto's technology targets the onboarding friction that has kept alternatives out of retirement portfolios.
PlannerPal raises $6 million to build a client intelligence layer for UK advice
PlannerPal raised $6 million (£4.3 million) in a round led by Mercia Ventures with Ada Ventures participating; more than 250 UK advice firms, including Canaccord Wealth, use the platform to support around £150 billion in client assets, and it is the only AI partner in the Iress Partnership.
The move from meeting capture to connecting data across conversations, documents and core systems such as Xplan, Intelliflo and Curo reflects firms' demand for AI that works inside existing technology rather than as "another disconnected AI tool."
M1 launches M1 Advisor, an AI financial advisor under its own RIA
M1 launched M1 Advisor, an AI advisor offered through its SEC-registered RIA that reads clients' M1 Invest, Cash and Borrow data and remembers their goals; it is free through December 31, 2027 for a platform reporting more than $14 billion in client assets.
Weighing cross-account trade-offs, such as borrowing versus selling for a tax bill or unwinding concentrated employer stock, while never moving money on its own puts a fiduciary AI advisor directly inside a self-directed retail platform.
UK tailored MPS demand is structural, and automation is the bottleneck
At an MDOTM event in London, NextWealth data put on-platform discretionary MPS assets at £208bn, up 32% in a year; tailored models make up about 14% of MPS assets, nearly three-quarters of DFMs offer them, and average costs have roughly halved since 2021.
Running models across 20 or more platforms creates a heavy reconciliation burden, and panellists pointed to automated risk-budget rules, rebalancing and drift monitoring, with tokenisation as a possible step change, as the way to run tailoring at scale.
Knote: Getting the MPS (managed portfolio solutions) industry in the UK automated is a key theme for us in 2027. There is a huge technology gap between the UK and the US in this regard that needs to be closed.
Network Wealth selects OneVest to power its next-gen advice practice
Canadian wealth management firm Network Wealth selected OneVest's full platform, covering digital onboarding, account opening, portfolio management, a single client app and an advisor workspace, to power its Next-Gen Advice Practice.
Coming a week after OneVest's agentic account-opening launch, the win shows the Salesforce, Deloitte, TIAA, Allianz and OMERS-backed platform consolidating Canadian advice-firm workflows into a single stack.
AI ATC - A quick summary of interesting AI launches for those with AI fatigue
Morningstar Investor Perspectives for Advisors: 4 Trends Shaping Client Relationships https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/morningstar-investor-perspectives-for-advisors-4-trends-shaping-client-relationships
Ridgeline Showcases AI-Native Innovation at Fifth Annual Base Camp Conference https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/ridgeline-showcases-ai-native-innovation-at-fifth-annual-base-camp-conference
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!
Subscribe and receive these insights directly: wealthtechstrategy.com