WealthTech Safari — Week of September 11, 2026
Hello FutureProof!
FutureProof kicks off in Huntington Beach, California this coming week (September 14-17). I won't be there because nobody wants to see me in short pants, but if you see either of these two out there, say 'hi' and see if you can get them talking about WealthTech.
Envestnet to acquire Vestmark, adding institutional-grade trading and tax capabilities
Envestnet agreed to acquire Wakefield, Massachusetts-based Vestmark, which supports more than $2 trillion in assets across over five million accounts, in a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 on undisclosed terms.
The combination pairs Vestmark's wirehouse and institutional trading base with Envestnet's independent broker-dealer, scaled RIA and hybrid footprint, and both roadmaps — VestmarkONE, VAST, Envestnet Enterprise, Tamarac and MoneyGuide — continue with no mandatory migration.
Knote: This fills in a weak spot for Envestnet: tax-loss harvesting, high-powered rebalancing (including tax transition), and direct indexing. Look for that feature set to expand across the entire Envestnet ecosystem.
Savvy Wealth raises $100 million Series C to scale its AI-powered advisor platform
Savvy Wealth raised a $100 million Series C at a $600 million valuation led by Halo Fund, the investment firm of Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith and Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney, with Thrive Capital, Industry Ventures, Canvas Prime, Index Ventures, Vestigo Ventures, Allianz Life Ventures and Euclidean Capital returning.
The tech-enabled national RIA says it is on track for $100 million in annual recurring revenue by year-end, up from $10 million in January 2025, against more than 150 advisors and $8 billion in AUM as of July — so the number that matters is whether assets scale at a much higher rate than advisor count.
MMnote: The telltale of whether this investment is worth it will be whether AUM scales at a much higher rate than advisor count.
Rogo raised roughly $30 million from global banks and sets its sights on wealth management
Rogo raised approximately $30 million from Barclays, BNP Paribas through Opera Tech Ventures, Citi Ventures, MUFG Innovation Partners, Societe Generale and Sixth Street co-founder Josh Easterly, joining existing backers J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners and Truist Ventures on a cap table of nine global banks holding close to $20 trillion in assets.
More than 50,000 professionals across over 350 firms already run Rogo's agents — including its Felix workflow agent — inside their own security perimeters, and with bank wealth desks reportedly testing the platform, the competition is arriving in wealth management from capital markets rather than from the advisor-desktop vendors.
MMnote: Rogo has been making headlines for a while and I've been waiting on them to bring their talents to wealth management. If the WSJ rumors are true, welcome!
Luminary raises $22 million Series A to build the data layer for wealth transfer
Luminary raised a $22 million Series A led by Ten Coves Capital, with BNY, Fin Capital, Focus Financial Partners, Rockefeller Capital Management's FinTech Innovation Fund, 8VC and several family offices participating, taking total funding to nearly $32 million.
The AI-native platform turns estate documents into structured data across more than $500 billion in client assets for advisors, trust companies, law firms and accountants, and the strategic investor list echoes Wealth.com (Schwab), Vanilla (Vanguard, Edward Jones) and Trust & Will (Northwestern Mutual, UBS) — estate data has become infrastructure that distributors want to own a piece of.
MMnote: Strategic money is not foreign in estate planning. Wealth.com has Schwab, Vanilla has Vanguard and Edward Jones, and Trust & Will has Northwestern Mutual and UBS. Congrats to all parties!
Aqua launches turnkey alternatives platform backed by $18.8 million
New York-based Aqua launched what it calls the industry's first turnkey alternative investments platform, funded by $18.8 million across a $3.8 million seed from Google's AI Fund and Y Combinator and a $15 million Series A led by Arthur Ventures with Alumni Ventures participating.
Co-founder and CEO Rohan Marwaha argues most firms still meet client demand for alternatives with spreadsheets and fragmented manual process; consolidating fund creation, lifecycle management, document intelligence and investor servicing moves the alternatives question from access to operations, and turns it into a build-or-buy decision.
MWnote: If you already have a marketplace relationship, the question this raises is not whether to switch but whether the operations layer sitting on top of it is something you should be building yourself.
FMG Suite introduces FMG Connect to unify advisor tools, data and workflows
FMG Suite introduced FMG Connect, an integration and orchestration layer spanning advisor productivity, prospecting, relationship intelligence and client communication for a base of more than 80,000 financial professionals reaching over 45 million U.S. investors, with APIs available now and Model Context Protocol support planned.
Seven launch partners are already in early access — Zocks, Jump, Aidentified, WealthFeed, Tax Status, Asset-Map and GReminders — and the Asset-Map and Tax Status connections are the ones to watch, since held-away asset visibility and tax alerts turn a marketing platform into a prospecting engine with a reason to call.
Knote: Asset-Map and Tax Status are two interesting integrations in particular. That brings in the full asset picture (including held-away) and the tax picture (including alert opportunities).
Ebix launches Ebix Meridian, a new operating platform for U.S. financial advisory firms
Ebix made Ebix Meridian generally available in the United States at $149 per month, built on Ebix MoneyWare, which serves more than 300 financial institutions across 17 countries. It folds client management, planning, private markets and insurance advisory onto a single client record with a shared document vault and audit trail, white-labeled client and investor portals at no extra cost, and a Meridian AI layer covering conversational intake, portfolio analysis, document intelligence and predictive scoring under SOC 2 Type II.
There is no mention of custodial links or trading and rebalancing, which constrains the operating-system claim — but at that price point, emerging firms assembling a stack from scratch will take the meeting.
Knote: No mention of the custodial links or trading/rebalancing, but for an emerging advisor the prospects of a pre-packaged advisorOS that turns on and just plain works can be compelling.
Advisor headcount set to grow as AI expands capacity
Cerulli Associates, in partnership with Vista Equity Partners, found wealth firms plan to add staff over the next two years — junior advisors at 73%, client service associates at 67% and senior advisors at 56% — while 64% report AI has already reduced manual and administrative work and 46% cite better client communication. AI-specific spending is projected to rise from 8% to 15% of technology budgets in 2026.
Half of firms still sit in the Exploring tier and only 12% reach Leading, and Cerulli's five differentiators — operating framework, defined governance, named ownership, formal training and measurement of results — matter more than firm size or technology spend.
State of AI in UK wealth and asset management
KPMG surveyed senior leaders at UK asset managers, wealth managers and specialist alternatives firms running £30 billion to more than £6 trillion, and found 83% deploying AI mainly for research summarization and legal contract review, 94% naming operational efficiency as the primary investment driver and 62% expecting budget increases over the next 12 to 24 months, with wealth firms most aggressive at 75% expecting AI budgets up 10-25% or more.
The gap is governance rather than ambition: 56% have a firmwide AI strategy but only 11% have embedded AI operating models, 72% name model hallucination as the top risk limiting adoption, 83% cite data readiness as the critical lesson, 75% point to skills shortages, and just 11% believe they are aligned with emerging AI regulation.
Knote: I am becoming a lot less interested in what AI can do and much more interested in how it is deployed and governed, especially after reading that only 11% of firms think they are in compliance with new AI regulation.
FinTurk adds PortfolioSolver and Vigil to its advisor-built CRM
FinTurk, an AI-first CRM built for financial advisors, launched PortfolioSolver, which turns plain-language investment constraints into structured rules that feed a deterministic optimizer, and Vigil, which monitors connections, portfolios, accounts, tasks and inboxes for pending work.
By keeping the language layer in AI and the trade math deterministic, FinTurk is pulling rebalancing and oversight functions advisors normally buy separately into the CRM itself, targeting capacity per advisor rather than headcount.
Knote: I love seeing companies using AI where they can but deterministic algorithms where it counts. This is an elegant blending of the two.
NextWealth benchmarks put the average adviser at 88 clients in UK
NextWealth’s Financial Advice Business Benchmarks research found advisers manage an average of 88 clients, with a new client taking around 32 hours of staff time to onboard and an existing client 62 hours of ongoing support each year.
Only 15 of those 62 hours sit with the adviser, placing the real capacity constraint in the surrounding paraplanning, research and compliance work, which is exactly where AI is being applied as one firm discusses moving from 150 clients per adviser to 200.
Knote: We have run into advisors in the UK who are servicing 300 clients per advisor, but these numbers seem right. Technology to the rescue.
Conquest Planning drops “Planning” and repositions around its SAM engine
Conquest Planning shortened its name to Conquest and unveiled a refreshed identity, repositioning around its Strategic Advice Manager engine, which pairs a calculation engine with a proprietary AI expert system that ranks strategies and models life events.
The rename moves a planning software vendor into the broader advice-engine category, and the headless architecture, with a deterministic algorithm and checkable audit trail behind every recommendation, is the pitch to compliance teams for white-label distribution across wealth segments.
Knote: WealthTech often reminds me of Italy in the late Middle Ages with everyone wanting to take over everything adjacent to them.
AI ATC - A quick summary of interesting AI launches for those with AI fatigue
FINTRX Launches New AI Agent Named "Fin" That Monitors Their Advisor Database Prompts Actions https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/fintrx-launches-new-ai-agent-named-fin-that-monitors-and-integrates-private-wealth-data-and-intell
WealthStream Adds OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 to Practice, Launching at Future Proof https://www.wealthtechstrategy.com/post/wealthstream-adds-openai-s-gpt-live-1-to-practice-launching-at-future-proof
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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