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WealthTech Safari — Week of September 18, 2026

10 minutes ago
7 min read

Charles Schwab and Anthropic bring Claude to 16,000 independent RIAs

  • Schwab Advisor Services partnered with Anthropic to deliver Claude for Financial Advisors to more than 16,000 registered investment advisors, with authenticated access to Schwab Advisor Center inside Claude and integrations across CRM, custody, portfolio reporting, planning and meeting tools.

  • Schwab is currently the only RIA custodian offering the integration, which places custodial data inside the assistant rather than alongside it and makes the custody relationship, not the software stack, the distribution channel for advisor AI.

Knote: While there is a chance it's less impressive than the headline, my bet is that Anthropic will win the Most Crowded Booth award at IMPACT in October.

Anthropic releases Claude for Financial Advisors with eleven wealth connectors

  • Anthropic released Claude for Financial Advisors, adding eleven connectors spanning Addepar, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Envestnet, iCapital, Orion, SS&C Black Diamond, Wealthbox, Wealth.com, Vanguard and Zocks, alongside eight packaged workflow skills.

  • Bundling pre-meeting prep, rebalance review, estate and tax briefs and a compliance skill that screens client-facing language against the SEC Marketing Rule moves the assistant out of general chat and into named advisor workflows, with regulated activities still routed through human approval.

Accenture launches Trusted Wealth Ops on Salesforce and Claude

  • Accenture introduced Accenture Trusted Wealth Ops, an AI-native offering combining Salesforce's governed data and execution layer with Anthropic's Claude, targeting 24-hour onboarding, a not-in-good-order rate below 5% and up to 25% higher advisor productivity.

  • The guardrail list — permissions, approved data sources, human approvals, exception routing and audit logging — carries as much of the pitch as the agents do, which is how systems integrators are now selling AI into enterprise wealth.

Knote: Reducing onboarding to "just 24 hours" does not sound all that impressive these days, but heading in the right direction.

Ritholtz Wealth Management picks Hadrius to govern firmwide Claude deployment

  • Ritholtz Wealth Management, a national RIA with more than $9.4 billion in assets, selected Hadrius to monitor Claude Enterprise activity firmwide through Claude's Compliance API and to consolidate all communications archiving onto the platform.

  • Archiving AI interactions the way firms already archive email answers a supervision question that SEC and FINRA obligations imply but do not yet specify, making governance tooling a precondition of an enterprise rollout rather than a purchase that follows one.

Knote: We continue to feel that AI Governance, which compliance is a part of, will be the biggest net new add to roadmaps in 2027.

AI usage costs are rewriting the WealthTech vendor's pricing model

  • The Oasis Group argues per-seat licensing breaks once every summary and drafted communication carries variable cost, noting usage-based and hybrid pricing grew from 30% of software companies in 2019 to roughly 85% by 2024 and that 73% of AI vendors now charge separately for AI features.

  • With 78% of IT leaders reporting unexpected AI-related charges in the past year, the renewal questions become whether the AI feature is capped or metered, what happens when a cap is crossed, and who absorbs a mid-term increase from the vendor’s own model provider.

Knote: The Oasis team is spot-on again. We have looked at several companies where the unit economics actually break at scale due to AI costs.

Vanguard survey finds advisors adopting AI but still short on client time

  • Vanguard surveyed 549 U.S. advisors in July 2026 and found 72% want more time for prospecting and deepening client relationships, while AI use concentrates in drafting emails at 38%, research at 35% and meeting notes at 27%.

  • Compliance concerns and firm hesitation lead the barriers at 37%, ahead of insufficient learning time at 34% and skill gaps at 31%, which places the constraint on adoption inside the firm’s own approval process rather than in the technology.

Knote: A few surprising/questionable stats: only 27% use AI notetakers (seems really low) and approximately 2/3 use model portfolios (seems really high). Also note that 37% mentioned compliance as a blocker.

Zeplyn opens Agent Studio and an MCP server to wealth firms

  • Zeplyn introduced Agent Studio, which lets firms define custom agents in plain language, and a Model Context Protocol server that gives outside AI applications and proprietary advisor tools governed access to those agents, client intelligence and more than 60 wealth-specific tools.

  • Publishing an MCP server concedes that the vendor’s own interface may not be where advisors work, and shifts the competition to governed access — role-based permissions, audit trails, PII redaction and human review — rather than ownership of the screen.

Verapath and GenTrust launch VIRA, an AI-native platform for RIAs

  • Verapath and GenTrust formed a joint venture and made VIRA generally available, unifying CRM, planning, portfolio, performance reporting, tax and data warehouse capabilities behind one interface, one system of record and one view of every client.

  • GenTrust, with nearly $6 billion under management, has run its own advisory business on VIRA’s predecessor for a decade, which is the claim the launch rests on: an operating platform proven in production before it was productized.

Broadridge brings its digital assets platform to U.S. wealth firms

  • Broadridge expanded its next-generation digital assets platform from Canada into the United States, giving broker-dealers, RIAs and wealth managers cryptocurrencies and tokenized real-world assets through its DLX tokenization platform, with Anchorage Digital and Galaxy Digital as initial partners.

  • Delivering wallets and institutional-grade custody through existing books and records systems, rather than through a separate venue, is what moves digital assets from a side allocation into the same operating model as the rest of the portfolio.

Knote: The real win here would be seeing tokenized private assets right alongside your public assets. Crypto is interesting, but not the big win, especially after the Clarity Act failed its procedural vote this week.

SEC approves a conditional Innovation Exemption for tokenized NMS stocks

  • The Commission approved a temporary, conditional exemption allowing permissioned trading of tokenized NMS stocks on Tokenized Securities Venues, subject to symbol limits, volume caps calibrated to limit up, limit down tiers, public transaction data and technology safeguards.

  • The relief is deliberately narrow and the Commission is soliciting data-supported comment on its design, so the near-term effect is a supervised test of onchain venues rather than an opening of tokenized equity trading.

Knote: I think tokenized public equities is a "nice to have" but the real game changer is tokenized private assets and anything that gets us closer is a thumbs-up in my book.

State Street goes live with RIA custody built on Apex

  • State Street launched State Street Wealth Services, an RIA clearing and custody business built on Apex Fintech Solutions’ platform with State Street acting as introducing broker, expecting its first anchor client within a couple of months and citing roughly 40 more RIA firms in the pipeline.

  • Targeting firms with $1 billion or more and hiring from Altruist, LPL and TD Ameritrade puts a new entrant into a custody market already being reshaped by Vanguard’s purchase of Altruist, with legacy platform-placement economics named as the opening.

Aberdeen Portfolio Solutions selects Jacobi for its model portfolio service

  • Aberdeen Portfolio Solutions Limited, responsible for £3.4 billion across six MPS solutions, selected Jacobi’s Model Portfolio Management System to industrialize rebalancing, deliver forward-looking analytics and complement its compliance and governance framework.

  • Institutional-grade tooling arriving in UK MPS is the same industrialization that reshaped US TAMPs, and it moves DFM competition from model construction toward the rigor and auditability of the rebalancing process behind it.

Knote: This is the sort of thing that needs to happen across the entire European MPS market and something we see as a key WealthTech theme over the next 5 years. Check out this conference in London Sept 29 by TWM: UK MPS - Talking Technology

Canadian dealers under 500 advisors make technology the recruiting pitch

  • All five smaller dealers in Investment Executive’s Dealers’ Report Card named technology a priority, with Carte Wealth automating roughly 80% of onboarding through IntellectAI, Portfolio Strategies building its proprietary Responsive App and Sterling Mutuals adding Continuum AI notetaking to OneBoss.

  • KPMG’s Geoffrey Barthelot notes smaller firms cannot match larger dealers on compensation but can adopt sooner because legacy systems are not in the way, which turns the absence of scale into the argument for a differentiated advisor platform.

Knote: It's hard to differentiate an aggregator with the standard "we take care of your back office." This survey highlights technology as a differentiator and we agree. We would probably add "payouts" and "leads" in the differentiation mix as well.

Collective launches Compass for advising on clients’ pre-IPO equity

  • Collective launched Compass, an AI platform pairing research across thousands of private companies with client-specific exit scenarios, tax modeling and execution spanning stock sales, loans, option exercises, exchange funds and charitable strategies.

  • With more than 900 U.S. unicorns valued at roughly $6 trillion and a median 14 years from founding to IPO, illiquid paper wealth has become a planning problem advisors have to answer rather than an event they can wait out.

Knote: I am not 100% sure this needs to be "AI", but they were on the main stage at Future Proof and private stock liquidity and planning is a hot topic

Grantd and Collective Liquidity partner on private market analytics for advisors

  • Grantd Equity integrated Collective Liquidity’s private market data, analytics and wealth products, giving advisors on a platform supporting more than 400 RIA firms and $15 billion in assets under administration access to Compass and the Collective Exchange Fund.

  • Pairing equity compensation data with a tax-deferred diversification vehicle addresses concentration risk where it originates, and extends the same tooling into Grantd for Work as an employee benefit at private and public companies.

Knote: An equity comp company teaming up with a 351 exchange company. Makes sense.

Quartz launches in the UK with £2.75 million pre-seed

  • Quartz opened in the UK with £2.75 million in pre-seed funding led by Daphni, with Outward VC and K Fund participating, and reported more than £10 million of member assets tracked since testing began at the start of the year.

  • Built by a former Revolut expansion lead on proprietary connectors across pensions, ISAs, savings and investment accounts, with FCA registration as an Account Information Service Provider, the aggregation layer rather than the assistant is the harder asset here.

AI ATC - A quick summary of interesting AI launches for those with AI fatigue

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