Donachie, P. (2026, May 22). AI Creates Further Risk in the 'Wild West' of Finfluencers. WealthManagement.com. https://www.wealthmanagement.com/regulation-compliance/finra-warns-finfluencers-pose-growing-risk-to-investors The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority identifies financial influencers, or finfluencers, as a significant emerging threat to retail investor protection. Regulatory authorities are concerned that social media personalities often promote complex financial products without disclosing their compensation or underlying conflicts of interest. FINRA's 2025 Annual Oversight and Adversary Report highlights a sharp increase in aggressive marketing tactics that target younger and less experienced investors. The report notes that many finfluencers lack the professional licensing required to provide specific investment advice or recommendations to the public. Broker-dealers are being reminded of their responsibility to supervise any third-party communications that are conducted on their behalf by social media partners. The rise of digital engagement practices has prompted regulators to increase scrutiny on how gamification and social proof influence high-risk trading behavior. FINRA plans to enhance its surveillance and enforcement actions to address fraudulent schemes and misinformation spread through popular social media platforms.

WEALTHTECH SAFARI A Guided Tour of WealthTech News Week of May 22, 2026 SEC opens the door for mutual funds and ETFs to invest in private assets • The SEC Staff issued a transformative no-action letter on April 27, 2026, expanding exempt relief for private asset transactions—previously limited to closed-end funds—to now include open-end mutual funds and ETFs, reversing historical prohibitions under the Investment Company Act of 1940. • While open-end funds must still cap illiquid investments at 15% of total assets, this regulatory shift materially broadens retail investor access to alternative strategies and accelerates the convergence of public and private markets within mainstream investment vehicles. Knote: Mutual Funds and ETFs will still be limited to only 15% in illiquid assets, but it plays along the same theme of the SEC softening its stance on private investments, presumably because they see some value there, or at least utility -- a key driver of the Alts2Wealth thesis. Read More → Farther raises $150 million Series D, achieves unicorn status • Farther, a New York-based AI-native wealth management platform founded in 2019, raised $150 million in a Series D round led by General Atlantic, surpassing $23 billion in recruited assets and tripling its year-over-year growth since Q1 2025. • The round validates the thesis that tech-native, integrated platforms are pulling growth-minded advisors away from legacy institutions—and the 3x industry organic growth rate signals this isn’t just a niche trend but a structural shift in how advisory practices are built. Knote: If there are any RIA aggregators or PE firms not yet convinced about the value of technology in their thesis, look no further than Farther. 3x the industry organic growth rate. Read More → Moment secures $78 million Series C to scale AI operating system for investment management • Moment, founded by former Citadel Securities quants and traders, raised $78 million in a Series C led by Index Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to $134 million—less than 10 months after its Series B. • The platform now powers firms managing over $10 trillion in client assets—including Edward Jones, LPL Financial, and Hightower—demonstrating that regulatory-grade AI agents for portfolio construction, compliance, and execution have moved well past the proof-of-concept stage. MMnote: Scaling from $300 billion to $10 trillion in client assets in just 18 months is absolutely wild. It is a clear sign that the industry is finally moving past the experimental chatbot phase and into serious, infrastructure-level automation. Read More → Bunch raises $35 million Series B to modernize private fund operations in Europe • bunch, a private market fund operations platform founded in 2021, secured $35 million in a Series B led by Portage with participation from Illuminate Financial and existing investors Motive Partners, Cherry Ventures, and Fintech Collective to expand its AI capabilities across Europe. • As ELTIF 2.0 opens European private wealth channels to alternative assets, the operational burden on fund managers is surging—and bunch’s automated onboarding, capital calls, and tax reporting infrastructure positions it to capture the plumbing layer of this structural shift. MMnote: ELTIF 2.0 is essentially the European equivalent to what we see in the US come out as interval funds and non-traded BDCs. The Alts2Wealth craze is not specific to the U.S. and some would argue that it's even moving faster in Europe. Read More → NEXT Investors backs Transient.AI in Series A to advance AI in regulated capital markets • NEXT Investors, a New York-based PE firm specializing in capital markets infrastructure, made a Series A investment in Transient.AI—the platform’s first institutional capital—to accelerate deployment of its AI operating system across front, middle, and back office trading operations at regulated financial institutions. • The platform’s emphasis on compliance-first AI—continuously scanning trading activity for anomalies and suspicious patterns—addresses a critical gap where institutional adoption of AI has been slowest due to regulatory complexity. Knote: I’m hoping they are leaving the AI to what AI does well and not the things that it does not do well (like doing the same thing the same way each time...for example, trade clearing and settlement). I love the idea of AI trade surveillance, though. Read More → Greenboard raises $20 million to make AI-native compliance accessible across financial firms • Greenboard, an AI-native securities compliance platform founded in 2023, secured $20 million in total funding including a $15.5 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, and now serves more than 500 firms with automated communications archiving, marketing reviews, and employee compliance workflows. • The launch of GreenboardGo—a conversational AI layer grounded in a firm’s own compliance books and records—signals a shift from compliance as a siloed cost center to compliance as a distributed, enterprise-wide capability, with early adopters reporting 60% reductions in onboarding time. CEnote: Compliance-related expenses are usually looked at as just that: expenses. It’s important though, and nobody talks about the potentially most impactful aspect of AI on wealth management: compliance. Read More → Envestnet and Orion deepen open-architecture integrations as TAMP competition heats up • Orion introduced an upgraded integration with Flourish that links held-away client cash account data directly into its reporting and planning workflows, while Envestnet announced a new partnership with fast-growing RIA firm Osaic to consolidate asset management onto a single platform. • These parallel moves reflect a broader structural trend in which TAMPs are competing less on proprietary product shelves and more on the depth and openness of their technology ecosystems—a shift that ultimately benefits advisors seeking unified, platform-based portfolio management. Read More → 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

The Daily Upside. (2026, May 21). Envestnet, Orion partnerships add new advisor tools to competing TAMPs. The Daily Upside. https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/wealthtech/envestnet-orion-partnerships-add-new-advisor-tools-to-competing-tamps/ Established TAMPs are actively building interconnected technology ecosystems to provide financial planning professionals with better tools. Orion recently introduced an upgraded integration with Flourish that allows eligible client cash account data to be linked directly into its reporting and planning workflows. This inclusion of held-away cash assets enables advisors to have deeper, more comprehensive planning conversations regarding cash-flow management and excess cash. Concurrently, Envestnet announced a new partnership with the rapidly growing registered investment advisory firm Osaic to consolidate asset management onto a single platform. The Envestnet and Osaic collaboration is intended to help advisors manage client portfolios more efficiently while simultaneously growing their platform assets. Industry executives note that these partnerships reflect a larger structural trend toward unified, platform-based asset management and open-architecture software. Ultimately, these technological integrations and shifts away from proprietary, walled-off data systems are designed to enhance the overall wealth management experience for both advisors and clients.

Graber, S., Nowakowski, J. J., Edwards, A. L., & O'Brien, J. J. (2026, May 19). SEC Staff Permits Mutual Fund and ETF Joint Transactions. Morgan Lewis. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/05/sec-staff-permits-mutual-fund-and-etf-joint-transactions The SEC Staff issued a transformative no-action letter on April 27, 2026, that expands exempt relief for closed-end fund private asset transactions to now include open-end mutual funds and ETFs. This regulatory relief reverses historical prohibitions under the Investment Company Act of 1940. By broadening the exemption, this action provides retail investors in Mutual Funds and ETFs with some access to alternative investment strategies previously restricted to closed-end funds. Fund governance is modernized by allowing a designated committee of at least three disinterested directors to authorize such transactions, rather than requiring approval from the full board. Despite this expanded flexibility, open-end funds must still strictly adhere to existing liquidity mandates, including the rule limiting illiquid investments to a maximum of 15% of total assets. Moving forward, advisers filing new exemptive applications or amendments after May 4, 2026, must explicitly name any open-end funds intending to rely on the regulatory order. Knote: Mutual Funds and ETFs will still be limited to only 15% in illiquid assets, but it plays along the same theme of the SEC softening its stance on private investments, presumably because they see some value there, or at least utility -- a key driver of the Alts2Wealth thesis.

New York-based financial technology company Moment announced it has raised $78 million in a Series C funding round. The round was led by Index Ventures, with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Avra, and other existing investors. This latest capital injection comes less than 10 months after the company secured its $36 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to $134 million. Moment provides an AI-powered operating system designed specifically for investment management infrastructure. Founded by former quants and traders from Citadel Securities, the platform replaces fragmented point solutions by unifying trading, portfolio management, and compliance into a single system. Its capabilities include specialized AI agents that handle portfolio construction from natural language, multi-asset portfolio optimization, real-time compliance surveillance, and automated order execution. This development highlights a major shift as major wealth management firms rapidly adopt artificial intelligence infrastructure to scale personalized services. Moment currently powers platforms for major institutions including Edward Jones, LPL Financial, and Hightower Advisors, collectively supporting firms that manage more than $10 trillion in client assets. For the broader wealth management industry, the platform demonstrates how secure, regulatory-grade AI agents can eliminate hours of manual labor and deliver custom client proposals in seconds. MMnote: Scaling from $300 billion to $10 trillion in client assets in just 18 months is absolutely wild. It is a clear sign that the industry is finally moving past the experimental chatbot phase and into serious, infrastructure-level automation. Link to Press Release

The private market fund operations platform bunch has secured $35 million in a Series B funding round to accelerate its commercial growth and expand its artificial intelligence capabilities across Europe. Portage led the investment round, which also included participation from Illuminate Financial along with existing investors Motive Partners, Cherry Ventures, and Fintech Collective. Founded in 2021, the company provides an integrated digital operating layer that replaces legacy, spreadsheet-based fund administration processes for private equity and venture capital managers. This technology directly addresses the growing industry surge in alternatives to wealth initiatives , where alternative asset managers seek new pools of capital as traditional institutional demand becomes tapped out. By ingesting unstructured documentation and structuring key data, the platform helps reduce the transparency, research, and onboarding friction that typically persists when wealth management platforms adopt alternative investments. The platform helps financial firms manage the entire fund lifecycle by automating digital investor onboarding, capital calls, fund accounting, and tax reporting. As alternative assets grow, structures like ELTIF 2.0 are expanding private wealth access to these complex vehicles. This influx of capital places significant operational pressure on wealth managers who must serve more investors while delivering rigorous reporting. Modernizing financial infrastructure through automated systems allows platforms and advisory firms to scale their alternative investment processes consistently without relying on outdated manual workflows. MMnote: ELTIF 2.0 is essentially the European equivalent to what we see in the US come out as interval funds and non-traded BDCs. The Alts2Wealth craze is not specific to the U.S. and some would argue that it's even moving faster in Europe. Link to Article

Farther announced it has raised $150 million in a Series D funding round led by General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors. The new capital injection officially establishes the wealth management firm as a unicorn company. Founded in 2019, the New York-based financial technology firm has experienced rapid momentum, surpassing $23 billion in recruited assets and tripling its year-over-year growth since the first quarter of 2025. The company operates an all-in-one ecosystem known as the Intelligent Wealth Platform, which is built from the ground up with artificial intelligence at its core. This modern solution serves a diverse client base ranging from high-earning individuals and small businesses to ultra-high-net-worth families through its dedicated family office infrastructure. The platform replaces fragmented legacy systems by delivering dynamic asset location, enhanced execution, high-quality data, risk management, personalized insights, and direct access to private markets. This funding allows the firm to continue scaling its platform capabilities and expanding its innovative tools to better support modern wealth managers. As the wealth management sector undergoes a structural shift, growth-minded advisors are increasingly seeking integrated, tech-native alternatives to traditional institutions that rely on outdated infrastructure. By eliminating operational complexities, the platform enables advisors to operate more efficiently and focus more time on serving their clients. Knote: If there are any RIA aggregators or PE firms not yet convinced about the value of technology in their thesis, look no further than Farther. 3x the industry organic growth rate.

NEXT Investors, a private equity firm based in New York, has announced a Series A investment in Transient.AI, an artificial intelligence platform built for institutional trading environments. Founded over 25 years ago, NEXT Investors specializes in financing critical capital markets infrastructure. This strategic partnership represents the first institutional capital for Transient.AI and aims to accelerate the platform's deployment within highly regulated financial institutions. Transient.AI provides an artificial intelligence operating system designed to streamline institutional trading workflows across front, middle, and back office operations. The platform integrates fragmented data into a unified interface accessible via desktop and mobile devices. While functioning as a comprehensive operating system, compliance seems to serve as a primary pillar of the technology by continuously scanning trading activity to detect anomalies or suspicious patterns. The capital injection will fund global expansion efforts as Transient.AI leverages institutional relationships across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. Chief executive officer Sreej Menon noted that the collaboration strengthens the firm's capacity to scale responsibly in complex financial domains. Founding partner Greg Grimaldi highlighted that the platform addresses a major industry challenge by deploying artificial intelligence safely and at scale. Knote: I'm hoping they are leaving the AI to what AI does well and not the things that it does not do well (like doing the same thing the same way each time...for example, trade clearing and settlement). I love the idea of AI trade surveillance, though. Link to Article

AI-native securities compliance platform Greenboard announced it has secured $20 million in total funding, including a previously undisclosed $15.5 million Series A round led by Base10 Partners. Founded in 2023 by Dave Feldman and Ed Schembor, the company provides a unified technology system that replaces outdated, fragmented compliance tools across financial institutions. The platform currently serves more than 500 firms, automating key workflows such as communications archiving, marketing reviews, and employee compliance. In tandem with the funding announcement, Greenboard unveiled GreenboardGo, a conversational artificial intelligence layer built directly on top of a firm's compliance books and records. Unlike generic models, this system provides answers grounded in an organization's specific policies and automatically prepares tasks for human review. This architecture aims to distribute compliance support across the entire enterprise, turning regulatory adherence into a shared responsibility rather than a localized operational bottleneck. This technological shift matters for wealth management firms facing expanding workloads and increased regulatory scrutiny. Wealth managers like Root Financial and JMG Financial Group have reported significant time savings, with the latter reducing onboarding time by 60 percent. The company intends to utilize the newly acquired capital to expand its country coverage, simplify integration and deployment processes, and build out its product, engineering, and go-to-market teams. CEnote: Compliance-related expenses are usually looked at as just that: expenses. It's important though, and nobody talks about the potentially most impactful aspect of AI on wealth management: compliance. Source Links: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260512170224/en/Greenboard-Raises-%2420M-to-Make-Everyone-a-Compliance-Champion https://ventureburn.com/greenboard-raises-20m-to-simplify-compliance/

WEALTHTECH SAFARI A Guided Tour of WealthTech News Week of May 15, 2026 Acuity Trading Invests in MarketReader to Build a More Complete Al Market Intelligence Offering • Acuity Trading has completed a strategic growth investment in MarketReader to integrate real-time market movement attribution into its financial intelligence ecosystem. • This partnership enables advisors to provide more defensible market analysis by combining alternative data with explainable AI that identifies specific market drivers. MMnote: To me, this is a great use of Al, although I'm sure these agents are expensive. They are constantly running to determine why stocks are moving a certain direction. Read More → Marloo Raises $10M to Evolve Beyond Transcription and into a Comprehensive Advisory Partner • Marloo secured $10 million in seed funding to transition from a meeting notetaker into an AI partner that automates complex document creation and administrative tasks. • The shift allows wealth management firms to scale operations and manage larger books of business without increasing headcount by streamlining manual workflows. Read More → Bullish to Acquire Equinity for $4.2 Billion to Drive Tokenized Securities Adoption • Digital asset exchange Bullish is acquiring traditional transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2 billion to establish a global infrastructure for tokenized securities. • This acquisition accelerates the availability of digital investment products by bridging the gap between traditional capital markets and blockchain-based systems. Read More → Wealth.com raises $65 million to scale AI-driven estate and tax planning • Franklin Templeton has collaborated with digital platform Corastone to launch multi-asset private market model portfolios providing diversified exposure to private equity, credit, real estate, and infrastructure. • This partnership utilizes distributed ledger technology for monthly rebalancing, offering an SMA-style structure that simplifies advisor access to multiple private asset classes through a single subscription. Read More → Centricity Seeks $30M in Funding • Indian wealthtech startup Centricity is in negotiations to secure approximately $30 million in a new funding round led by MUFG and SIG, potentially doubling its valuation to $250 million. • The capital injection will be used to advance technology and scale Centricity's digital infrastructure and portfolio management tools for financial advisors and private wealth management. Read More → Orion Recruits AssetMark’s Yi-Ching Wu to Lead Wealth Platform Integration • Orion has hired former AssetMark executive Yi-Ching Wu as Executive Vice President of Wealth Management Product and Platform to oversee the integration of its tech and investment businesses • This strategic hire aims to unify Orion's $5.9 trillion in administered assets with its TAMP to provide advisors a simplified "one-stop shop" for technology and investment management. Read More → Wells Fargo Launches 'Advisor Gateway' AI Platform • Wells Fargo introduced Advisor Gateway, a unified desktop platform that integrates applications and AI-powered tools like BlackRock’s Aladdin Wealth to streamline financial advisor workflows. • By automating administrative tasks and synthesizing portfolio risk data through generative AI, the platform enables advisors to deliver more personalized and proactive client communication. Read More → Trouble in Alts Paradise as Anthropic declares Tokenized Shares Invalid • Anthropic issued a warning that unauthorized transfers of its private shares via tokenized products or secondary marketplaces are void and carry no legal value. • The move caused tokenized share prices to plunge by nearly 50% on certain platforms, highlighting significant regulatory and transfer restriction risks inherent in pooling retail capital for private equity. MMnote: It's not that the tokenization technology is not ready yet, rather, that anthropic has share transfer restrictions that don't allow them to be re-sold. Read More → New BlackRock and RedBlack Technologies Target Alt Gaps • BlackRock and RedBlack launched technology integrations to enhance data analytics and trading workflows from alternative investments, including private credit benchmarks and direct CAIS integration. • These updates address critical infrastructure gaps by allowing advisors to trade and monitor alternatives within existing rebalancing engines, making private funds feel like a standard part of portfolio management. Read More → 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

Southall, B. (2026, May 13). Orion headhunts Yi-Ching Wu from AssetMark -- its second attempt in 14 months to fill a crucial role -- 'to put a phone book onto a postage stamp' and weave together its tech and investment businesses. RIABiz. https://riabiz.com/a/2026/5/14/orion-headhunts-yi-ching-wu-from-assetmark-its-second-attempt-in-14-months-to-fill-a-crucial-role-to-put-a-phone-book-onto-a-postage-stamp-and-weave-together-its-tech-and-investment-businesses Orion has hired Yi-Ching Wu, a former AssetMark and Schwab executive, as the new Executive Vice President of Wealth Management Product and Platform. The hire represents Orion's second attempt in 14 months to fill this critical leadership position following the departure of Michael Mandelos. Wu is tasked with integrating Orion’s $5.9 trillion in administered assets with its $185 billion turnkey asset management program (TAMP). This strategic move aims to simplify complex investment data into an intuitive interface for Registered Investment Advisors. The leadership team at Orion now features several former AssetMark executives, including CEO Natalie Wolfsen and Chairman Charles Goldman. Orion seeks to capitalize on a growing demand among advisors for "one-stop shopping" that combines technology infrastructure with outsourced investment management. The firm is making significant investments in AI-native workflows and research to further unify its wealth management capabilities throughout 2026.

Acuity Trading recently announced a strategic growth investment in MarketReader to enhance its financial intelligence ecosystem. Acuity Trading provides market and trade intelligence solutions for global brokers and financial institutions while MarketReader specializes in explaining real time market price movements. The partnership combines the alternative data capabilities and global distribution of Acuity Trading with the specialist market move attribution technology developed by MarketReader. The investment reflects a broader industry focus on the best and worst uses of artificial intelligence. Effective applications of this technology involve cleaning massive unstructured data sets to provide nuances and inference for client engagement. MarketReader uses a rules based framework and controlled workflows to identify abnormal price movements and connect them with relevant macro and sentiment data. This approach provides consistent and explainable outputs which are critical for professional environments where transparency and human oversight are required. MarketReader serves institutional investment teams and wealth firms by answering why specific market moves occur. This capability helps professional market participants move beyond simple headlines toward clearer market context and faster explanations of activity. The investment supports closer commercial alignment between the two companies as they build a stronger workflow for users to identify and validate market drivers. By adding an explanation layer to its suite of intelligence solutions Acuity Trading helps advisors and platforms provide more defensible market analysis to their end users. MMnote: To me, this is a great use of AI, although I’m sure these agents are expensive. They are constantly running to determine why stocks are moving a certain direction. Original Article Here