From AI to crypto, November’s headlines were dynamic. The technology firms in wealth management certainly aren’t coasting into year end. Here are the five WealthTech headlines we think are worth a look right now:
Claude has expanded Claude for Financial Services with an Excel add-in, additional connectors to real-time market data and portfolio analytics, and pre-built Agent Skills. Generally, people are using Claude to dramatically shorten the timeframe between idea and content release. Claude for financial services will be a potential driver of increased AI in the advisor desktop space. Its ability to help drive decisions, content and analytics seems positive. Claude’s entry into financial services isn’t a surprise, but it has been a long time since we’ve seen a large, highly-funded enterprise technology platform lean aggressively into the financial services and wealth space. It demonstrates the tools that work in regular commercial America are going after our industry.
We urge caution; however, because they won’t carry into our industry any of the regulatory and nuanced understanding of use cases, data, client experience and advisor experience. It’s on all of us to understand how they’re using the information and where it’s going. Ultimately, though, this is great because we don’t have to fund this industry innovation ourselves. And we’ll also benefit from what they’ve learned from other industries.
This deal will create a unified ecosystem for private stock administration, liquidity, and trading—broadening access to private company shares traditionally limited to institutions. For the wealthtech industry, this is a major step toward democratizing private markets. Schwab is, by far, the largest custodian in our space; however, its capabilities were designed for the liquid side. Anything reported on an illiquid basis was an accommodation. Its acquisition of Forge and the expected integration at Schwab would mean that Schwab is solidly where its clients are in supporting these growing alternative asset allocations—great thinking by Schwab to look ahead on this one. But, as we famously say, acquisition does not equal integration. It will be up to Schwab to integrate the Forge data and reporting into the core of the custody platform. That will take time and require investment in reporting, calculation and integration of the data.
This will be the first advisor-focused meeting assistant natively embedded within an industry-leading CRM. Let’s take a quick step back and review the state of the market. In the last six months, the increase in AI notetaker and Agentic AI solutions in wealth has been headline grabbing. Firms like Jump have led the charge in low-cost advisor efficiency in ways we haven’t seen since the advent of e-mail. The losers in the AI notetaking game are projected to be CRMs. CRMs once held the position as the place advisors went to enter all client notes and later consume information to prepare for client conversations. That position has moved into the notetaker space almost overnight, so we expected a CRM to launch its own notetaker in response.
Our reaction is that this is pretty late to the game. Advisors who use Wealthbox and haven’t chosen a dedicated AI notetaker yet will probably benefit from this, but we don’t expect it to drive much adoption or usage of the Wealthbox CRM. And, the Wealthbox users who already have relationships with firms like Jump likely will not terminate those contracts to use Wealthbox’s capabilities. AI notetakers will continue to innovate and drive integrations far faster than Wealthbox will on its own.
We’ve had a lot of movement in the market this year, so tax alpha should be one of the top concerns for advisors, next to market risk, going into 2026. Orion’s new offering enables advisors to deliver tax-aware, personalized portfolios at scale—without incurring the traditional out-of-pocket costs associated with direct indexing. It’s no surprise that Orion announces its ability to allow better tax-efficient personalized portfolios to its clients during this time of year. Orion is clearly using its power as a massive accounting and portfolio management vendor to its benefit and to deliver more value to its clients.
Tax-efficient portfolios are not new. But getting it from the same vendor that you use for trading and reporting takes one of the steps out. (Side note: Parametric and Aperio—two large direct index tax optimization vendors in the marketplace—should expect incumbent solutions like Orion to try to take market share.) We don’t have a sense of Orion’s platform cost, but having it on the same platform you manage all your other assets without having to go to a third party is certainly worth a look for a lot of our clients.
Lastly, while not the most innovative and groundbreaking change, a large player like Orion using its power to include one of these capabilities needs to be recognized. As the big players work to make themselves more valuable, it’s going to put more pressure on smaller players that only do tax optimization.
Schwab’s expansion gives RIAs more structure, tools and operational support to scale—resources that also help firms navigate increasingly complex reporting requirements, including those related to digital assets. As advisors face heightened expectations around transparency and tax reporting for crypto holdings, this is part of a broader trend at larger institutional institutions like Fidelity and others to include digital assets on their platforms.
Justifiably, everyone is cautious due to regulations and the risk of exposure to loss and potential litigation from clients. While Schwab and others want to respond to investors’ desires to have access to what they believe to be an asset class that is a hedge against traditional markets through these platforms, they have to tread carefully because most investors have a general lack of understanding of the correlation of crypto assets to other assets and their value. Traditional assets don’t have that problem. We expect the custodians to take time to really figure this out, and for now, make baby steps like these that seem to be more a reflection of investor demand and less a strategic move to validate or to lend credence to non-traditional assets such as digital currencies.
We’ll be back with just one more look at the headlines in 2025! We’re hoping wealthtech closes the year out strong.
