Griffin Kelly at Daily Upside wrote about wealthtech becoming advisers' biggest frustration. As independent RIAs move upmarket and expand from investment management into planning, tax coordination and broader relationship work, they have to build the infrastructure that wirehouses already have, and they build it out of software that does not talk to itself.
My quote captured the daily version of that problem: when a client asks a simple question about their account balance, I should not have to triangulate three systems to give them a confident answer. A CRM, a planning platform, a custodian portal, a document vault and a growing stack of AI tools, each with its own login and its own version of the truth, held together by manual processes and a spreadsheet.
The innovation is real. The integration is not. Every new tool promises to save time and then adds a place where data has to be re-entered or reconciled. The result is that the adviser, or a staff member, becomes the integration layer, and that is the most expensive place to put it.
My advice to peers in the piece and in practice: before adding anything to the stack, ask what specific problem it solves and what it has to connect to. If the answer is that it will require a person to move data between it and the systems you already run, the productivity gain is imaginary. Fewer tools that integrate beat more tools that impress.
Read the full article at Daily Upside →
