The quiet machinery that lets a community bank offer big-bank investing - without writing a line of code.
Somewhere right now, a regional bank is losing a customer to a slicker app. The customer has $40,000 to invest and nowhere at their own bank to do it. Marstone built the thing that fixes that - a branded, ready-to-launch digital investing and planning platform the bank can stand up in months, not years, and call entirely its own.
Marstone is not a robo-advisor you have heard of, and that is the point. It does not want your retail dollars. It sells the rails - the onboarding, the portfolios, the planning tools, the compliance plumbing - to the institutions that already hold your checking account. The "Powered by Marstone" platform wears their logo, speaks their language, and books their fees. Marstone stays backstage.
For most of the last century, real financial advice came with a velvet rope. You needed assets to get an advisor, and you needed an advisor to grow assets - a tidy loop that kept ordinary savers out. The mass-market alternative was a pamphlet in the lobby and a phone number nobody called.
Then came the robo-advisors of the 2010s, promising to democratize the whole thing. They did, sort of. But they also asked people to leave the institution they trusted and hand their money to a startup with a friendly app and a two-year track record. Trust, it turns out, does not port easily.
Marstone read the gap differently. The trust already existed - it sat inside the thousands of banks and credit unions that hold America's deposits. What those institutions lacked was the technology to act on it. Building a compliant digital investing experience in-house is brutally expensive. So most simply did not, and watched their customers drift to the apps.
That drift is the tension running through everything Marstone does: trusted institutions with no product, modern products with no trust. Close the gap, and you reach the investors the industry forgot.
Margaret J. Hartigan spent a decade as a top-quintile financial advisor in Merrill Lynch's Global Wealth Management Group, working between New York and San Francisco. She had seen the velvet rope from the inside - who got the meetings, who got the call back, and who got neither. A Brown University graduate, she left in 2013 to build the platform she wished the rest of the market could access.
The bet was contrarian. While peers raced to launch consumer robo brands and buy customers at a loss, Hartigan wagered that the durable business was infrastructure - selling shovels to the institutions, not panning for gold against them. She co-founded Marstone with Robert Stone (Chief Creative Officer) and Christopher D. LaVine (Chief Strategy Officer), pairing advisory credibility with design and distribution.
Ex-Merrill Lynch advisor; Milken FinTech Advisory Committee member; the company's public face and conscience.
Owns the design-led, human feel of the product - the part that makes investing feel less like a tax form.
Strategy and the institutional relationships that turn pilots into signed contracts.
Hartigan founds Marstone; the white-label wealth thesis is set.
HSBC partners with Marstone for a digital advice offering.
Closes $5M Series A; Pershing custody integration completed.
American Century Investments selects Marstone to power its digital wealth.
$8M Series B to drive fee-based revenue for institutions.
"Powered by Marstone" is modular by design. An institution can run it as a self-directed robo, as an advisor-assisted hybrid, or as a point solution bolted onto an existing wealth practice. Underneath sits the unglamorous, load-bearing work: digital onboarding, identity verification, e-signature, account funding, goal-based planning, and portfolio management - multi-custodial, multi-lingual, and multi-currency, which is rarer in US wealthtech than it sounds.
The white-label platform institutions brand as their own - RIA, portfolios, features, and look all configurable.
Account opening with verification, e-sign, and funding built in - the part that usually breaks.
DIY robo investing or a hybrid that hands clients to a human when it matters.
Goal-based planning tools that turn a one-time deposit into an ongoing relationship.
A backstage platform lives or dies by who is willing to stand on it. Marstone's roster reads like a credibility checklist: HSBC for a digital advice offering, American Century Investments to power its end-client wealth, and Fiserv - whose network touches a vast share of US banks - as a distribution partner. Custody runs through Pershing, Apex Clearing, and Interactive Brokers; account data through Plaid; signatures through DocuSign; verification through LexisNexis. Regional institutions like Equity Bank, Woodforest National Bank, Red River Credit Union, and AltaOne Federal Credit Union round out the base.
The Series B pitch was blunt and bank-friendly: launch a wealth practice for less than the cost of an average full-time hire, then watch it retain deposits, lift non-interest income, and keep clients from wandering. For a chief financial officer, that is not a vision deck. It is a line item.
Marstone states its mission plainly: enhance financial literacy, deepen financial inclusion, and humanize finance for all. It is the kind of sentence that usually decorates a careers page and means nothing. Here it doubles as the go-to-market plan. The more institutions that can cheaply offer real investing, the more people get advice who never qualified for it before. Inclusion and revenue point the same direction - which is the only kind of mission that tends to survive a budget meeting.
Hartigan has carried the message beyond the company, sitting on the Milken Institute's FinTech Advisory Committee and partnering with the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The platform's multi-lingual and international-citizenship support is the mission expressed as a feature flag: the next investors do not all speak English or carry one passport.
The customer with $40,000 and nowhere to put it is still standing there. The difference is that now their bank can say yes - branded, compliant, on a phone, with a human one tap away if the markets get scary. The deposit stays. The relationship deepens. The fee shows up on Marstone's side of the ledger and the bank's. Nobody had to leave the institution they already trusted.
That is the whole bet, eleven years and $43 million in: trust is the scarce asset, and most of it is sitting inside boring old banks. Marstone does not try to win it away. It just hands those banks the tools to finally use it. The velvet rope does not come down with a slogan. It comes down with infrastructure - quietly, one institution at a time.