financial-advisors
(48)
The Advisor Has Two Audiences: The Client and Compliance
Hearsay made social posts, texts and calls usable at the scale of a financial firm. Its clever trick was to let an advisor sound like a person while giving the institution a record it could defend.
The Money Hiding in a Life Insurance Policy
Inclined found an unlikely place for a modern credit product: the cash value inside whole life insurance. Its wager is that a better doorway to existing money can matter more than inventing new money.
The Twenty-Year Overnight Success of Matt Brown
He was headed for film school when a pinstriped stranger offered to teach him the math. Three decades later, Matt Brown has made a career of turning finance's velvet ropes into software.
Patrick Kelly and the Sixty-Page Problem
A financial advisor met a 60-page application and discovered that selling insurance was easier than delivering it. His answer became two companies, one recurring obsession and a wager that the industry's least glamorous problems are worth solving properly.
Envestnet Built the Operating System for Advice. Now It Has to Make the Whole Thing Feel Like One Product.
After 25 years of buying and building the plumbing behind financial advice, Envestnet reaches roughly a third of U.S. advisors. Its new challenge is less about adding another tool and more about making a sprawling suite behave like one coherent machine.
How eMoney Turned $10.5 Trillion Into a Conversation
eMoney’s planning platform gives financial advisors and clients the same live picture of a household’s money. Its depth is the draw - and the reason simpler practices may find it too much.
WBI’s $1 Billion Day Was the Easy Part. Then It Had to Build the Advisor’s Operating System
WBI made its name by launching 10 active ETFs and attracting more than $1 billion in a day. Its harder, more revealing act is Cy - a platform built to turn an advisor’s paperwork, portfolio math and operational drag into one guided workflow.
Justin Boatman Learned Product Strategy in the Most Unexpected Place
Before fintech, Justin Boatman built programs and media for a church. Now he turns advisor problems into products, product launches into live shows, and even the family allowance into a lesson about risk.
CAIS Built a $2 Billion Business Out of Wall Street's Least Glamorous Problem
Independent advisors wanted private markets. What they lacked was the institutional plumbing. CAIS spent 17 years assembling access, diligence, education and paperwork into one operating system - and turned the boring middle into a company valued above $2 billion.
Mick McLaughlin Is Selling Crypto’s Least Crypto Idea: Own the Index
After helping ETFs become ordinary, Mick McLaughlin has taken on a stranger assignment: making crypto boring enough for a portfolio meeting - without pretending the risk has disappeared.
Mark Swan Wants AI to Give Financial Advisers Their Time Back
From Aberdeen classrooms to Revolut’s fire hose and a $40 million New York startup, Swan has built his career around one stubborn idea: software should clear the desk so people can do the human work.
John Rourke Spent Three Decades Making CRM Feel Less Like Work
Before Wealthbox secured a $200 million majority investment, its CEO spent years testing one stubborn idea: business software can be powerful without making its users miserable.
Parker Ence Wants AI to Take the Notes - So Advisors Can Stay in the Room
A guitar teacher turned four-time tech CEO found his next company hiding in the least glamorous hour of a financial advisor's day: the paperwork after a good conversation.
The 100-Year-Old Money Machine Betting Its Next C$70 Million on AI - Without Firing the Humans
IGM Financial spent a century turning face-to-face advice into a Canadian institution. Now it is cutting complexity, absorbing a C$95.3 million charge and recycling the savings into AI - a test of whether old trust and new software can compound together.
Wealthbox Bet Advisors Would Use a CRM They Didn't Hate - Now It Wants AI to Run the Follow-Up
A clean interface got Wealthbox into thousands of advisory firms. A $200 million bet now asks whether that beloved system of record can become the system that does the work - without turning into the bloated software it set out to replace.
North Square Built the Sales Engine Boutique Fund Managers Couldn’t - Then a $160 Billion Giant Came Calling
North Square made a business out of the least romantic part of asset management: getting good strategies onto advisers’ shelves. Eight years, several acquisitions and $4.05 billion in retail fund assets later, its distribution machine belongs to Azimut.
3xEquity Turned the Recruiter Cold-Call Into a Silent Auction for Advisors
The Kirkland firm gets financial advisors competing offers from 200-plus broker-dealers in a few days - anonymously, and without paying a dime. In May 2026, Elite Consulting Partners bought it.
FMG Turned the Compliance Headache Into a Marketing Machine
Financial advisors are supposed to market constantly and phrase everything carefully. FMG built a business by making those two demands coexist - then bought the missing pieces.
The Goldman Quants Who Turned Tax Losses Into a Selling Point
Two ex-Goldman quants built software that automates the boring, expensive part of managing money - and got a $1.3 trillion asset manager to buy the whole thing.
The Atlanta firm quietly building a private-markets operating system for your financial advisor
For years, private markets belonged to endowments and the ultra-wealthy. BIP Capital is betting the next chapter belongs to the advisor down the street - and it built the plumbing to prove it.
The $160 Billion Middleman That Made Outsourcing Its Edge
Hartford Funds built a large investment business by deciding it did not need to do every job itself. Now Wellington Management plans to buy the platform it has helped power for four decades.
The $143,000 Bet That Turned a Basement IMO Into Advisors’ Back Office
Advisors Excel began with three friends, a dentist-office basement and their pooled savings. Two decades later, its real product is not an annuity - it is the machinery that lets an independent advisor run like a much larger firm.
Raymond James
A firm that started in a downtown St. Petersburg apartment now watches over $1.92 trillion - and it still measures itself one advisor and one client at a time.
Morningstar
Forty years ago Joe Mansueto sorted mutual fund reports on his apartment floor and decided regular people deserved the same research Wall Street kept for itself. The five-star rating that came out of it now shapes how trillions of dollars get invested.
LPL Financial
LPL Financial built a $2.6 trillion business by staying behind the advisor. Now its bet is that scale, open architecture and embedded AI can make independence feel less lonely - without making every practice look the same.
Franklin Templeton
The mutual-fund house founded in 1947 now runs a federation of specialist managers, an expanding private-markets shelf and one of Wall Street's more serious blockchain experiments. Franklin Templeton's wager is that old-fashioned distribution and new financial rails belong under the same roof.
Christopher King
Christopher King is the founder and CEO of Eaglebrook, a crypto investment platform that gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) direct access to bitcoin and digital assets through tax-optimized separately managed accounts (SMAs). A Penn State finance graduate who began investing in digital assets in 2014, King started his career in crypto-focused venture capital at Morgan Creek Capital Management before launching Eaglebrook in 2019. The New York and Miami-based company has grown into one of the largest crypto SMA platforms serving wealth managers, backed by investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, and Franklin Templeton.
Aidentified
Aidentified is a Boston-area AI company that maps who is wealthy, who they know, and when they come into money. Its platform combines 300M+ consumer and professional profiles with relationship graphs covering 16 billion first-degree connections to help financial advisors, wealth managers, insurers and nonprofit fundraisers find high-value prospects and reach them through warm introductions rather than cold outreach. Founded in 2017 and backed by financial-data giant FactSet, it delivers its wealth-and-relationship intelligence through a web app, CRM integrations, an API and data-as-a-service pipelines.
Eaglebrook
Eaglebrook is a New York-based crypto investment platform built for wealth managers. It gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) and their clients direct, tax-optimized exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets through separately managed accounts (SMAs) held at institutional qualified custodians. As an SEC-registered investment advisor, Eaglebrook operates one of the largest crypto SMA platforms in the market, integrating with advisors' existing portfolio-management and reporting systems so they can offer, trade, bill, and report on digital assets inside their normal workflow.
Farther
Farther is a New York-based technology-driven wealth management firm that pairs human financial advisors with a proprietary 'Intelligent Wealth Platform.' Founded in 2019 by Taylor Matthews and Brad Genser, the company gives advisors an all-in-one digital ecosystem for financial planning, investing, tax optimization, and estate planning, while offering clients a family-office-style experience. After a $150 million Series D led by General Atlantic in 2026, Farther has grown to roughly $23 billion in recruited assets and ranks among the fastest-growing financial services firms in the United States.