financial-advisory
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The People Who Find the Missing Vote
Most shareholder votes look ceremonial - until the arithmetic stops working. Alliance Advisors built a business around that nervous interval between sending the proxy and knowing the result.
Teneo Built a Company for the Phone Call No CEO Wants
A communications boutique became a 1,800-person advisory machine by buying the specialists executives need when reputation, capital, risk and leadership collide. Its hardest assignment arrived when the crisis was its own.
The Boston bank that only speaks fluent brand
A boutique bank that refuses to do anything but consumer deals just got a lot bigger. Here is how a Boston firm turned brand obsession into a specialty M&A practice - and why Origin Merchant Partners bought in.
The Arkansas Lawyer Who Sold Investors a Number Instead of a Promise
A Fayetteville lawyer stopped selling upside and started selling downside. Cabana's whole pitch is a single, honest number: how much you should expect to lose before you make anything back.
The Bank That Would Rather Have One Client Than a Hundred
Founded by dealmakers who left Morgan Stanley and TPG, Incentrum Group built a merchant bank around a contrarian idea - take fewer clients, own the advice, and put your own money where your counsel is.
Summit Ventures Is Building a Portfolio You Can Walk Into
A waterfront complex, immersive art, a boat club and a working ranch look like unrelated bets. Summit Ventures treats them as one operating system - capital, property and experiences designed to reinforce one another.
The Bank That Wins When Everyone Else Is Losing
It ranks No. 1 in global M&A by deal count and No. 1 in restructuring. One of those businesses thrives in good times, the other in bad. Houlihan Lokey owns both.
Morgan Stanley
The bank that decided predictable beats spectacular - and built a $9 trillion advice machine on top of a trading floor.
CBIZ
CBIZ spent three decades stitching local specialists into a national middle-market machine. After swallowing Marcum, it is now set to become part of Grant Thornton - a $5 billion coda to the accounting industry's consolidation race.
PolicyStreet
PolicyStreet is a Malaysia-based, full-stack insurtech group that makes insurance simpler and more accessible across Southeast Asia and Australia. Founded in 2016 and operating under holding company Polisea, it works with more than 40 life, general and Takaful providers to deliver embedded insurance, employee benefits, gig-worker protection, financial advisory and an online insurance marketplace through B2B, B2B2C and direct-to-consumer channels. Backed by Khazanah Nasional, Cool Japan Fund and others, it has grown to serve over 10 million customers and turned profitable in 2025.
Uprise - Embedded Tax and Advisory
Uprise is a San Francisco fintech that embeds full-service tax filing and financial advisory into the SaaS platforms small business owners already use. Its model pairs AI-generated first drafts with review from Certified Financial Planners and tax professionals held to a fiduciary standard, letting partners like Rippling, Carry, Heard and HoneyBook launch white-labeled, premium tax-and-advisory services in weeks rather than years.
Jessica Chen Riolfi
Jessica Chen Riolfi is the co-founder and CEO of Uprise, a fintech building embedded tax and financial advisory for small business owners. She spent more than a decade shipping products at Wise, Earnin and Robinhood, ran TransferWise's Asia business across 15 countries, and started out in J.P. Morgan investment banking before pairing human advisors with AI to make real financial advice affordable for entrepreneurs.