Tandems.

The quiet rebrand of a wealth-tech veteran

A nineteen-year-old fintech does not usually change its name. SigFig did. In September 2025, the San Francisco company that helped invent the robo-advisor traded a brand built on consumer-friendly portfolio dashboards for something blunter and more ambitious: Tandems, an AI-native wealth operating system aimed at the firms that actually move the money.

The shift is not cosmetic. SigFig was a product. Tandems is a platform - three apps (Meet, Grow, Invest) plus the connective tissue between them, sold to banks, RIAs, broker-dealers, and insurance carriers. The customers are the same kinds of institutions that licensed SigFig's older robo-engines. The promise is bigger. The acronym soup is denser. The lawyers are happier.

Advisors spend most of their day not advising

Walk into any wealth management firm at 9 a.m. and the senior advisors are not advising. They are prepping for a meeting that will happen at 11. Then writing the recap from the one that happened at 8. Then filling out a custodian form. Then logging the call into a CRM that asks 17 questions to log a call. Tandems likes a number for this: roughly 90% of an advisor's working hours go to work that is not, strictly, advice.

The math is unkind. The relationships that drive the business get the leftover time. Compliance gets the rest. Software, for years, made this worse by adding screens. Generative AI threatened to make it worse again, because compliance teams cannot deploy a tool that may hallucinate a fiduciary recommendation. So most large firms watched the AI wave and did the responsible, frustrating thing - nothing.

A second act, with the same co-founders' fingerprints

Mike Sha, the CEO, has been running this company for almost two decades. He met co-founder Parker Conrad as a Harvard freshman; they were dorm roommates with a long-running plan to start something. SigFig was that something - a portfolio-tracking startup that pivoted into one of the first real robo-advisors. Conrad later left to start Zenefits, then Rippling, which is to say SigFig was the first SaaS act in a now well-known career.

Sha stayed. He kept selling into banks while the consumer robo wave crested and broke. He watched UBS, Wells Fargo, Citizens, and others license SigFig's engine. He also watched, with something like patience, as the entire industry waited for an AI tool that would not get a compliance officer fired. The Tandems bet is that the patience finally pays. Verticalize the model. Bolt it into Salesforce, Fidelity, Schwab, Pershing. Stamp it with SOC 2 Type II. Promise a 30-day install. Charge accordingly.

Three apps, one ambition

Tandems ships as three product lines that work together and refuse to overlap too cleverly. TandemsMeet handles the meeting - prep, in-meeting AI guidance, follow-up notes, action items. TandemsGrow handles the funnel - asset capture, outreach, automated onboarding. TandemsInvest handles the portfolio - personalized investment, rebalancing, tax-optimization at scale.

The unsexy part is the plumbing. Pre-integrations with Salesforce, Fidelity, Schwab, Pershing, Broadridge, Microsoft, and DocuSign mean Tandems does not ask a bank to rip and replace anything. It rides on top. That decision is also the entire commercial strategy. A wealth firm with a working CRM and three custodial relationships will buy a layer. It will not buy a rebuild.

The numbers, and what they actually mean

The legacy SigFig platform reportedly served over $60 billion in assets across about two million accounts and 6,000 advisors. Tandems inherits that footprint, plus the institutional relationships that came with it. The new pitch leans on a different set of figures - integration breadth, deployment speed, and the share of advisor time the system aims to take back.

Give the advisor back the part of the job they liked

Tandems' stated mission is not modest, but it is small enough to be testable: free up the 90% of an advisor's day spent on manual work so the remaining time can go to relationships and strategy. The vision is bigger - an AI operating system for wealth, banking, and insurance that institutions trust enough to run on top of their existing stack.

That second sentence is doing a lot of work. "Trust" inside a regulated industry is not earned by demoing well. It is earned by deploying at one bank, surviving two compliance reviews, getting renewed, and then doing it again. Tandems has done the prior version of that loop - quietly - for nineteen years.

The interesting move is the one the customer doesn't notice

The defining tension of generative AI in financial services is not capability - it is permissibility. Capability has been there for two years. Permissibility - the ability to put a model into a workflow without a compliance officer pulling the plug - has not. The firms that solve the second problem do not win because their AI is smarter. They win because their AI is allowed in the room.

Tandems is betting that the next wave of fintech value is verticalized, regulated, and unsexy on the surface. No standalone chatbots. No "AI assistant" splash screens. Just a software layer that quietly removes the friction nobody at the firm misses. If they are right, the most interesting wealth-tech company of the next five years will be one most retail investors never hear of.