Welcome to the September 2026 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors!
This month’s edition kicks off with the news that Altruist has been acquired by Vanguard, representing a major shift for an RIA custodian that had previously been untethered to a retail financial institution – but the bigger industry implication is that by owning its own custodian, Vanguard can undercut and effectively push back on the insistence of other custodians to charge revenue sharing payments on ETF assets, which could have a profound impact on those custodians’ revenue models and potentially trigger another round of consolidation in the custody business.
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- The AI prospecting solution FINNY has revamped its pricing model, switching from a flat-fee annual subscription to primarily a 20bps revenue share for new client revenue brought in through the platform – which shows how FINNY sees itself as more of an automated business development ’employee’ than a SaaS platform, but the question remains how much of the prospect sourcing and cultivation process FINNY can truly automate (since advisors have proven willing to pay a revenue-share percentage to people or platforms that can reliably get prospects on their calendar, but may not be willing to do so if they’re still responsible for doing most of the work of sourcing and developing those prospects)?
- Startup CRM providers Slant and FinTurk both launched new forms-related tools – Slant’s for building forms, and FinTurk’s for filling forms out – that eliminate the need for their users to buy standalone tools for those purposes, and reaffirm how CRMs can still be useful in the era of AI by building new functions that help advisors better leverage the data they have
- Pontera, the platform aiming to enable advisors to directly manage their clients’ assets within 401(k) plans, has announced a new non-discretionary 401(k) advice tool for advisors who can’t or prefer not to manage their clients’ 401(k) assets directly (perhaps as a response to state regulators and 401(k) recordkeepers like Fidelity cracking down on Pontera’s original technology)
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- Wavvest, which built an ‘all-in-one’ AI technology solution for financial advisors, has also launched an in-house RIA based on that technology, which in light of the growth and funding success of ‘digitally native’ RIAs like Savvy and Farther (which are built on their own proprietary technology platforms) suggests that the economics of running an RIA might be better than those of selling all-in-one technology to RIAs
- Even as surging AdvisorTech categories like AI notetakers have raised hundreds of millions in investment capital over the last two years, platforms related to alternative investment distribution and support for RIAs have raised over $2 billion – showing that even though advisors may only allocate a small amount of clients’ portfolios to alternatives, the revenue opportunity of participating in asset distribution still far outpaces that of selling SaaS solutions
And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular “Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map” (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!
*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.
