I was grateful for the opportunity to help start a restaurant and learn a completely different business from the ground up.

We had to choose systems for point of sale, payments, online ordering, kitchen operations, delivery, inventory, and accounting. I knew these categories existed, but I had never made those decisions with our own capital and an operating business depending on them.

One thing that stood out was how similar the major point-of-sale systems had become. Toast, Square, and their competitors covered much of the same basic ground and competed hard to make it inexpensive to get started. Square offers point-of-sale software with no monthly fee, while Toast offers starter configurations with little or no upfront hardware cost under certain pricing arrangements.

Once a restaurant selects a system, the other products from that provider have a natural advantage. Payments are already connected. The menu and orders already live there. Employees know how to use it. Adding another service from the same company is easier than introducing a new vendor and making the systems work together.

The inexpensive software and hardware get the restaurant onto the platform. The provider then has more opportunities to earn money from payments and the products sold around it.

That experience made me wonder whether wealth technology is moving in the same direction: broader platforms, more software included in the initial package, and more of the economics coming from the financial products and services around it.

The wealth-tech stack will narrow

A wealth management firm today may use one system for portfolio accounting, another for CRM, another for financial planning, and several more for trading, billing, documents, alternative investments, compliance, and workflow.

That arrangement exists partly because each category was once difficult and expensive enough to support a separate software company. Portfolio accounting required its own engineering team and industry knowledge. So did planning, trading, CRM, and billing.

AI will make it faster and cheaper for established companies to add products next to the ones they already sell.

This does not mean one engineer can suddenly replace an entire team. AI may make meeting summaries, client portals, workflow tools, and document extraction easier to build. The underlying books and records remain difficult.

Portfolio data still has to be reconciled to custodians. Performance and advisory fees have to be calculated correctly. Tax lots have to be maintained. Transactions need the proper permissions and audit trail. A plausible answer is not good enough when the system is calculating a client’s return, fee, or realized gain.

A smaller team can now build and test more ideas than it could before. Engineers can write and review code faster, modernize older systems, create integrations, and learn adjacent categories with less time and capital.

The visible features will be copied first. Nearly every serious platform will soon have an AI assistant, meeting summaries, document extraction, workflow creation, reporting, and some version of a client portal.

Winning a new advisory firm will remain much harder. The vendor still has to earn the firm’s trust, convert years of data, train employees, and persuade people to change how they work.

Once a technology company has done all of that, selling more to the customer it already has is often easier than finding another one.

This is already happening. Orion combines advisor technology with outsourced investment management, a trade desk, custom indexing, and cash and credit offerings. Advyzon has expanded beyond its core platform into models, direct indexing, partnered trading, tax management, and OCIO services. Black Diamond now combines portfolio management, trading, reporting, CRM, alternative-investment servicing, and a TAMP within the broader SS&C business.

These companies started in different places, but all are looking for more ways to earn revenue from firms already using their technology.

I do not think every piece of the current stack disappears. I do think fewer firms will continue buying it one application at a time.

Smaller firms will buy more from one provider

For smaller and midsized RIAs, the appeal of a broader platform is straightforward.

The industry has talked for years about a single source of truth and straight-through processing. In plain English, a large withdrawal request, new account, or capital call should not have to be entered three times or disappear between systems. The CRM, trading system, billing records, and reporting engine should all be working from the same underlying information.

Most firms do not need the best individual product in every category. They need accurate information and systems that work together. They need a client request to reach the right person and not get lost. They need to know what remains open and what has been completed.

Firms will still buy a separate product when it solves a difficult problem much better.

Fi-Tek, for example, has built technology around the processing, books and records, custody, and reporting requirements of trust, brokerage, and wealth businesses. Pontera addresses a different but similarly specific problem: allowing advisors to manage workplace retirement accounts while maintaining security, supervision, and auditable records of advisor activity.

A broader platform may eventually place those capabilities behind its own interface. The advisor may stop logging into a separate application, but the difficult technology underneath will still be necessary.

Products that are only slightly better will have a harder time overcoming another contract, data conversion, integration, security review, and employee-training process. Many RIAs will choose one main platform and add specialized technology only where the difference is large enough to matter.

The software may not be where the money is

The point-of-sale comparison may also tell us something about how wealth software will be priced.

As the major platforms cover more of the same ground, companies with other sources of revenue will be able to include more software in the package.

Altruist offers the clearest example in wealth management. Advisors who custody assets there receive portfolio accounting, performance reporting, billing, rebalancing, and a client portal without a separate software charge. Altruist One adds automated tax-management tools and model-related benefits through a household-level subscription.

Because Altruist owns the custodial relationship, it has ways to make money beyond a conventional software subscription.

Wealth platforms will look for similar economics in investment management, cash, lending, insurance, and trading. A company earning revenue from those activities can bundle more software than one whose only revenue comes from licensing the application.

That does not mean the overall relationship becomes cheaper. The economics may simply move from a visible software fee into cash spreads, asset-based charges, transactions, lending, or products sold through the platform.

Advisors will need to understand not only what the software costs, but how the provider makes money. A bundled platform can be convenient while making the total economics harder to see.

There is also a cost to putting more of the firm onto one system. The more data, workflows, assets, and services an RIA places with one provider, the harder that provider becomes to replace.

A firm can remain independently owned while becoming operationally dependent on one technology company. Data portability, open APIs, business continuity, and the ability to leave will matter more as these platforms become more important.

Large firms will build more themselves

Large RIA aggregators and multi-family offices are unlikely to use an outside platform exactly as it comes.

As engineering becomes more productive, these firms will have more reason to build their own advisor desktop, client interface, AI tools, service workflows, internal knowledge systems, and management reporting.

Those are the parts a large firm may want to make its own.

Some firms are already moving this way.

Storgate has developed its own integrated family-office environment across reporting, estate and tax planning, investments, and family-office services. Allposit began with software Michael Liberman built for his own family-office needs before developing it as a commercial product. HolisticOS is building a unified system across investments, tax planning and preparation, financial planning, communications, and compliance. There are many more I can keep listing.

I hear the same ambition from advisors who want to build more of the interface and workflows themselves while relying on outside providers for portfolio accounting, custodial data, trading, and other infrastructure.

Even a very large firm may have little reason to rebuild every custodian connection, performance engine, billing calculation, tax-lot record, permission structure, and audit trail.

Building also creates a permanent obligation. Software that begins as a differentiator can become another legacy system the firm has to maintain.

Large firms should probably build where the technology reflects something genuinely different about how they serve clients. Rebuilding portfolio accounting, billing, or trading infrastructure simply to call it proprietary is a harder case to make.

Smaller firms may buy nearly the whole platform. Larger firms may use the same underlying technology without showing the vendor’s name, building their own interface and workflows on top of it. Some wealth-tech companies will try to serve both.

What I learned at Mirador

Mirador taught me the other lesson.

During my time there, the company grew from serving a relatively small number of clients to several hundred relationships across single-family offices, multi-family offices, and large RIAs.

Technology was essential, but clients were not buying software alone.

They were relying on people to collect and review the data, notice when something was wrong, resolve exceptions, and make the information dependable. The technology allowed that work to scale, but capable operators were a large part of what made it valuable.

Good technology still needs an effective operator.

That makes me skeptical that wealth-tech platforms will differentiate themselves through features alone. Once most platforms offer similar reporting, CRM, billing, workflow, documents, planning, and AI capabilities, implementation, reliability, and service will matter more.

Payroll and cybersecurity have followed versions of this path. Payroll providers expanded from calculation software into tax filings, benefits, compliance, and broader HR support. Cybersecurity providers moved from producing alerts to managed services that investigate and respond to threats.

In both cases, customers paid to hand off part of the responsibility rather than simply gain access to another tool.

Wealth tech may move in the same direction, but the provider should not try to do everything. Personal judgment, family governance, legal work, and the advisor relationship are difficult to standardize and should remain close to the client.

The best opportunities are repetitive, data-heavy tasks where software can handle most of the routine work and experienced operators step in when judgment is needed. That is how service can grow without headcount rising at the same rate.

More independent firms and more consolidation

Wealth management is creating more independent firms while concentrating more assets inside the largest ones.

RIA acquisition activity remains high. DeVoe counted 93 transactions in the first quarter of 2026 and 167 across the first half of the year.

At the same time, the number of SEC-registered investment advisers reached a record 16,544 in 2025, an increase of 674 firms from the prior year.

Better infrastructure makes it easier to run a focused independent firm without building a large internal organization. Cheaper engineering gives the largest firms more ability to build proprietary tools, integrate acquired businesses, and spread the cost of specialists and technology across a larger base.

The pressure may be greatest on firms that have accumulated the costs and complexity of a larger organization without enough scale to build distinctive capabilities or spread those costs across a broad client base.

That leaves aggregators with a harder question: what does joining them provide that an independent firm cannot buy elsewhere?

Access to good software and centralized operations becomes less persuasive when smaller firms can purchase both. Larger organizations will need to show that their scale produces something an independent firm cannot easily buy: growth, connected expertise, better execution, succession support, or meaningfully lower costs.

Wealth-tech companies face the same problem. A long feature list will matter less once the major platforms cover most of the same ground. Reliable financial records, difficult integrations, implementation knowledge, existing customer relationships, and the ability to operate the system well will be harder to reproduce.

From software to infrastructure

I do not expect one platform to serve every wealth firm in the same way.

Smaller RIAs will buy increasingly complete systems. Large aggregators and family offices will build more of their own advisor and client tools while relying on outside accounting, data, trading, and custody infrastructure. Specialized wealth-tech products will remain where the underlying problem is genuinely difficult.

Some technology companies will make more money from custody, investment management, cash, lending, insurance, or trading. Others will take responsibility for repeatable work performed through their systems.

Helping start a restaurant showed me how inexpensive software and hardware can lead to a much larger economic relationship.

Mirador showed me that good technology still depends on people who know how to operate it and take responsibility when something goes wrong.

That is what I mean by wealth infrastructure: the financial records, custodial and trading connections, products, operating knowledge, and service that allow a wealth firm to run without building everything itself.

A smaller firm may no longer need to join a large institution to gain access to sophisticated infrastructure. It will still have to decide how much of its business it is comfortable placing in the hands of one platform.

That is where I think wealth tech is headed. The most important platforms will no longer be judged mainly by the software their customers can see. They will be judged by how much of the firm can reliably run through them—and how difficult it would be for the firm to operate without them.

That is the shift from wealth software to wealth infrastructure.

While I was at Brown Advisory, I remember Mike Hankin, the firm’s founder and CEO, remarking that we were incredibly lucky to be in this industry. I understood exactly what he meant.

At its best, private wealth management is one of the most meaningful professions in finance. Advisors help families steward wealth across generations. They guide business owners through liquidity events, structure complex estates, coordinate tax and philanthropic strategies, prepare the next generation, and provide perspective when markets become emotional. Their work is rarely confined to investments alone. More often, it centers on helping families make thoughtful decisions about increasingly complex financial lives.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to interact with many wealth management firms, and I have met advisors whom I believe deserve every client they can get. The care with which they advocate for their clients is impossible to miss. They are thoughtful, intellectually honest, and relentless in acting on behalf of the families they serve. If I were asked to recommend them, I gladly would.

Mike’s observation reflected something else as well. Wealth management is also an extraordinary business.

Few industries combine recurring revenue, durable client relationships, and long-term asset growth in quite the same way. Advisory fees are typically deducted automatically from client accounts each quarter. Relationships often span decades, and over long periods the asset base generally grows. Clients rarely pay an invoice or make a conscious purchasing decision to continue the relationship. The relationship simply continues.

The economics show up in the margins and in the prices investors are willing to pay. In 2024, the typical advisory firm achieved an operating profit margin of nearly 40 percent, even as organic growth net of market performance remained modest. In 2025, RIA valuations reached record levels, with median firms trading at more than 11 times EBITDA – a multiple associated to enterprise firms in the industry about a decade ago. These figures reflect a business model with recurring fees, “loyal” clients, and significant operating leverage.

That is a remarkable feature of the business, and one worth reflecting on. Unlike wealth management, in other industries companies must repeatedly persuade customers that they are worth paying.

The numbers make the attraction obvious. According to Cerulli Associates, independent RIAs grew assets under management at a 10.9% annualized rate from 2014 to 2024, while hybrid RIAs grew at 12.2%. Together, those channels increased their share of total industry assets from 21% in 2014 to 27% in 2024. And due to incentives for advisors, there is no sign of this trend slowing down. Echelon reported that the first quarter of 2026 set a new quarterly record for wealth management M&A activity, with 142 transactions announced and $1.67 trillion of assets changing hands.

At an event in Boston earlier this year, I met Mike Rose, a Director in Cerulli’s Wealth Management practice. He shared a statistic that has stayed with me: firms managing more than $5 billion represent roughly 2 percent of RIAs yet they oversee more than half of all RIA assets. Cerulli also found that those firms controlled about 34 percent of RIA assets in 2018. And by the end of 2024, that figure had risen to more than half.

The independent advisory movement began as an alternative to large financial institutions. Now many of those firms are becoming large financial institutions themselves!

There are benefits to scale. I saw that during my time at Brown Advisory and Cresset. A family dealing with a business sale, complex trusts, private investments, philanthropy, liquidity needs, and next-generation education is not merely looking for a portfolio. It is looking for judgment across decisions that affect one another. The more complex the family, the more valuable it becomes to have the relevant expertise connected rather than scattered.

The general contractor analogy is useful here. No one hires a general contractor because they expect that person to perform every trade personally. The value comes from understanding the project as a whole, sequencing the work, bringing the right people together, maintaining quality, and remaining accountable for the finished result.

But private wealth management is not construction. A home is a project with a beginning and an end while a family’s financial life is ongoing. A trust decision can affect investment policy or a liquidity event can affect tax planning, estate strategy, philanthropy, and family governance at the same time. The work does not arrive in neat categories and one decision often changes the shape of another.

That is where integrated expertise under one roof can be so valuable. The advantage is not simply convenience but rather a shared context. It is the benefit of having people around the same table who understand the same family, the same priorities, and the same tradeoffs. Advice becomes better when the people giving it are not entering the conversation cold, or being pulled in only after a decision has already started to have its effects.

Outside specialists will always have a role though. Most firm cannot do everything , and some questions require expertise beyond the walls of any single organization – for example, an attorney in certain market with narrow experience on business matter. But there is a difference between calling on outside expertise and asking the client to manage a loose network of referrals. The best advisory relationships feel more coherent than that. Someone understands the whole picture. Someone is responsible for how the pieces fit together.

Investment management itself has become steadily less differentiated. Broad market exposure can now be obtained for only a few basis points. Trading costs have largely disappeared even for retail investors. Information that was once available only to institutions is now widely accessible. But even though constructing and maintaining a diversified portfolio has become easier, helping families make sound financial decisions has not.

The burden should not fall entirely on the client to piece this together. A good advisory firm should make the economics of the relationship plainly visible – almost like an annual client statement. The client should be able to see what was paid in dollars and what work was done for them. Not every client will study it closely and many will simply trust the relationship. But the standard should exist anyway, because transparency should be part of the discipline of doing the work well.

Looking back, one of the things I appreciated most about my time at Brown Advisory was that the strongest client relationships were never built on investments alone. Brown strived to deliver on “first-class performance” but equally important was integrated “thoughtful advice” and “client-first” service.

As portfolios become easier to build, firms become larger, and access to products easier – I believe the harder work will be integrating advice around a family’s full financial life. The firms that stand apart will be those that make expertise feel connected rather than fragmented, keep accountability clear, and help families understand not only what they are paying, but the value being created in return.

One of the strangest facts about being human is that we live finite lives with seemingly infinite desires.

Adam Smith’s account of ambition has stayed with me because it speaks directly to a question I do not know yet how to put into practice consistently: how does a finite creature know when enough is enough?

Modern life offers many ways to measure a life: money, status, influence, achievement, even the optimization of sleep, diet, and attention. Wealth makes life safer, recognition opens doors, and achievement expands what becomes possible.

The difficulty is that none of them tell us when to stop. Even when life affords us the opportunity to rest, we often treat it as a moral failing rather than a human need. As soon as something is achieved, something else (has to) takes its place.

Smith traces this to our desire to be “observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of.” We do not simply want comfort but rather we want our lives to register in the minds of other people.

Once basic needs are met, the desire to be seen often becomes a powerful source of motivation. It is a tormenting way to live, speaking from personal experience, but also one of the forces that has carried much of civilization forward.

Smith’s parable of the poor man’s son paints a youth who sacrifices his peace of mind for wealth and status, believing it will bring lasting happiness. He reaches old age having achieved it, only to discover it is not enough. It does not remove anxiety, or the deeper instinct to be seen.

The desire to be seen is not a bug in human nature. It is more like part of the human operating system, and unfortunately, understanding it does not remove the need to be seen from our psyche.

That reframes Smith’s distinction between being loved and being lovely. To be loved is to receive approval; to be lovely is to deserve it. Much of ambition becomes confused when the visibility (the need to be loved) starts to feel like proof of worth.

Smith’s “impartial spectator” is an attempt to judge actions without relying on others’ approval. Not whether something is noticed, but whether it is worth doing. In that sense, Smith is not trying to eliminate ambition, but to govern it.

For a long time I thought Smith was offering a way to quiet the need to be seen through the lens of impartial spectator. Now I think he is answering a narrower question. The desire to be seen does not disappear. The challenge is to keep it from deciding what is worth striving for.