Advisor Tech Talk (Week of 10/19/26)

Your clients probably don’t truly understand cybersecurity risk. 

Welcome to Advisor Tech Talk, where we have a healthy harvest of wealthtech headlines to share this week, but first, we’re going to share a personal story, because as we were researching this week’s column our parents called us on their way to see their financial advisor, asking what we thought they should talk about. 

Now, for the past decade or so we’ve sat in on most of these periodic wealth management meetings, but to be honest our parents don’t really do much with their money: they manage our family wealth like bonsai gardeners slowly pruning and training tiny trees over the years and decades, which is pretty much how those assets have been managed for generations. 

Mom does most of the talking—on our calls and in the meetings—and asked point-blank about cybersecurity. A good friend of theirs had lost a seven-digit sum due to a cyber breach at a small local brokerage, the account was only insured for $250,000, and the assets appear to be completely lost. Luckily, the friend has other assets in other accounts at other custodians and brokerages. 

But our parents have most of their money in one account at one large institution, and Mom wanted to ask their wirehouse brokerage rep about maybe diversifying their assets across more locations to avoid cybersecurity threats. 

This when Dad finally chimed in, noting that he never goes online, has never logged into a bank or investment account portal, and therefore is immune from the threat of cybercriminals breaching his accounts and stealing his money. 

For a moment, as we began clearing our throat, Mom saw his point and agreed with him. 

Mind you, Mom is a retired nurse, Dad is a retired attorney. These are well-educated, smart, well-informed people who are probably approaching last few go-go years of their retirement. 

We had to explain that everything about their financial lives was already on a computer and was being accessed and manipulated by financial professionals using computers, and had been for decades, because our parents, as smart and with-it as they are, didn’t quite understand that with a cybersecurity threat, the old horror tropes don’t really mean anything. The call doesn’t have to come from inside the house, the mistake that leads to a breach and exposes our assets and well-being to harm and bad actors might not even be our own. 

Then we had to explain why their wirehouse advisor might not give them the best advice when it comes to diversifying their assets to mitigate cybersecurity risk. We harbor more than a few doubts that even the most stringent fiduciary is capable of giving great financial advice when it comes to cybersecurity and protecting one’s assets as we move through a new digital epoch that will be defined by evolving threats from artificial intelligence and quantum computing. 

Here it is, Monday, and we’ve already opened enough cans of worms for a great fishing trip. 

Let’s get to your headlines...

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Acorns 

Acorns, the financial wellness company helping everyday Americans grow their money, today announced the acquisition of Frich, a community where young Americans learn about money from each other. Frich co-founders Katrin Kaurov and Aleksandra Medina join Acorns as Co-Leads of Education & Community. 

The deal reflects Acorns' broader goal of giving everyday Americans a real chance to grow their money. The acquisition brings Acorns a community of 1.6 million people and an organic creator network producing financial education content, extending the company's approach to reaching new investors through creator-led education. 

Many people avoid investing because they feel like it's a club they don't belong to, and they assume everyone else understands it and they don't. That feeling often forms years before someone opens an investing app. This acquisition meets people in the peer conversations where they're already shaping their money habits. It also continues a pattern for Acorns: bring in strong fintech builders and let them build. 

Benzinga 

Benzinga, a leading provider of real-time financial news, market data, and financial APIs, today announced an expanded relationship with WNSTN, an AI personalization and engagement platform built for financial institutions. The two companies will go to market together with a combined solution for brokerages, with WNSTN providing the AI intelligence layer and Benzinga providing the real-time and historical data that grounds it. 

The expansion builds on a year of collaboration inside Benzinga's products. Since launching across Benzinga Pro in 2025, Benzinga AI, powered by WNSTN, has delivered natural language chat, news summarization, and market analysis to Benzinga's base of active traders and financial professionals. The product has generated strong user adoption, including 25x increase in engagement, giving both companies the confidence to take the technology beyond Benzinga and make it available to a broader set of financial platforms. 

For brokerages, the offering is designed to shorten the distance between wanting AI in the client experience and being able to defend it internally. WNSTN supplies multiple touchpoints that sit on top of data, including a conversational layer, portfolio-aware personalization, always-on market monitoring, actionable investing ideas, tailored summaries and a compliance agent trained on global regulatory frameworks including FINRA, SEC, CySEC, and MiFID II, with every output routed through that layer before it reaches an end user. Benzinga supplies the underlying market intelligence, including real-time equities news, analyst ratings, earnings and corporate events, SEC filings, and Why Is It Moving explanations of price action, alongside historical archives for retrieval and context. 

Capitalize 

Capitalize, the industry’s leading infrastructure for retirement account transfers, today announced Liza™ AI, an enterprise AI solution built specifically for 401(k) rollovers and other transfers. Liza can work directly with customers and participants, as well as behind the scenes with operations teams - helping financial institutions complete more rollovers, faster and with fewer errors. 

Liza builds on Capitalize's established infrastructure to bring an intelligence layer to every stage of the retirement transfer process. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Liza is powered by Capitalize's Rollover Intelligence Engine - a proprietary foundation informed by millions of customer interactions and billions of dollars in rollover volume. That data advantage means Liza understands not just what customers are asking, but how to move transfers forward regardless of the situation. 

Liza is built with layered safeguards designed for financial institutions. Responses are grounded in Capitalize's retirement transfer knowledge base, with data protection, output validation, and authorization controls governing the information and actions available to Liza. Liza's automation is paired with rigorous QA capabilities - including human review, output validation, ongoing monitoring, and audit trails - so institutions can move faster without sacrificing accuracy or control. 

Choreo 

Choreo, LLC ("Choreo" or "the firm") announced today that Gabriel Rodriguez has been named Chief Technology Officer. He will report to Chief Executive Officer Jason Van de Loo, join the firm's executive leadership team and be based in the Charlotte, North Carolina office. 

Rodriguez will build the technology foundation for Choreo's next phase of growth, creating a connected platform that helps advisor teams deliver coordinated tax and wealth advice consistently as the firm scales. He will leverage AI to expand advisor capacity and will strengthen the planning, reporting and client engagement tools advisors use every day, supported by training that helps teams adopt them. 

Rodriguez brings over 20 years of industry experience. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President of Technology at LPL Financial, responsible for ClientWorks, the firm's advisor workstation. Before that, he spent six years at Vanguard leading technology architecture and engineering for its U.S. intermediary business. Earlier, he led investment research systems at Wellington Management and developed investment systems at Bain Capital. 

DeepVest 

DeepVest, the agentic front office for financial advisors, today announced the launch of PlanLab, its financial planning capability that brings the near-entirety of a household’s financial picture into one unified view. The interactive plan spans 11 planning domains and maps 53 connections between them.  

With PlanLab, advisors can visualize how various parts of a client’s financial life connect across retirement, taxes, investments, estate planning, insurance, risk, goals, behavioral factors, household details and business ownership. Rather than managing these areas across various spreadsheets and disconnected tools, advisors can now use PlanLab to see how a decision in one area may impact the rest of a client’s financial plan. 

With the launch of PlanLab, DeepVest has expanded its unified, agentic workspace into financial planning, building on its existing capabilities across proposal generation, market data, portfolio analysis and continuous monitoring. PlanLab is built on DeepVest’s hallucination-free platform, which combines AI-driven workflows with deterministic calculations to deliver accurate, transparent and auditable results. Information and decisions from elsewhere in DeepVest can flow into the financial plan, while PlanLab maintains a record of decisions and re-evaluates the plan as new client information becomes available. Firms can also use PlanLab alongside an existing financial planning system by importing a plan as a starting point, without having to replace their current setup. 

Docupace 

Docupace, the premier provider of back-office software to streamline operations and ensure the compliance of wealth management enterprises and financial advisors, today announced the availability of Docupace Next 1.0, the next generation of its Wealth Operations Platform. Built as a modern, enterprise-scale cloud platform, Docupace Next introduces a new data architecture and user experience designed to improve efficiency, accountability, scalability, and give firms a foundation for new agentic capabilities. 

The launch represents a major step in Docupace's evolution. Docupace Next creates a common technology foundation for future development while delivering meaningful improvements to customers today. 

Connecting client data is central to the Docupace Next platform, which is built around reusable contact records and structured relationships. Firms can enter or synchronize information once and use it as a universal client master across custodians, accounts, workflows, documents, and connected systems. This is the "Capture It Once, Use It Everywhere" concept that centralizes data and saves financial advisors time. 

DriveWealth 

DriveWealth, a global Brokerage-as-a-Service platform powering the infrastructure for modern investing and trading, and TrueMoney, Southeast Asia’s leading fintech platform under Ascend Money, e-payment services and financial services provider, today announced a strategic partnership that will expand access to U.S. stock investing for more than 30 million TrueMoney users. The investment service is provided via Webull Securities (Thailand), a Thai SEC licensed broker platform which is integrated in the TrueMoney application. 

Through this partnership, TrueMoney customers will be able to invest in U.S. equities through the TrueMoney app, leveraging DriveWealth’s infrastructure to expand access to global markets. 

Powered by DriveWealth’s modern and scalable brokerage infrastructure, which ensures a secure and compliant path to global markets, Thai retail investors will gain access to U.S. equities in an equitable way. 

FinTurk 

FinTurk, an AI-native CRM built specifically for financial advisors, today announced a new partnership with Fiduciary Check, an advisor network supporting financial professionals with resources and solutions to help them grow and operate their practices. Through the partnership, Fiduciary Check members will receive preferred access to FinTurk at discounts of up to 44%, with Fiduciary Check subsidizing the cost of the platform as part of its membership offering. 

The partnership gives Fiduciary Check members access to FinTurk’s CRM and automation capabilities at a reduced cost, bringing client relationships, workflows, meeting preparation, task management, portfolio management and automation together in one platform. Rather than requiring advisors to piece together separate technologies, FinTurk is designed around the day-to-day operations of an advisory firm, with native artificial intelligence (AI) embedded throughout the CRM. 

FinTurk’s native AI assistant, Finn, works within the CRM to help advisors understand their book of business, prepare for client meetings and manage day-to-day work, while keeping the advisor in control of every action. The platform also supports customizable client and household management, workflow and task automation, portfolio and cash management, along with email and calendar integrations. 

Focus Financial Partners 

Focus Financial Partners (“Focus”) and Nevis today announced a strategic partnership under which Nevis will serve as the enterprise AI platform for Focus Partners Wealth and Focus’ other business units, helping reduce administrative burdens, expand advisor capacity and enhance the experience for clients and advisors. The deployment will support Focus’ team members, reinforcing its commitment to pairing cutting-edge technology with highly personalized advice. 

This announcement follows Focus' multi-year transformation. While continuing to invest heavily in its brand, infrastructure and operating model, the company is now deploying AI at scale as part of its growth strategy, making this significant investment in Nevis’ wealth management technology. 

Focus enters this partnership as a leader in the wealth management, asset management, and business management industries, with more than $500 billion in collective client assets, more than 300 completed M&A transactions, and more than 6,300 team members. That scale gives Focus a distinct opportunity to shape how artificial intelligence is applied across wealth management, combining enterprise-level resources with the personalized guidance clients expect from their advisors. Nevis has established itself as the AI platform of choice for enterprise RIAs, growing the assets under management on its platform from $50 billion to $700 billion this year — establishing itself as the fastest-growing platform in its category. The company is backed by $40 million from Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, and Ribbit Capital, and its customer base includes some of the largest and fastest-growing wealth management firms in the country, among them IEQ Capital, United Capital, and AlTi Global. 

Jump 

Jump, the leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for advisors and financial services professionals, today announced its integration with FMG Suite (“FMG”), the leading marketing and growth platform for financial advisors, insurance professionals and enterprises. Built through FMG Connect, the workflow surfaces relevant, compliance-approved FMG content based on client conversations for advisors to review and use in post-meeting follow-up. 

For example, if a client raises questions about retirement income during a meeting, Jump could surface an FMG educational resource on that topic for the advisor to review and consider including in a post-meeting follow-up. The advisor decides whether the material fits the client’s needs and whether to send it, retaining control over the communication. 

The milestone builds on FMG’s recent introduction of FMG Connect, the integration and orchestration layer that allows external advisor tools to connect with FMG. Jump was one of seven early-access partners developing integrations. The new workflow advances that work into a concrete meeting-to-marketing experience. 

Mary & Pip 

Mary & Pip today announced its official public launch, introducing a new kind of finance app designed to help people stop overthinking — or underthinking — their finances and start taking meaningful action. 

Financial advice is everywhere, yet managing money can still feel fragmented, overwhelming and deeply personal. Mary & Pip brings users' broader financial life into one place, identifies a clear next step based on their priorities, and gives users the tools to act on that recommendation directly within the platform. 

At the center of the product is a behavioral system designed to make better financial decisions easier to understand, easier to execute and easier to repeat. 

MDOTM 

MDOTM Ltd., a global provider of AI-driven investment solutions for asset and wealth management companies, today announced an expansion of its New York office to strengthen its U.S. presence and build on its relationships with institutional clients nationwide. 

The expansion follows MDOTM’s recent $27 million growth equity investment led by Expedition Growth Capital and reflects the company’s continued investment in serving asset and wealth management firms. 

MDOTM’s AI investment platform, Sphere, brings together AI-driven investment insights, portfolio construction and rebalancing, and automated reporting. The platform helps investment teams turn market intelligence, investment views and client preferences into scalable investment decisions, personalized portfolios and client-ready communications. 

Prometheum 

Prometheum Inc. (“Prometheum”), a market infrastructure provider for crypto assets, and Federated Hermes, Inc. (NYSE: FHI) (“Federated Hermes”), a global leader in active investment management, today announced a strategic partnership to expand the reach of tokenized securities products through Prometheum’s SEC-registered, FINRA member broker-dealer market infrastructure. 

Through this planned collaboration, Federated Hermes will bring its deep active management expertise, a long-established commitment to fiduciary responsibilities, along with a growing suite of tokenized solutions in global markets. Prometheum will provide digital securities infrastructure through its SEC-registered, FINRA member broker-dealer subsidiaries. ProFinancial, Inc. will support distribution of tokenized products. Additionally, Prometheum Capital LLC will custody, clear, and settle products on behalf of its customers and make Federated Hermes’ tokenized products available to introducing broker-dealers through its correspondent clearing platform. 

The announcement comes as tokenized funds, and money market funds in particular, have emerged as a notable use case in the tokenized asset market, with early issuances demonstrating market interest and value to the end investor. This collaboration is designed to bridge traditional and digital asset markets by bringing on-chain access to the brokerage accounts and advisor relationships through which many Americans already invest. 

SaverLife 

Today, SaverLife announced the launch of a customized version of its award-winning financial wellness app, designed specifically to support skilled trades workers. Funded by The BlackRock Foundation as part of its continued commitment to support America’s workforce development through BlackRock Future Builders™, the SaverLife x BlackRock Future Builders app, including SaverLife‘s Financial Navigator, will provide customized tools to help thousands of apprentices manage their debt, build credit, and grow their savings over time with confidence. Designed to address their unique needs, the app is now available to nearly 75,000 apprentices nationwide through the electrical training ALLIANCE (etA), the national training partnership between the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). The etA is responsible for the standardized apprenticeship curriculum, program tools, and resources that support IBEW-NECA training centers nationwide. 

Powered by financial health expertise, behavioral science, real-time data, and AI, SaverLife is designed for working Americans who need trusted, just-in-time financial support. Their free app currently supports 800,000+ Americans across all 50 states, and the majority save more after joining SaverLife. As part of the SaverLife and The BlackRock Foundation partnership, union apprentices in the BlackRock Future Builders programs will be eligible for cash incentives as they progress through the training program and build healthy financial habits. 

The BlackRock Foundation’s commitment builds on BlackRock’s ongoing work to support America’s workforce and reflects its broader mission to help more people invest better to live better. It follows an initial $100 million philanthropic commitment to grow America’s skilled trades workforce, and the launch of the Alliance for America's Skilled Trades: a coalition focused on expanding pathways into critical industries. As the U.S. continues to invest in its infrastructure growth, these careers allow opportunities for more people to work toward their own financial resilience and security. 

SEI 

SEI® (NASDAQ: SEIC) today announced the appointment of Kristie Edling-Day as Chief Information Officer (CIO), reporting to Ryan Hicke, Chief Executive Officer. In this role, Edling-Day will lead the enterprise technology and product strategy and operations, including digital transformation, platform modernization, and cybersecurity governance. The appointment reinforces SEI's commitment to operational excellence and advancing the technology capabilities that will enable the firm's long-term growth ambitions. 

Edling-Day will oversee SEI's technology and product organization and will be responsible for advancing the firm's multi-year technology and product roadmap, ensuring investments align with business objectives, client needs, and regulatory expectations. Alongside SEI leadership, she will drive cross-functional collaboration to accelerate innovation, strengthen operational capabilities, and deliver technology solutions that support the firm's strategic priorities. 

Edling-Day brings more than 20 years of technology, product, and strategy leadership experience spanning financial services, wealth management, enterprise transformation, and emerging technologies. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President and CIO for Advisor Technology and Enterprise Production Operations at LPL Financial, where she led technology supporting approximately 32,000 financial advisors and oversaw enterprise production operations, improving reliability and reducing operational risk. She helped define and operationalize the firm's enterprise AI strategy, led its early implementation, and played a key role in shaping enterprise technology strategy and presenting strategic priorities to the board. 

SMArtX Advisory Solutions 

SMArtX Advisory Solutions, a leader in enterprise managed account technology, today announced a strategic partnership with AdvizorStack, a technology and operational services platform for independent RIAs. Through the partnership, SMArtX will power AdvizorStack's platform with its Manager Marketplace, proposal generation, trading, and billing technology — embedded directly within AdvizorStack's advisor environment. 

AdvizorStack provides technology and operational support to help independent RIAs launch, transition, and scale, pairing hands-on consulting with a curated technology stack and partnerships with custodians including Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Raymond James. Through this integration, AdvizorStack's network of independent RIAs will have direct, native access to SMArtX's Manager Marketplace, proposal generation, and trading and billing capabilities, all delivered within AdvizorStack's own advisor environment rather than a separate, third-party system. 

The partnership reflects both companies' shared commitment to giving independent RIAs institutional-grade tools without the complexity of managing multiple vendors. 

SUBSCRIBE 

SUBSCRIBE, a global fintech company providing the leading enterprise operating system for alternative investments, today announced the launch of their 1031 DST Transaction Platform. The digital solution provides over 1200 wealth management firms and their 55,000 financial advisors access to more than 40 DST offerings from leading alternative asset managers including Blackstone, Bluerock, Cantor Fitzgerald Asset Management, Capital Square, Cottonwood, ExchangeRight, Hines, Inland, Invesco, Nuveen, Palladius, Passco, Starwood, and many others. As part of the initiative, the company has also formed strategic relationships with national 1031 exchange firms, such as Accruit, digitally embedding qualified intermediary (QI) services as part of the workflow within SUBSCRIBE. 

The technology-enabled 1031 exchange workflow and property data solution is designed to allow financial advisors and their clients to initiate, manage, and track an exchange transaction from start to finish. The solution seeks to close the information gap that often exists between financial advisors and their clients by capturing exchanger, relinquished property, and other critical information to help automate the multistage, paperwork-heavy process on a single platform and do so transparently for all stakeholders. The embedded QIs will provide financial advisors with educational resources and access to experienced exchange professionals, while the broad menu of DSTs centralizes access to high-quality investment options. 

SUBSCRIBE's 1031 DST Transaction Platform is also positioned to make offerings easily accessible, and transaction tracking simpler for alternative asset managers that have designed DST offerings to provide financial advisors and their clients with access to institutional‑quality real estate across senior housing, student housing, multifamily, and industrial property. Bringing sponsors, QIs, and financial advisors together on a single platform to consolidate and simplify the process helps clients preserve capital, defer taxes, and execute reinvestment strategies more efficiently. This creates greater confidence in DSTs as tax-deferral strategies, strengthens long-term client relationships, and delivers a more seamless experience for all stakeholders.