Practice management: archive
Every Practice management story in Advisors, newest first. 330 stories
9 stories
MoneyGuide can now model the annuity inside the plan
The income floor now sits in the same projection as the portfolio, moving the decumulation fight from illustration to product selection.
Your firm's manual now decides which side gigs survive
The SEC narrowed what brokerages must monitor, kept the sales-compensation trigger, and left every firm to write the list that actually governs an advisor's outside business.
The SEC just gave examiners a checklist for your annual review
The annual compliance review now has a published yardstick — firms that treat it as paperwork will feel it first.
NASAA holds its $15 rep fee flat; the ledger is the cost
The firm-level IARD waiver now runs through 2027, which fixes the cheap part of state registration while the per-representative workload keeps growing.
Advisors want client time; AI is buying back emails
Vanguard's 72% time priority gives practices the benchmark for judging where AI belongs, and the survey's usage data shows most are still a layer away from the client-facing hours they say they want.
The 5% foundation payout floor is now a client audit trigger
Average payout at the largest private foundations was 5.1% in 2024, handing advisors a benchmark and a warning for private foundation clients.
Ask what the decision solved before you call it a mistake
Kitces and Richards would have advisors rebuild a client's reasoning before they rebuild the portfolio; the answer is what justifies the rewrite.
Healthcare's fiscal trajectory belongs in every decumulation model
The Tax Foundation's fiscal math argues for stress-testing federal healthcare subsidies and the employer-coverage exclusion the way advisors already stress-test equity returns.
Claude for advisors hits the workflow wall
The connectors are the proof of concept, and the practices that never wrote down a baseline will have no way to know whether the tool moved anything.
5 stories
Ridgeline’s $250M raise matters to advisors for who wrote it
An invitation-only round led by the founder buys the platform time to finish the reconciliation build its RIA clients have already signed up for.
RIA buyers have more capital than ever; holding period now wins deals
Eight ways to fund an RIA acquisition, and the one term that decides whether the seller's team survives it: the buyer's return model.
SEC approves FINRA's outside-business rewrite and leaves firms the discretion that matters
Rule 3290 removes the paperwork on bartending and weekend refereeing and says broker-dealers need not supervise a dual registrant's RIA; how much of that relief survives is decided in each firm's compliance manual.
FMG Suite bets the follow-up email is the growth bottleneck
Seven launch partners route meeting recaps and prospect intake through one API layer; the practices whose records already agree will benefit most.
Legacy Positions Are Fiduciary Work, Billable or Not
Rich Chen's guest post for Kitces maps the traps that turn a new client's concentrated stock into an exam finding — and puts the fee question squarely back in the firm's lap.
3 stories
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.
Pave's $15M round prices advisor AI at the custodian layer
The advisory firms that wrote checks bought a cheaper portfolio-construction layer — and a position in the channel that sells it.
Grow the team, then cut the book to fit it
Carolyn McClanahan spent years training successors who left, then shrank Life Planning Partners to 65 households and handed ownership to the employees who stayed.
5 stories
Schwab's Claude exclusive puts a $4,800 AI seat on 16,000 RIAs
The custodian's first-mover integration costs an advisor $240 a year per seat, plus process work nobody has budgeted yet.
Anthropic's advisor suite hands the AI edge to firms with clean permissions
Nine integrations bundled into a single install make the assistant easy to switch on, and the practices that audit access rights first will be the ones that get the capacity gain.
Anthropic pitches advisers a tool that doubles as model-portfolio distribution
The pitch is capacity, but the shelf inside the tool is where BlackRock's $300 billion book gets its front door.
Career changers cost more up front and less in churn
Kitces Research puts new-graduate turnover at two to five times the career-changer rate, which makes the salary premium that scares firms off the cheaper half of the trade.
The AI race moves to what happens after the meeting
Salesforce's Agentic Advisor turns meeting output into prioritized action, and the practices that wire it into owned tasks first will consolidate assets and compound referrals before smaller rivals can afford the integration.
2 stories
Anthropic's adviser list will be won on fees, not logos
The AI firm asked wealth managers to put pricing and services on paper, handing independent practices a rare look-in on the windfalls its employees are about to receive.
The IRS security checklist doubles as a marketing asset
Six controls the IRS wants owned and documented are the evidence file a client’s attorney, accountant or bank eventually asks to see.
1 story
DOL's overtime exemption turns on duties, not titles
The administrative exemption is determined by documented job duties and a salary level the fact sheet only points to elsewhere; a typical RIA back office has written down neither.
3 stories
Mariner's $175M bot bet is a headcount purchase
At $250,000 per bot over five years, Mariner is budgeting capacity rather than software, and the deployment work is where the plan will be won or lost.
Advisers grade their own recruiting a C, and they are right
Cerulli counts 35% of advisers retiring within a decade, which is why the entry-level pitch has to be training and a path, not a payout grid.
RIAs are hiring around AI before they can manage it
Seventy-three percent of surveyed firms want junior advisors and 15% want compliance staff, which is the shape of the bet and also its weak point.
8 stories
Hamachi says its patent keeps client data out of LLMs
The advisory-tech veterans behind the platform are selling a masking layer; the practice still owns the questions about where the data travels and who answers for it.
XYPN buys AI-search access; the credibility behind AI answers accrues slowly
The network can hand members the machinery of testimonial-driven visibility, but the thing that gets a firm named in a chat window is proof built over years, which puts the payoff past the length of most marketing contracts.
Pride forum spins out of LPL Focus with three sponsors attached
The 2027 gathering is funded before it has a venue or dates, and the sponsor list is the number to watch when the dates land.
An outage at Wells is a protocol test for every practice on shared plumbing
BetaNXT also sits under LPL, Janney and Stifel, so a vendor advisors never chose can still decide whether the desk works on a Tuesday.
The app score belongs in recordkeeper due diligence
J.D. Power's 53-point gap between app and website satisfaction tracks with the rollover behavior plan sponsors care about most.
The SEC's AI priorities turn on who signs the review
Existing fiduciary and disclosure duties already reach AI-drafted advice, putting the cost in the approval step rather than the model.
Conquest drops 'Planning' and bets on a white-label advice engine
The audit trail behind SAM is the compliance argument; the next year's test is which platform puts SAM in front of clients.
Bain's Vestmark buy makes the next renewal a negotiation
Adaptive modularity promises no forced migrations; what decides whether a practice can ever leave is the export clause.
3 stories
Wells Fargo's outage is a vendor dependency audit
A shared back-office vendor puts four major firms on the same rails, and a manual fallback is only as good as its last drill.
Health Portfolios Are the Last Retirement Input Advisors Miss
MIT AgeLab's Joseph Coughlin wants advisors to treat monthly health spending as a managed position, not a personal line item, and his October paper gives them a script.
A client's bad trade is still the client's call
Fiduciary duty requires following lawful client instructions; the advisor's craft is in the pause, the paper trail, and the reassessment that follows.
1 story
Salesforce bets advisor AI on follow-through, not note-taking
The Agentic Advisor suite turns meeting output into prioritized action, but small-firm adoption remains the open question.