Advisors archive
Every Advisors story, newest first. 898 stories
2 stories
- The Advisor's Note
Schwab prices AI at $240 a seat
The custodian's Claude integration turns AI into a custody line item, and the process work will cost more than the license.
- Recruiting & transitions
Six Modern Wealth advisors left as it acquired $710 million in assets
Consolidators can buy a book; the week showed they cannot buy the advisors who run it, and the recruiting market is repricing on that difference.
8 stories
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Recruiting & transitions
A UBS team ran the LPL math and chose Raymond James
A two-year search that weighed Rockefeller and LPL ended at Raymond James' employee channel, the clearest recent test of West Coast recruiting economics.
- Tax & estate planning
The Roth conversion screen should start with taxable assets
Slott's negative list reorders the conversion conversation: three of the five disqualifiers are answered with a balance sheet, not a projection.
- Practice management
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 Advisor's Note
Anthropic's advisor list will be won on fees, not logos
The AI firm is making wealth managers submit pricing and service proposals, giving independent practices a rare shot at pre-IPO wealth that private banks used to control.
- Practice management
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.
4 stories
- Products & portfolios
AI adoption is collapsing fund lineup diversification
Managers buying the same models and the same datasets leave advisors holding one bet under five tickers, and the overlap check is now the job.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Tax & estate planning
Luminary's $22 million round is a bet on the estate-document layer
The raise is small against a claimed $500 billion in client assets supported; the real wager is whether advisors come to treat Luminary as the place those documents live.
3 stories
- The Advisor's Note
Kahan built a pro bono channel, not a gesture
Twenty-five years on, the replicable piece of the 9/11 volunteer effort is the plumbing that put willing planners in front of families who needed them.
- Practice management
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.
- The Advisor's Note
Mariner's $175 million bot budget is a supervision purchase
At $250,000 a bot, the AI gap in wealth management is now a data-custody and review-standard problem.
5 stories
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Tax & estate planning
OZ 2.0 is a scheduling problem dressed as a tax break
The 2027 rolling deferral hands advisors a quarter to build the exit plan before the entry gets sold.
- Succession & selling a firm
Sanchez's real multiple sits in the terms nobody published
Modern Wealth bought a $710 million book and a founder's remaining career in one signature, which makes the price that matters the one the announcement left out.
13 stories
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Products & portfolios
Clients bought protected participation, not yield, in Q2 annuities
LIMRA's final second-quarter tally cut $2.7 billion from the preliminary total, and the product-level split should anchor retirement-income conversations.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- Products & portfolios
The 401(k) savings gap is a plan-design problem
Fidelity's generational deferral spread and Morningstar's managed-account finding hand advisors the argument for getting paid inside the plan, not at the rollover desk.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
- The Advisor's Note
A zero-fee custody pitch turns due diligence upside down
Interactive Brokers has put a zero on the fee page; advisors now have to underwrite response times and export clauses before moving a dollar.
- Tax & estate planning
Put the client's health spending on the portfolio page
Marsh's 8.2% trend rate turns a missing budget line into a funded position with its own inflation rate and an annual review date.
- Succession & selling a firm
A $710 million exit where the founder stays put
Sanchez Wealth Management's sale to Modern Wealth prices both a practice and a career; the terms nobody published are the ones a selling principal should be negotiating.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.
5 stories
- Recruiting & transitions
IBKR pitches RIAs with a fee page and a promise
The no-fee policy is the right answer to a custody market edging closer to the client; the service record behind the promise is still unproven.
- Tax & estate planning
Jock taxes are a filing problem beyond football
Single-day filing states make mobile clients the real audience for the Mahomes tax story.
- Recruiting & transitions
Banks' upstream push hands RIAs their next breakaway wave
Fee hikes and routing rules turn mass-affluent advisors into RIAs' next recruiting class—if the destination firm can serve the clients.
- Practice management
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.
- Practice management
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.