BNY Pershing folds Wove into Adam Vos's wealth solutions unit

BNY Pershing is folding Wove, the multi-custodial platform it launched at its 2023 Insite conference, into a larger wealth solutions business, and it has told advisors so—a move that puts the platform's workflow, not its brand, under immediate watch. WealthManagement.com, which reported the overhaul first, describes the platform as being dismantled, with its stronger components carried into the custodian's broader offering; the goal, per that account, is a unified wealth proposition paired with custody at BNY or at a custodian the advisor chooses.

A BNY spokesperson told the publication by email: “BNY is focused on building a more connected, flexible set of capabilities for advisors and investors,” describing the firm as well positioned to support a comprehensive wealth ecosystem as a long-term provider.

The work is overseen by Adam Vos, who took over BNY Pershing and Wove earlier this year as global head of wealth solutions, a newly created role; his January promotion also put him over Archer Managed Account Solutions, the managed-account technology provider BNY acquired in 2024. The firm names four workstreams for the effort: modernizing the clearing and custody stack, easier API-enabled integrations, a unified managed accounts platform, and a better investor experience.

Wove went from launch to absorption in roughly three years, spearheaded by Ainslie Simmonds, then head of Pershing X, the start-up unit BNY set up to build new products. Simmonds, who had been with the firm about five years, left in June to spend more time with her family in Canada, according to the announcement to clients and employees, and had already handed the product head role to Carolyn Weinberg, who joined as chief solutions and innovation officer. Upgrades kept arriving in the meantime: at last year's Insite conference, BNY announced an integrated investor view of portfolios, information and tools on its NetX platform, a fixed-income portfolio management upgrade, and a unified managed account tool.

BNY declines to say how many advisors run on Wove, though three firms have been on record implementing the platform: TIAA, Sanctuary Wealth and Steward Partners. PWD's records show four Pershing executive changes logged on a single day in August, so the custodian's leadership has been in motion while the platform's future is sorted out.

For an advisory firm, the asset in Wove was the workflow it delivered, and workflow is exactly what a platform decision can quietly rewrite. A multi-custodial front end earns its keep by holding planning, trading, reporting and billing against one version of a client's accounts, wherever the assets sit—the part of the product advisors touch every day. The four workstreams speak to it directly: the API layer and the unified managed accounts platform decide how many people a firm hires to move data between systems.

Comparing custody platforms now means pricing the workflow above the clearing beneath it, a distinction we drew when Savvy began pitching advisors on software running over Fidelity's rails. Financial Planning's 41st annual IBD Elite study, which we covered in August, found clearing and custody costs layered deep enough that few advisors can see them, and the platform layer is where that opacity thickens rather than thins.

Wove was built as a multi-custodial platform, which let a firm keep assets at BNY or wherever else it liked; absorbing it into a business that also sells BNY custody, clearing and a managed-accounts platform moves the software closer to the shelf, and this publication has argued all year that the shelf fee and the custody fee are becoming one disclosure event. Advisors drawn to Wove because it did not tie them to a single custodian now have a version of that argument sitting inside their own technology stack.

The report does not say what happens to the firms already on the platform, which integrations survive the move, or how support changes; the four workstreams set direction without laying out a migration. That leaves the practical questions for a firm to put in writing: which APIs are live today and which sit on the roadmap, who owns the relationship when a data feed breaks, and what the exit looks like if the unified platform turns out to be a product the firm does not want. A practice with custody spread across more than one provider has leverage it lacked when Wove was the new thing, and the lesson we drew from the Vanguard-Altruist deal holds here — a change of this kind is a reason to reprice a custody relationship, not to move assets on the news.

The same report quotes George Guidetti, director of enterprise solutions at the AI-wealth platform ARQA, on BNY's move away from what the piece calls its legacy wealth platform, Albridge Wealth; the implication is that Wove itself was a successor product and that a custodian's platform brand has a shelf life shorter than the integrations built on top of it.

The next marker is Insite, the conference where BNY launched Wove in 2023 and announced its upgrades last year, and what goes on that stage next is the nearest thing to an answer for the advisors still running it.