Choreo's AI bet is the Schwab pipe it will own

Choreo has handed proposal drafting and client onboarding to AI agents built by Beemo Automation, a ten-employee Chicago software shop that founder and CEO Ben Olsen has bootstrapped without outside money, and the agents live inside Microsoft Teams, where Choreo's advisors already work, drawing on the firm's Microsoft SharePoint documents when prompted. InvestmentNews reported that Choreo, with more than 120 advisors across 21 states, over 40 offices, some 7,000 clients and $28.6 billion in assets, is the largest firm on Beemo's roster of roughly 50 RIA partners.

The weight sits with the Schwab integration, which Beemo built as a direct connection to the custodian's data — Schwab is Choreo's main custodian — and which Olsen told InvestmentNews Choreo will own. That ownership separates this deployment from the AI access being handed around at the top of the stack, where Schwab has moved to put Anthropic's Claude in front of the RIAs that custody with it, a partnership this publication argued buys queue position rather than a better model, because the value in AI for advisors settles with whoever writes the connector. Here it is the RIA writing it, with a custodian's cooperation and a vendor's labor.

Beemo's pricing is unromantic: retainers begin at $5,000 a month to build the agents and run as high as $50,000 for larger deployments, dropping to a maintenance fee once they are live. Olsen founded the company in 2024 after starting in entry-level roles at Merrill Lynch and then working as a client services associate at The Mather Group in Chicago — the job, he says, that Beemo's software now largely automates. Mather's most recent regulatory numbers, 32 registered reps and $13.4 billion in assets, describe the buyer Beemo is pricing for: firms large enough that a hire is a visible line item, small enough that the retainer is the cheaper answer.

For Choreo, majority-owned by Parthenon Capital and described in the coverage as an RIA acquirer, the onboarding math matters more than for most because client onboarding is the recurring cost of every practice it absorbs and headcount added there is permanent in a way a monthly retainer is not. CEO Jason Van de Loo framed the aim as creating capacity and improving consistency while preserving "the judgment and personal relationships that remain at the heart of great client service." That is an honest description of what these agents do: they draft and they gather, and an advisor still signs.

Owning one Schwab data path is a head start with a shelf life, because connector value compounds with each additional custodian and depends on whether the custodian leaves that integration in the RIA's hands. Choreo's client base sharpens the case for building it: the firm has been active serving employees at pre-IPO companies such as SpaceX and is targeting workers from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are the accounts most likely to strain an onboarding process. The same agents are available to the roughly 50 other RIAs already working with Beemo, but Choreo is the one paying to own the pipe.