Focus Financial adds Nevis as enterprise AI platform nine months after Jump rollout

Focus Financial Partners has added Nevis as its enterprise AI platform, InvestmentNews reported on Oct. 21, nine months after the firm rolled out Jump's AI assistant to 800 advisors.

Nevis will handle account opening and client onboarding first, Focus COO Justin Ferri told InvestmentNews earlier this week. Jump, originally built as an AI notetaker for advisors, recently opened a limited beta for AI account opening at Schwab and Fidelity, the same function Nevis will take on at Focus.

Both products also claim notetaking. Nevis co-founder and CEO Mark Swan wrote on LinkedIn that advisors use the firm's tool to take meeting notes, prepare for meetings and draft emails.

Aaron Steinberg, founder of the RIA-focused AI consultancy ThrivAI, separates the two products. "Jump lives in the meeting, capturing the conversation and drafting the follow-up; Nevis lives in the back office, moving an account from application to open," said Steinberg, who previously was an RIA and custody head at LPL Financial.

Time to market is the case for running both, according to Joel Bruckenstein, a fintech consultant and publisher of T3 Technology Hub. "Nevis might already have a well developed solution for account opening while another vendor is still building it out," he said. A deep integration with a custodian, another vendor or an insurance company that the other tool does not have yet is a second justification, he said.

Focus has more than $570 billion in collective client assets across 330 locations and 6,300 team members, InvestmentNews reported.

Jay Coulter, CEO of Titleist Asset Management, told InvestmentNews that RIAs at Focus's scale are likely to have varying technology vendors across the firms rolled into its network. "Focus is built from hundreds of acquired firms, so its stack was never going to be uniform, and running a notetaker alongside an operations platform can make sense while you learn what works," Coulter said. "Eventually somebody has to decide which tool owns account opening, because you cannot have two systems doing it."

Subscription cost is only part of the arithmetic; as this publication reported in September, Schwab's Claude integration turned AI into a custody line item, and the process work will cost more than the license.