Merit's first CTO turns the roll-up trade into an integration trade

Merit Financial Advisors has named John Rajes its first chief technology officer, InvestmentNews reports, the clearest sign yet that the Atlanta RIA aggregator is shifting from buying books to integrating them.

Rajes started July 13 and will oversee technology architecture, data strategy, integrations and artificial intelligence, working from Charlotte with significant time at Merit's Alpharetta, Georgia headquarters.

The hire lands as Merit manages roughly $30.1 billion across more than 55 offices and has closed 61 acquisitions, nine of them in 2026. That pace has pushed the firm to fill out its senior bench, adding chief financial officer Doug Moore, executive vice president of financial planning Sarah Mouser, and chief advisor success officer Alex Hansen earlier this year.

Rajes comes from an independent consulting practice, and his résumé includes LPL, UBS, Barclays and Goldman Sachs. At LPL, he ran strategic partnerships and oversaw a fintech ecosystem of roughly 90 providers, along with investment product relationships spanning asset managers, insurers and separately managed account providers.

That platform-side view matters for a firm whose growth has come from bringing other people's books onto its own system, a perspective Chrissy Lee, Merit's chief operating officer, said the firm has been deliberate about building.

"Technology is now central to virtually every aspect of how we support our advisors, integrate new teams and create scale across the firm," Lee said. "John brings the wealth management experience, technology expertise and strategic perspective we need to connect the investments we are making today with a much broader roadmap for where Merit is going."

Rajes framed the work in similar terms. "Technology becomes more important as an organization grows, but simply adding more technology isn't the answer," he said. "Merit already has a strong foundation. Now we can build on it by connecting our data, integrations and AI capabilities in ways that make information more useful, accessible and actionable for advisors and employees."

The appointment follows a pattern now familiar across wealth management, as firms that scaled through M&A add specialized executives to carry the operational weight of that growth. InvestmentNews, which first reported the hire, notes that for private equity-backed consolidators aiming at an IPO exit, integration may be the make-or-break factor.

RIA M&A's next phase is integration rather than aggregation; the buyer pool is shorter, and advisors should ask who owns the platform before taking the check. Merit has now set its own answer by putting a technology executive on the leadership bench.

Bridgeway Group, a former Commonwealth RIA with $900 million in assets, closed in August and pushed Merit to its 61st acquisition. The CTO hire puts the next test inside the firm: making the 61 books it already owns operate as one.

The harder work is data unification and workflow consistency across more than 55 offices, where every acquired book tends to bring its own systems and habits; that is unglamorous work, and the reason so many roll-ups quietly trade at discounts to the sum of their parts.

PWD's records show Merit serves 20,710 accounts with 470 employees, the true scale of the integration challenge. Every account that arrived through an acquisition carries its own history, its own systems and its own advisor habits. Rajes's mandate includes artificial intelligence, which is where integrated data becomes a competitive weapon; the client-facing payoff of AI will go to whoever owns the cleanest integrated data.

The next acquisition will be announced soon enough; the better question is whether, by the fourth quarter, Merit can make all 55 offices produce the same client statement.