At a glance
- 23 WealthManagement.com column by a Practifi executive.
- Every route ends at the same invoice, the column says.
- Firms renegotiating software contracts have one term worth pinning down: whether integration or consumption charges may be passed through, and where they surface on the invoice.
Orion will charge technology providers for API access, and Salesforce will meter AI agent calls at a rate it hasn't published, according to an Oct. 23 WealthManagement.com column by a Practifi executive. The column asks who ends up paying.
Every route ends at the same invoice, the column says. A vendor billed for connecting to a platform can pass on the charge, adding a surcharge for a service clients already fund. Drop the integration and the firm loses the efficiency it existed to create. Absorb the cost, which the author calls the worst option because it comes out of the roadmap. Switch vendors, the author says, and face licensing fees, project costs and lost productivity.
Firms renegotiating software contracts have one term worth pinning down: whether integration or consumption charges may be passed through, and where they surface on the invoice. Schwab's Claude integration carries a $240-a-year per-seat price, which this publication reported in September. That is a number a firm can put in a budget line; a per-call rate that hasn't been published is not, and a practice billing clients a fixed percentage of assets has no matching meter on the revenue side.
The column argues for transparency rather than free software: charge for value delivered and let clients judge the fee. It concedes APIs cost money to build and secure, and that an unprofitable vendor can't build anything worth connecting to. The author's firm, Practifi, charges neither integration nor consumption fees, according to the column.
The column leans on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, published free in November 2024 and given to the Linux Foundation so nobody could own it; OpenAI and Google adopted it. That plumbing sits under the connector wave this publication has covered — Anthropic's Claude plugin connects to Schwab, Orion, Addepar, Envestnet and others, with advisors choosing services during setup. A consumption model would put a price on exactly that traffic.
Salesforce's per-call rate and Orion's charges for technology providers are the two numbers a firm needs before it signs next year's software budget. A renewal signed before they are published locks in the terms the firm negotiated; one signed after inherits whatever pass-through language the vendor wrote.
That is a number a firm can put in a budget line; a per-call rate that hasn't been published is not, and a practice billing clients a fixed percentage of assets has no matching meter on the revenue side.
Reported by the Practice management desk from WealthManagement.com, Wealth Advisor Daily archive and Wealth Advisor Daily archive. Published . Corrections