Wealthtech Innovation Is Becoming Advisors’ Biggest Frustration

Did you try unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in, or cleaning the gunk out of the mouse?

As more RIAs push upmarket to serve high- and ultra-high-net-worth clients, they’re expanding beyond investment management into planning, tax coordination and broader relationship management. For wirehouses, that’s easier: Large firms already have specialists and integrated infrastructure. Independent advisors often have to build those capabilities themselves through technology. That’s where things get messy.

Advisors now juggle CRMs, wealth management platforms and all kinds of AI tools that frequently don’t integrate cleanly. The result is a patchwork of systems held together by manual processes. “When a client asks a simple question about their account balance, I shouldn’t have to triangulate three systems to give them a confident answer,” said Jeff Judge, managing partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners. 

Decisions, Decisions

Advisors first need to decide where they want to excel (whether it’s investment management, financial planning or client relationship management) because doing all three equally well is difficult, said John O’Connell, CEO of the Oasis Group. “That’s like saying you want to be a rocket scientist, deep sea diver and bohemian all at the same time,” he said. “Once you figure that out, now you know where you want to spend the most money on technology.”

Kimberly Bridges launched her RIA, Bright Women Financial, last year and has spent much of that time evaluating software. “The challenge now isn’t a lack of options,” Bridges said. “It’s the overwhelming abundance of them.” When Bridges wanted an AI note-taking tool, she initially used Zoom. Soon after, Wealthbox and Calendly rolled out competing features, and similar tools seemed to appear everywhere. “Once you’ve committed, trained and integrated a tool into your workflow, it’s hard to justify switching again, even when the new option looks superior,” she said. “The real friction isn’t the technology itself; it’s trying to make durable decisions in an environment where the ‘best’ solution keeps shifting.”

The pace of change ranks among advisors’ biggest tech frustrations, according to an Orion survey:

• Disconnected systems remain the top complaint, with only 3% of advisors reporting fully unified data across platforms.
• More than one-third of advisors said they aren’t sufficiently trained to get full value from their technology.
• Half expect their firms to increase tech budgets this year, by an average of 19%.

DIY is Not A-OK. O’Connell said one growing concern is advisors “vibe coding,” using AI or copied code snippets to build internal tools without proper oversight. “It scares the hell out of me,” he said. “If an advisor says they built their own CRM, you have to wonder where it’s hosted, whether it’s secure and if it would even pass a Regulation S-P compliance test.” However, it is a good way to prototype ideas before meeting with a developer, he added.

Just don’t put a client’s Social Security number in there before then.