Is it bad to put all your eggs in one basket? Not in the world of modern wealth management.

Citi Wealth and Advyzon announced a new partnership this week to build a unified managed account platform for Citi Wealth clients. The move reflects the broader trend of consolidating siloed investment processes into unified frameworks, allowing for easier account opening, billing, reporting and even tax management. Research from Advyzon and other UMA technology providers like SS&C Advent backs that assessment.

Traditionally, custom portfolios were built and managed account by account, making them highly personalized, but manually intensive (not to mention cost prohibitive for smaller accounts). Today, firms across the industry are redesigning their operating models around unified portfolio architecture, and UMAs sit at the center of it all.

All Together Now

Citi Wealth’s UMA program certainly has a lot to offer, according to the announcement, including multi-currency capabilities and access to both traditional and alternative investments. In addition, clients can access both onshore and offshore investment structures and the firm’s home office portfolios. The firm said Advyzon was selected following a “thorough and competitive search” to identify a strategic partner, citing its artificial intelligence-enabled, multi-jurisdictional turnkey asset management program as a key differentiator.

Marc Turansky, head of investment advisory programs for Citi Wealth, noted that news coverage of UMAs and SMAs often focuses on the way the technology empowers tax-aware investing and opens access to interesting asset classes across public and private markets. That’s critical, but equally important is the ability of the technology to provide an easier account opening and client onboarding process.

“[This] is crucial for both the financial advisor/banker and their client,” Turansky told Advisor Upside. “The new Citi Wealth Global UMA is built around … one agreement and one fee to the client that clearly lays out what each of the components to the fee are for” and to whom they are paid.

Taken together, Turansky said, the attractive features of UMAs are gaining considerable attention from both industry stakeholders and clients alike, especially the tax efficiency and transparency. Research published last year by Cerulli Associates underscores the impressive growth:

• Total net flows into managed account programs were $811.8 billion in 2024, reaching their second-highest level ever.
• UMA programs experienced the highest net flows that year ($257.7 billion), followed by separate managed account programs ($218.4 billion).

Join the Party. Citi and Advyzon are far from the only firms investing in UMA technology expansion. Others include Orion, Edward Jones, 55ip, Envestnet and many more that are utilizing technology to “democratize” access to UMAs for clients with lesser wealth. So, what was once an investment approach reserved for the wealthiest clients is now being made available to the mass affluent.

Wealth.com just did for itself what it’s hoping to help advisors do for their clients: It got wealthier.

The AI-powered estate and tax planning platform used by financial advisors and wealth management firms recently raised $65 million in a Series B funding round. Wealth.com, which previously raised $30 million in Series A funding in 2024 and garnered an investment from Charles Schwab just last year, said in a news release that its AI-powered workflows have grown 664% year over year as more wealth management professionals turn to automation. Estate planning has been a huge beneficiary of the recent influx of AI capital. More than half of respondents to a Caring.com study said they have no estate planning documents in place, and advisory firms have been quick to fill that gap, said John O’Connell, founder and CEO of the consultancy The Oasis Group. It’s the “fastest-growing category in financial planning, growing faster than alternative investment adoption in my discussions with wealth management firms,” he added.

Automation Everywhere

The Wealth.com investment will be used to add staff in AI, product and security operations, CEO Rafael Loureiro told Advisor Upside. It also plans to expand AI capabilities, accelerate enterprise deployments and bring new innovations to market faster. “Most firms are still operating across spreadsheets, PDFs and disconnected systems. That’s not scalable,” Loureiro said. “We’re investing to replace that with the platform where data is structured, insights are generated automatically and workflows actually connect.”

AI has the power to upend the wealth management industry. For advisors, work that used to take hours or days now happens in seconds, freeing time to focus on clients instead of manual processes, Loureiro said. And for clients, it allows advice to become more proactive and personalized. But that doesn’t mean it comes without pushback:

• The interest in AI is real, but so is the skepticism, and both are justified, Loureiro said.
• “Firms are pushing hard on accuracy, governance and security, which they should. In this industry, you can’t deploy something that’s mostly right,” he added.

Estate Planning Boom. Patric Glassell, chief growth officer at Kwanti, a portfolio analytics solution for financial advisors and investment managers, said advisors aren’t skeptical of AI, but they are skeptical of the hype. “The tools getting real traction solve a specific, tangible pain point rather than leading with AI as a feature,” he said. For instance, note-taking tools took off because the value was immediate and the downside risk was low.

Estate and tax planning may be more complex than note-taking, but the return-on-investment case is equally clear, Glassell said. “These are labor-intensive workflows that genuinely benefit from structured automation.”

The class is getting crowded.

There are a lot of new names on the dual-share-class roster, as the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday granted exemptions for about two dozen asset managers. The SEC has been giving approval in waves, with the latest including the likes of Goldman Sachs, Franklin Templeton, T. Rowe Price and Columbia Funds. That ultimately means there will be a lot of ETF share classes tacked onto mutual funds, and vice versa, in some cases. But even as a lot of shops now have keys to the kingdom, they don’t really have anywhere to go, yet. Unless firms have a lot of experience on both the mutual fund and ETF sides, they must build out their capabilities to offer both, or go through third parties to make that happen.

“A lot of people see the news of the SEC granting a lot of exemptive relief and assume there will be a flurry of product launches to follow,” said Matt Barry, a vice president at Touchstone Investments. “By and large, you’re going to see most ETF issuers wait until the infrastructure is built out.”

Waiting Period

One quirk is that companies must add mechanisms in order for ETF and mutual fund shares to be exchanged, Barry noted. Distribution has also been a lingering issue, as ETFs aren’t built to provide compensation to broker-dealers, as mutual funds do with their revenue-sharing fees. Still, one firm, Vanguard, has been offering ETF share classes of its mutual funds for years, as it had a patent that only recently expired. That was limited to passive funds, but under the new SEC exemptions, active funds are getting the dual-share-class treatment.

So far, only a few other firms have launched dual share classes:

• F/m Investments was the first to do so under the new SEC approvals, adding a mutual fund share class of its US Treasury 3 Month Bill Fund ETF (TBIL).
• Dimensional Fund Advisors was the first to add an ETF share class of an actively managed mutual fund, one for its US Micro Cap Portfolio.
• Thornburg Investment Management earlier this month rolled out ETF shares of its American Opportunities Fund and Focus Growth Fund.

Soon Enough. Touchstone, which was among numerous firms that received exemptions for dual share classes in February, may add its first in the second half of 2027, Barry said. It’s reasonable to expect most other asset managers to start adding share classes in two or three years, he said. When they do, the tax efficiency of ETFs will help the mutual funds they’re affiliated with. “It will be very beneficial in time,” Barry said.