We’ve got some interesting AI headlines this month that appear to be the real beginning of a broader transformation of our industry. In addition, marketing is a hot topic because organic growth continues to be a big challenge we need to overcome. Here are our five WealthTech headlines for October:
Industry veterans, Eric Clark, Brian McLaughlin, Mike Wilson and Mustapha Baassiri (all former executives from well-known industry firms), launched a new AI-powered platform to provide asset managers and advisors personalized, compliant, and timely client communications at scale. Organic growth is a critical focus point for the industry going into 2026, but we estimate few wealth firms have a strong handle on the concept of marketing. Hamachi.ai will allow advisors to market and grow organically or serve clients and expand relationships through marketing. Effectively it shortens the path between a client question and receiving qualified content. Proactively talking to your clients about market trends, sector performance, or external and internal activities in their portfolio is marketing. More touch points lead to higher NPS and referability. In the release, Hamachi.ai also mentions questions going from the advisor to wholesaler (we take that to mean the asset management community). This could rapidly get market intelligence insights out of the asset management world’s ivory tower and into clients’ hands. Importantly, Hamachi.ai is not alone in this space. We’d like to better understand how it will integrate into advisor workstations to beat out competitors like Catchlight, Seismic or 4U, which was recently acquired by Red Oak.
OpenAI acquired investment start-up Roi and together the teams will work to develop the foundation for a new generation of personal finance and transformative software. This is a signal to everybody … AI is happening. Anybody who uses ChatGPT knows that there are specialties going on in ChatGPT, tones and areas of focus, that make this ubiquitous GPT technology even more focused potentially for our industry. It’s not clear from the press release, but we think that Sujith Vishwali and his team built a way to customize financial information to investors. Is it a disruptive moment for advisors? Probably not. But we think you can look at this and say that if OpenAI is investing in insights around investing, chances are it’s going to increasingly become a place where our clients will either ask it first before they talk to their advisor, or use it as a second opinion when talking to their advisor about portfolio markets, strategy, and asset classification. Don’t be surprised if there’s an ‘upload my portfolio and provide 20 things that my advisor should focus on’ coming. Start thinking now about how you’ll deal with it or use it yourself in a more compliant way to double-check and proactively send content to clients. We all have to see where this goes. The next two to three months will tell us more, but it’s something that advisory firms should definitely keep their eyes on.
Orion’s technology powers the core of WealthPath, an innovative platform designed to simplify the complex and deliver truly holistic financial guidance throughout retirement by integrating planning and portfolio management into a seamless experience. Voya’s retirement, advice, and investment management capabilities are great, and now it has chosen to launch on the very capable, scalable, integrated Orion platform. Has Voya figured something out here? We’ll wait and see how well Orion does at solving that integrated retirement to advice channel, and if they solve it at all, because if they can successfully address it, there are half a dozen other firms that desperately need integrated retirement and advice. So, we’ll watch this one a little closely. We expect it won’t be transformative, but it should work, and that’s a good thing.
Snappy Kraken rolled out a real-time AUM Pipeline Dashboard that links marketing activity directly to assets under management, giving financial firms a unified view of how marketing drives growth. Most of the marketing automation and prospect lead-generation marketing tools on the market focus on getting either an individual potential client into a pipeline or deploying resources or marketing campaigns through your existing pipeline. This is different. This addresses something that we’ve heard over and over again at F2, which is that firms tried marketing, and it just didn’t work, and they gave up. About a quarter of the firms we talk to about marketing say they cultivate client referrals as their marketing effort. Snappy Kraken will be able to help push advisory firms more forcefully toward marketing support and will cut through the reluctance and doubt around marketing spend for advisory firms.
We are expanding once again with the acquisition of HBMJ Consulting. HBMJ specializes in operational scalability, data intelligence and technology transformation for hedge funds, hybrid funds, private credit and other alternative investment firms seeking to institutionalize their back offices. Like our previous acquisitions, HBMJ was built by an industry insider. That makes this partnership a natural fit and another powerful step forward in serving clients across the entire ecosystem of investments and advice.
Thanks for going through another round of headlines with us as 2025 continues to deliver on innovation. As we close out the year, we expect to see at least a few more announcements that impact and evolve how we work in wealth management.