Practice management: archive
Every Practice management story in Advisors, newest first. 316 stories
3 stories
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.
Pave's $15M round prices advisor AI at the custodian layer
The advisory firms that wrote checks bought a cheaper portfolio-construction layer — and a position in the channel that sells it.
Grow the team, then cut the book to fit it
Carolyn McClanahan spent years training successors who left, then shrank Life Planning Partners to 65 households and handed ownership to the employees who stayed.
5 stories
Schwab's Claude exclusive puts a $4,800 AI seat on 16,000 RIAs
The custodian's first-mover integration costs an advisor $240 a year per seat, plus process work nobody has budgeted yet.
Anthropic's advisor suite hands the AI edge to firms with clean permissions
Nine integrations bundled into a single install make the assistant easy to switch on, and the practices that audit access rights first will be the ones that get the capacity gain.
Anthropic pitches advisers a tool that doubles as model-portfolio distribution
The pitch is capacity, but the shelf inside the tool is where BlackRock's $300 billion book gets its front door.
Career changers cost more up front and less in churn
Kitces Research puts new-graduate turnover at two to five times the career-changer rate, which makes the salary premium that scares firms off the cheaper half of the trade.
The AI race moves to what happens after the meeting
Salesforce's Agentic Advisor turns meeting output into prioritized action, and the practices that wire it into owned tasks first will consolidate assets and compound referrals before smaller rivals can afford the integration.
2 stories
Anthropic's adviser list will be won on fees, not logos
The AI firm asked wealth managers to put pricing and services on paper, handing independent practices a rare look-in on the windfalls its employees are about to receive.
The IRS security checklist doubles as a marketing asset
Six controls the IRS wants owned and documented are the evidence file a client’s attorney, accountant or bank eventually asks to see.
1 story
DOL's overtime exemption turns on duties, not titles
The administrative exemption is determined by documented job duties and a salary level the fact sheet only points to elsewhere; a typical RIA back office has written down neither.
3 stories
Mariner's $175M bot bet is a headcount purchase
At $250,000 per bot over five years, Mariner is budgeting capacity rather than software, and the deployment work is where the plan will be won or lost.
Advisers grade their own recruiting a C, and they are right
Cerulli counts 35% of advisers retiring within a decade, which is why the entry-level pitch has to be training and a path, not a payout grid.
RIAs are hiring around AI before they can manage it
Seventy-three percent of surveyed firms want junior advisors and 15% want compliance staff, which is the shape of the bet and also its weak point.
8 stories
Hamachi says its patent keeps client data out of LLMs
The advisory-tech veterans behind the platform are selling a masking layer; the practice still owns the questions about where the data travels and who answers for it.
XYPN buys AI-search access; the credibility behind AI answers accrues slowly
The network can hand members the machinery of testimonial-driven visibility, but the thing that gets a firm named in a chat window is proof built over years, which puts the payoff past the length of most marketing contracts.
Pride forum spins out of LPL Focus with three sponsors attached
The 2027 gathering is funded before it has a venue or dates, and the sponsor list is the number to watch when the dates land.
An outage at Wells is a protocol test for every practice on shared plumbing
BetaNXT also sits under LPL, Janney and Stifel, so a vendor advisors never chose can still decide whether the desk works on a Tuesday.
The app score belongs in recordkeeper due diligence
J.D. Power's 53-point gap between app and website satisfaction tracks with the rollover behavior plan sponsors care about most.
The SEC's AI priorities turn on who signs the review
Existing fiduciary and disclosure duties already reach AI-drafted advice, putting the cost in the approval step rather than the model.
Conquest drops 'Planning' and bets on a white-label advice engine
The audit trail behind SAM is the compliance argument; the next year's test is which platform puts SAM in front of clients.
Bain's Vestmark buy makes the next renewal a negotiation
Adaptive modularity promises no forced migrations; what decides whether a practice can ever leave is the export clause.
3 stories
Wells Fargo's outage is a vendor dependency audit
A shared back-office vendor puts four major firms on the same rails, and a manual fallback is only as good as its last drill.
Health Portfolios Are the Last Retirement Input Advisors Miss
MIT AgeLab's Joseph Coughlin wants advisors to treat monthly health spending as a managed position, not a personal line item, and his October paper gives them a script.
A client's bad trade is still the client's call
Fiduciary duty requires following lawful client instructions; the advisor's craft is in the pause, the paper trail, and the reassessment that follows.
10 stories
Salesforce bets advisor AI on follow-through, not note-taking
The Agentic Advisor suite turns meeting output into prioritized action, but small-firm adoption remains the open question.
New scholarship targets career changers, the pipeline CFP funding skips
Twenty $5,000 grants aim at women switching into planning, a profession whose student-focused funding has missed them.
Senators to FINRA: make transfer locks a rule
A Senate push would put deliberate friction in front of every outbound ACATS transfer.
Wells Fargo's second outage is a client-communication test
Manual order entry covers execution; the durable fix belongs in advisors' client-communication plans.
A former Stanford receiver chooses NIL freshmen over NFL millions
Osiris St. Brown made his NFL brothers his first clients, then aimed his practice at college athletes who get paid before they understand money.
FINRA Pulls Bulk Enforcement Data, Keeping Vetting in Search Box
A downloadable FINRA enforcement file appeared in August, then vanished after reporter questions, leaving broker-dealer and recruit vetting dependent on the regulator's search box.
Plan sponsors are ready for discretionary menus
Fidelity's annual study finds 41% of sponsors now want advisers to take full control of plan investment menus, up from 36% in 2025 — a figure retirement-plan practices can take into the next sponsor conversation.
RIAs doubled AI adoption. The payoff is still unproven.
A BCG finding that just 6% of companies have seen AI reduce costs or grow revenue puts practice owners on the hook to prove the tool adds clients.
SEC pay-to-play repeal won't rewrite the compliance manual
The proposed rollback of the 2010 political-contribution rule leaves the blanket bans firms adopted to avoid it standing until chief compliance officers choose to reopen them.
NASAA's IAR CE rule: obligation follows the rep
The six-plus-six credit split is simple; the state-registration trigger and permanent carryover demand a per-rep ledger.
3 stories
Vanguard's Altruist deal puts a toll on the ETF shelf
A Kitces.com analysis traces the deal to revenue sharing, the fee that turns fund menus and renewal terms into an advisor's first negotiating table.
Client advances need a script, not silence
Ask an Advisor's latest column shows advisors handling unwanted client advances alone; 71% of workplace-harassment survey respondents cite retaliation fears.
Tax planning is the new client-acquisition play
The $15 million estate-plan trap and Longview's 1% annual drag turn review season into a growth event.
1 story
Wealth M&A buyers now underwrite tech stacks
Integration has moved into pre-deal diligence, but the larger return sits one layer up in orchestration.
1 story
The 14.4% savings benchmark belongs in annual reviews
Fidelity's Q2 data makes the average participant's deferral the number to put in front of clients saving less.