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This report explores how the wealth management industry is preparing itself for the challenges and opportunities of the future, embracing new technologies, new approaches to compliance, and a transformation of operating models.
06
Editor's letter
By Stephen Wall, Founder of The Wealth Mosaic.
and
14
Insight into key themes and trends on the theme of future-readiness in the wealth management sector.
The first part of each Showcase is the Topic. Each contributor establishes a Topic, introduces it, highlights its relevance to wealth management, and explains why a wealth management business should consider it for their business.
28
A collection of viewpoints on key industry challenges and opportunities.
44 Showcases
The second part of each Showcase is the Solution. The Solution is designed to support the Topic, with each contributor tasked with highlighting how their Solution delivers on the Topic. This includes elements such as its features and functions, use cases and other relevant elements of their offering.
Six showcases focused on the future-readiness of the wealth management industry.
44
Showcase #1 Redefining adviser efficiency
Empowering advisers with intelligent, scalable and future-ready workflows.
Contributed by LSEG
58
Showcase #3 Securing investment platforms
How firms can protect themselves and their customers from digitally enabled forms of fraud
Contributed by LexisNexis Risk Solutions
76
Showcase #5 Family office technology consolidation
Consolidating digital infrastructure to future-proof family offices.
Contributed by Altoo
52
Showcase #2 Integration standardisation
Wealth without friction: Unlocking next-gen advisory through intelligent automation.
Contributed by Precept
68
Showcase #4 The rise of embedded wealth
Connecting digital lifestyles to financial products.
Contributed by Wealth OS
84
Showcase #6 Future-ready family offices
Where family-office governance meets real, productive AI.
Contributed by Lightbox Wealth
Our aim with this report has been to bring together a range of relevant, insightful, and thought-provoking opinions from those at the forefront of the push to future-proof the wealth management industry.
We hope you enjoy reading how innovators and thought leaders in this space are reshaping wealth management, rethinking the relationship between human advisers and new technologies, and readying our industry for the challenges and opportunities of the years to come.
Welcome to the Future View Toolkit 2025 from The Wealth Mosaic. As technology advances, regulation tightens, and client expectations shift, future-readiness is top of concern for the wealth management sector like never before. This report is conceived to address that moment: to explore how our industry can not only respond to change, but anticipate and take advantage of it.
This conversation isn’t just about adaptation, it’s about rethinking. Artificial intelligence, data orchestration, workflow automation, and integrated digital platforms are reshaping not just processes, but entire propositions. They are redefining not just what firms can do, but what clients expect.
The Future View Toolkit 2025 aims to answer some core questions. How can the wealth management industry future-proof itself in an era of rapid technological acceleration? What must firms change at the foundational level to remain competitive and serve their clients’ expanding expectations? How should human advisers evolve their own roles to take advantage of technological change?
This report brings together a spectrum of voices from different voices and different segments of our industry. Some explore how advanced technologies are reshaping the nature of work. Others focus on the infrastructure and governance firms must implement to unlock the benefits of innovation.
Still more examine the future of the client relationship, the evolution of advisory roles, and the rebalancing of skills towards the USPs of human beings: empathy, experience, and judgement.
Rather than predictions in this report, we’ve sought to bring together grounded insight, honest reflections, and clear-eyed assessments from those in our industry who are at the forefront of making it ready for the future.
They don’t have easy answers, but they do offer frameworks, lessons, and perspectives for firms to act upon. Future-proofing isn’t just about technology, or accurately predicting what developments are beyond the horizon. It’s about designing organisations that can absorb changes as yet unforeseen.
Cast your mind back 10 years to 2015: the landscape is almost unrecognisable from now. Workforces are mostly office-based and in-person. AI is more a matter of theory than reality. Technology’s role is mostly operational and focused on the back office.
Client reporting is dominated by periodic paperbased reporting, and advice is human-led and inperson. Regulation is focused principally on suitability, transparency, and protection against mis-selling.
And the industry, while dominated by established firms, is both highly fragmented and formed of a series of traditional and distinct business models such as independent financial advisers (IFAs), private banks, and private client investment management firms (PCIMs).
Just as the wealth management industry of 2015 could not have easily predicted the changes to come by 2025, so in 2025 we can’t easily predict what’s to come by 2035. But what we can do is prepare ourselves operationally and organisationally, so that whatever changes do come, our industry is adaptable to them.
The firms that will thrive as the future unfolds are those that absorb change with confidence rather than apprehension. That mindset will not only meet rising expectations, but it will help to define what excellence looks like for the next generation of clients.
Stephen Wall Founder The Wealth Mosaic
In this, the fourth in our Toolkit Report series, we’ve gathered a global set of perspectives from firms and thought leaders engaged in the effort to future-proof the wealth management sector: modernising its infrastructure, reimagining the adviser–client relationship, and building organisational models capable of absorbing constant change.
As the contributors to this Toolkit argue, it’s the foundations beneath AI that are essential to get right: clean, connected data; coherent operating models; and governance frameworks that make automation safe, explainable, and scalable. It’s the embedding and integration of technology, not the acquisition of it, that will really make the difference between success and failure.
In the wealth management industry, preparing for the future isn’t just a good idea to stay ahead, it’s a professional imperative. Wealth managers owe a duty to their clients to foresee and prepare for future developments in both markets and technology, in order to adequately plan across a client’s entire wealth lifetime. A wealth manager who can’t future-proof their own business doesn’t stand to future-proof their client’s prospects either.
The Future View Toolkit 2025 describes a wealth management sector where technology is no longer just a set of tools but an entire operating environment. Artificial intelligence, in its manyforms — from machine learning and generative models to emerging agentic systems — will reshape the value chain from front office engagement to back office processing.
But the changes that the industry needs to plan against are accelerating, driven by technological acceleration, regulatory pressure, shifting client demographics, and rising expectations around personalisation and efficiency.
The contributors to this Toolkit argue that future-proofing the wealth management industry is less about chasing new tools and more about building durable, adaptable infrastructure. That includes modular architecture capable of evolving with new capabilities; standardised data models that eliminate the fragmentation of today’s technology stacks; and integrated platforms that replace the patchwork of single-solution applications that currently dominate wealth management.
From family offices consolidating around unified digital wealth platforms to large firms seeking to reduce cognitive and operational debt, the direction of travel is clear: long-term resilience requires simplification at the core and sophistication at the edge.
The Future View Toolkit 2025 also examines how the role of human advisers is being redefined in an increasingly automated industry. The potential for agentic AI in particular is to free advisers from administrative burdens, allowing them to engage in deeper, more strategic client conversations. The skills that differentiate human advisers — emotional intelligence, judgement, creativity, and empathy — should become more valuable, not less. As one of our Industry Perspective articles puts it, the human adviser is ‘augmented’, operating in partnership with intelligent systems that surface insights, anticipate risks, and support complex decision-making.
Family offices face their own future-proofing challenges. With growing scale, rising complexity, and heightened expectations across generations, they must confront the inefficiencies the sector has so far tolerated.
Increasingly, they will find that integrated platforms, intelligent automation, and clearer governance structures are essential to maintaining control, reducing operational drag, and preparing for succession. The operational models of the quiet past can no longer support the ambitions of the stormy present — let alone the unknown future.
The future of wealth management belongs to firms that can harmonise intelligence, whether that be human or artificial. It belongs also to those that can mobilise operational and organisational effectiveness. Technology alone cannot future-proof the sector, but technology embedded within clear operating models, strong governance, and a client-centred philosophy can redefine what the industry is capable of.
We’ve structured this report into Industry Perspectives and Showcases. Each Industry Perspective offers an expert view on a key challenge within the theme of future-proofing the industry. They include insights from a global survey of investment firms that reveal how they are integrating AI at scale; an argument for an infrastructure-first approach to AI integration; and a vision for how agentic AI can redefine the role of relationship managers.
Each Showcase, meanwhile, is intended to focus on a specific Topic, plus a Solution entry which highlights the contributing firm’s supporting technology offering. The overall contribution of each firm features a Topic and a Solution, and both together should educate the reader on an aspect of future-readiness that they may consider for their business.
Featured in this report are Showcases covering:
• Adviser efficiency
• Integration through standardisation
• Investment platform security
• Embedded digital wealth distribution
• Family office technology consolidation
• AI governance for family offices
We also examine the evolving competitive landscape. As an emerging generation of heirs are demanding immediacy, transparency, and mobile-native experiences, firms must rethink how they deliver value. Embedded wealth is one response, extending financial products into the digital ecosystems where clients already spend their time. This not only opens new distribution channels but also lowers barriers to engagement, offering a path toward financial inclusion and more personalised client journeys. Watch this space for our upcoming US RIA Toolkit 2026, soon to come.
The Future View Toolkit 2025 invites readers to look beyond the hype cycles and examine the structural transformations required to build wealth management businesses that are resilient, scalable, and relevant for decades to come. It paints a picture not of disruption for its own sake, but of purposeful evolution: an industry redesigning itself to meet the demands of a more complex, digital, and interconnected world.
The Toolkit Report Series covers thematic, geography and wealth manager segment-focused reports, each tasked with delving into the topics and supporting technologies of relevance to help wealth managers of all types better understand how they should bring technology into their business and in which areas.
Reports coming soon:
US RIA
Toolkit 2026
Segment
January 2026
The US Registered Investment Adviser market plays a significant role in the wider US wealth management sector, with a wide range of technologies built to support its needs. This Toolkit will showcase a range of topics and solutions focused on the needs of the US RIA market.
Interested in featuring in our Toolkit reports?
Get in touch to discover more details and secure your place.
Get in touch >
FEATURED REPORT
Showcasing the application of AI in wealth management
PetakSys helps financial firms streamline operations through integration, automation, and purpose-built software.
Whether you are aiming for faster performance, better client experience, longterm stability, or process precision, we deliver. From custodian bank integrations and automated client reporting to tailored platforms, our solutions are designed to fit your unique needs — with efficiency, quality, and compliance in mind.
Welcome to our Data Insights section. This is designed to provide a curated collection of relevant insights and data points, to provide an empirical foundation for insights that follow in this report. It highlights the trends, challenges and opportunities associated with future-readiness in wealth management, and offers valuable perspectives for industry professionals operating in this thriving market.
Change across the global wealth management landscape is now a constant feature of the sector, and that change runs broad and deep. Name an aspect of the industry: clients, advisers, staff, products, services, regulation, competition, financial, fees, culture, leadership; it is all in motion, at least compared to what was the industry’s historic norm.
Wealth management has long transmitted a culture of stability, tradition, and conservatism among many of its participants. Indeed, those characteristics have been what its clients expected from their wealth manager. First and foremost, don’t lose their money! Stable growth is better than shooting the lights out.
That mantra might still be the case but beneath the surface, industry participants are having to move faster to keep up with competitive pressures, think more about their strategic positioning and development, and apply a responsiveness to challenges and opportunities to more areas of their business than ever before.
To future-proof their businesses, wealth managers have a lot to focus on. And underpinning many of their decisions today will be questions related to their technology infrastructure.
In the pages that follow, we have highlighted some of the main areas of change, and issues to consider in future-proofing a wealth management business.
Name an aspect of the industry: clients, advisers, staff, products, services, regulation, competition, financial, fees, culture, leadership. It is all in motion.
Future-readiness in wealth management encompasses a range of different aspects of change. We highlight some of these below.
01 Global wealth levels
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03 People and leadership
Page 19
05 Portfolio allocation
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07 Technology Page 21
02 Clients Page 18
04 Products and services Page 19
06 Business models Page 22
Wealth is growing globally. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023, total global household wealth in 2022 was estimated at US$454.4 trillion. The same report series has not provided an update to this figure since; however, based on average annual growth rates, the latest figure is believed to be in the range of US$490 trillion to US$500 trillion. According to McKinsey’s global balance sheet analysis, the figure is US$600 trillion.
Citing sources such as UBS, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group, annual growth is between four percent and seven percent. This means that, if those growth rates continue, total global wealth will measure between US$6.24 trillion (five years at four per cent) and US$8.42 trillion (five years at seven percent).
Looking geographically, although wealth is global, according to the UBS research, there is a concentration in two markets — the United States with 35 percent of the global total and mainland China with 20 percent.
As with total wealth levels, the total number of clients will, of course, rise too. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2025, there will be over 5 million new millionaires by 2029.
For the industry, despite the geographic concentration, the data highlights a continued growth in both wealth levels and in numbers of wealthy individuals. There are more people to target and service, and they have more money to manage. It’s a good equation for the wealth management sector.
Source: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025
The nature and detail of wealth clients is changing. Although the number and assets of individuals for the industry to engage and service have continued to grow, those clients are no longer as homogeneous as they once were.
Looking deeper into the trends among the wealth management industry’s client base, we can highlight a range of increasingly dynamic characteristics, including:
Who has the money: Wealth will be held by a broader range of individuals going forward. In particular, the following themes emerge:
• Global private wealth will be held in younger hands, with millennials and Gen Z controlling the majority
• Women will also hold a much higher proportion of global wealth. Although women hold about 33 percent of the world’s wealth, according to BCG, they are expected to be the greatest beneficiaries of the Great Wealth Transfer.
• More wealth will be held by entrepreneurs and those in new industries, including in technology, entertainment, social media, and so on.
• Segments with names like ‘Everyday Millionaires’ (EMILLIs – those with investable assets between US$1–5 million) as identified by the UBS Global Wealth Report 2025, are on the rise.
• Analysis by Cerulli suggests US$124 trillion in wealth will transfer to inheritors through to 2048 as part of the Great Wealth Transfer.
• Wealth management will be increasingly available to younger generations and less wealthy client segments through digital propositions.
What do wealth holders want: The expectations of wealth holders today and those over the next 10 years are also different to what has gone before, including:
Personalisation: clients want tailored strategies that fit with not only with their financial needs and expectations, but also their values and identity.
Planning: clients expect greater interaction around their major life events, as well as broader access to planning capabilities, including estate, tax, insurance, giving, legacy, and so on.
Digital-first approaches: as available in myriad other areas of their lives, clients increasingly expect a digital experience and capability to be available.
Transparency: In relation to fees, products, investment performance, and so on.
Values-driven outlooks: aligning wealth with purpose, incorporating aligned investment offerings that support impact and ESG.
Although the numbers are good, the complexity of clients is increasing. Who they are, how they see themselves, how to reach, engage and service them, who they want to be served by, and many other elements, are all now at play. Building a wealth management firm to serve both the clients of today and those of tomorrow’s is more complex and requires a broader set of skills, products, and services than historically.
Although the numbers are good, the complexity of clients is increasing.
As clients are changing, so too must the people in wealth management and the industry’s leadership. The industry is shifting from a heavily relationship-driven and product-centric business model to one that is more digital, data-driven and personalised. That shift, together with a changing client base and widening product and service mix, dictates a new set of skills.
Across the industry’s people and leadership, the following dynamics are at play:
Adviser retirement: The average age of advisers in key markets like the UK and US is widely seen to be nearing retirement. These individuals need to be replaced, and the skills they hold need to evolve to the future needs of the marketplace.
Professionalisation/specialisation: Historically, the adviser/private banker was seen as a largely relationship role, not focused on specific skills. As the market delivers a more professional and personalised offering, there is a greater need for skills such as paraplanning, compliance, digital technology, data, private markets, and much more.
Technological capability: The industry’s workforce needs to be increasingly technology-capable and enabled to work with clients and be more efficient in their roles.
Training and upskilling: The industry will focus more emphasis and expectation on training and upskilling staff, including in areas such as:
• Technology and data, including the various areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) data analysis, compliance automation, workflow automation, client interaction, and cyber security.
• Soft skills, including relationship management, communication and interpersonal skills, empathy and emotional intelligence
Industry leaders, meanwhile, need a far broader and deeper grasp of key industry topics outside of traditional relationship management and plain-vanilla product areas.
There is a greater need for skills such as paraplanning, compliance, digital technology, data, private markets, and much more.
The product and service offering across the industry is fast evolving, too. Once-distinct business models, such as financial planning versus investment management, are increasingly converging. The landscape reflects changing client expectations and is therefore more complex.
Looking into the changing nature of products and services, elements in play include:
Advisory: An area that fully reflects the increased complexity of the offering, as well as the needs of clients, is advisory. And not just financial advisory, but also advisory related to health, longevity, education, and legacy. In the financial area, specifically, there is more emphasis around asset allocation, spending, financial planning, and giving.
Financial planning: This sub-set of advisory is growing in emphasis across the market, responding to clients who want not only personalisation but also support across the major planning areas cited above.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG): Again, closely related to the changing expectations of clients, ESG is firmly on the agenda with wealth managers expected to deliver advice, products, portfolios, and reporting that reflect ESG perspectives.
Alternatives and private markets: The so-called democratisation of investment assets that were previously only available to ultra-high net worth clients. A wide range of alternative and private market investment options is being made available to lowervalue wealth management clients through platforms. These include private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, art, infrastructure assets, and much more.
Crypto and tokenisation: Similarly, the direct availability of crypto assets is now on the radar of some wealth managers, as are tokenisation and fractionalisation.
Family offices: As the business model of firms continues to evolve, they are also looking to evolve into broader areas of ‘wealth’, meaning supporting needs like philanthropy, education, wellness, business, corporate services, and more.
Although some wealth management firms might stick to a traditional product and service model, the industry as a whole is evolving into a more complex product and service offering to meet the needs and expectations of tomorrow’s client base as well as today’s.
The industry as a whole is evolving into a more complex product and service offering.
Similarly, the portfolio allocations of wealth management firms for their clients are also shifting.
According to the Natixis Wealth Management Outlook for 2025, a moderate-risk portfolio is broken down into: 44 percent equities, 33 percent fixed income, 17 percent alternatives, five percent cash, and one percent other. The picture today is fairly straightforward; equities dominate, but other asset classes play a role.
However, there is a clear shift in play: asset classes like alternatives and private market assets are on the rise as firms seek to move away from the traditional 60/40 model. The industry and its clients are looking for more non-correlated assets, greater portfolio diversification, a higher return potential than they see in public equities and other traditional asset classes, clear risk mitigation strategies, and so on.
The shift in portfolio allocations is also driven by factors such as ethical alignment, long-term legacy, thematic investing (AI, bio, green, ageing, etc.), as well as trends around technology-driven advisory tools where AI is taking the lead. The market is in motion.
Concerning alternatives and private markets, some headline data points to consider include:
• Private wealth investors, on average, allocate 22.6 percent to alternatives: Investment Week, Preqin
• Family offices, on average, allocate 21 percent of their portfolio to private equity: Moonfare, UBS
• Bain estimates that private wealth holders will allocate US$12 trillion to alternatives by 2034, up from US$4 trillion today.
• According to Hamilton Lane’s 2025 private wealth adviser survey, 56 percent of advisers plan to increase private markets allocation, with infrastructure topping the list for increases in 2025.
Looking forward, the move away from a traditional 60/40 split will see greater emphasis on:
As the sector at large is changing, individual wealth management firms need to consider a range of options in terms of their business models.
As highlighted above, this includes their target client types and their product and service offerings, but it also includes other factors like ownership, partnerships and collaborations, consolidation, and pricing and revenue models. Overall, there is pressure for the business models to shift from assetcentric and opaque to clientcentric, transparent, and technology-enabled.
Breaking this down, here are other areas of consideration when it comes to the business models of wealth management firms.
Revenue models Firms need to consider:
• Moving from assets under management (AUM) to outcome-based fees
• Bringing in subscription and membership pricing models
• Introducing family office-as-a-service models to bring those services further down the wealth pyramid
• Crafting more flexible fee models, perhaps blended and usage-based, better mapped to the preferences of the client
• Tokenised pricing
• Making more accessible digital wealth-style pricing available
Consolidation and M&A Firms need to be aware of:
• Private equity-backed consolidators continuing to snap up smaller players
• Larger players emerging to compete with the industry’s behemoths
• The ongoing role of specialist players and independent boutiques
• Further technology developments enabling the independent model
Human versus machine Firms need to consider:
• How to blend the delivery of services between humans and machines
• Giving clients more self-service engagement options
Embedded finance/wealth Firms stand to take advantage of:
• Wealth management embedding its services into related industries such as retail banking, real estate, art and collectables, healthcare, and so on
• The potential of ecosystems/platforms that support a client’s broader life and wealth needs
Democratisation of wealth services Firms should consider:
• Delivering fractional investing
• Enabling their clients’ greater access to alternative and private market assets
• Facilitating automated estate planning
• Subscription-based advisory pricing
• AI-driven, subscription-accessible insights
• Subscription-accessible, personalised wealth journeys and plans
Although many of the fundamentals of wealth management might remain — such as supporting the financial needs of clients through advice, planning and safe custody of their assets — much else around the industry is being reshaped by the possibilities and threats of technology, the changing nature of clients and demographics, and the role and expectations of regulation. Business models will continue to evolve as these drivers shape the industry.
There is pressure for business models to shift from asset-centric and opaque to clientcentric, transparent, and technology-enabled.
Technology underpins the future of the wealth management industry. To support the future-proofing of the industry, ongoing investment in its technology infrastructure is critical.
Simply put, firms will not be able to deliver everything that is expected of them by clients, advisers, other employees, leadership, investors, and regulators without a significant emphasis on their technological underpinning.
There are many elements to this, but headline topics in play now include:
Modernisation
• Wealth managers are looking to adopt more modern infrastructure, including cloud platforms and AI tools, to support more flexible, responsive and efficient operations. These systems promise streamlined operations, more real-time insights, and support industry goals like adviser efficiency and hyper-personalisation.
• In the context of AI, this means many different things but includes concepts and tools like AI copilots and 24/7 advisory through conversational AI.
• For agentic AI, specifically, the routes to delivery include autonomous support in areas like portfolio monitoring, goal-based planning, investment research, decision support, data reconciliation, report creation, trade workflows, risk and compliance (KYC monitoring, suitability reports, etc.), and so on.
Distribution and engagement
• Digital platforms and robo-advisory services allow firms to not only reach further into segments that were historically underserved and inaccessible, but also support the distribution of products and services and the engagement of existing client bases.
Hybrid
• The industry wants to marry the best of its humantouch, personalised service model, with the best of technology tools. This is seen as a win-win. Clients get better access when, where, and how they want. The adviser can service more clients effectively. The business can scale more efficiently.
• On the agenda for many firms, with the increasing openness and connectivity of technology, is cybersecurity. Firms will want to protect against data breaches, identity theft, fraud, phishing, ransomware, insider threats, and third-party risks, among other threats. At an individual technology level, at an infrastructure level and relating to people, behaviour and training, cybersecurity must be in mind. A market-leading cybersecurity operation can even be considered a point of differentiation in the modern era of wealth management.
Data
• Data is the foundation. Firms have lots of data, so they say, but it’s in different places, formats, and systems. Accessing a single view of data to support much of what has been highlighted above, including things like client personalisation, is a huge project for the industry, but one it needs to get done.
Integration
• System integration is an increasing challenge for firms, with a potential spaghetti dish of suppliers and systems in place to run all aspects of their business. A lack of integration is a potentially serious vulnerability.
There is more, and we are sure our readers will be able to add to this in various ways. What is undeniable is that technology will play a fundamental role in the delivery and futureproofing of the wealth management sector, wherever in the world you are looking.
The industry wants to marry the best of its human-touch, personalised service model with the best of technology tools.
The picture that emerges from these data points is of an industry that can no longer rely on its inherited assumptions. Wealth management has traditionally been guided by stability. That means steady markets, predictable client profiles, long-established service models, and gradual technological evolution. That context has vanished.
It isn’t a single disruptive force that’s defining the sector now, but a convergence of them: demographic turnover, new forms of wealth creation, expanding client expectations, and rapid product innovation; add to these the tricky balance of human judgement with digital capability.
Future-proofing, therefore, is neither an abstract ambition nor a distant strategic exercise. It is the organising principle behind every meaningful decision a wealth manager must make. The sector is being shaped by multiple forces at once: resilience will come not from reacting to individual trends, but from understanding the interplay between them.
The industry is also becoming more layered. Wealth managers are serving a broader spectrum of clients, with different priorities, backgrounds, and sources of wealth. Younger generations expect a more participatory relationship with their finances. Women are set to command a growing share of global wealth. Certain types of clients, such as entrepreneurs and creators, bring their own liquidity dynamics and sometimes idiosyncratic flavours of risk appetite. These shifts require firms to build propositions that are far more nuanced, modular, and flexible than those of the past.
At the same time, the capabilities required within firms are changing. Wealth management is no longer sustained solely by relationship skills and investment knowledge. It now demands fluency in data, comfort with automation, confidence using new analytical tools, and the ability to orchestrate services across widening ecosystems. Leadership, too, must adapt: not only to guide teams through change, but to make strategic choices in an environment where the boundary between financial services and technology continues to blur.
The document also makes clear that the definition of ‘wealth management’ itself is expanding. Products and services that once sat at the margins, such as private markets, alternatives, thematic strategies, tokenised assets, and broader life-planning advisory, are becoming more prevalent features of client demand. As these offerings grow more diverse, firms must find ways to maintain coherence, by aligning advice, risk management, and reporting across portfolios that are increasingly eclectic.
Technology is no longer merely infrastructure. It is the medium through which firms deliver value, pace their operations, safeguard trust, and differentiate themselves. But modernisation is not simply about adopting technology. It is also about untangling legacy systems, creating unified data foundations, strengthening cyber resilience, and ensuring that human expertise remains at the heart of the client experience.
The forces we describe here point toward a deep reconstruction of the wealth management industry. The firms best positioned for the years to come will be those that accept this complexity rather than resist it. They are the ones who are willing to rethink roles, redesign processes, broaden their service models, invest in people, and build technology foundations that allow them to evolve continuously.
The future of wealth management will not reward complacency. It will reward adaptability, clarity of purpose, and the courage to redesign the familiar. What we’ve described here is the beginning of what transformation looks like — and why it must begin now.
The future of wealth management will not reward complacency. It will reward adaptability, clarity of purpose, and the courage to redesign the familiar.
Our WealthTech Landscape Reports cover all key wealth management geographies. Each report provides the reader with a compelling mix of thought leadership, solution showcases and Solution Provider Directory highlights designed to provide our wealth management and vendor community with a modern and insightful knowledge resource for its technology and related business needs.
With the rapid pace of change in financial services, understanding technology's impact on this sector is more crucial than ever. In this, our first Europe-focused Landscape Report, we feature a series of insightful articles that explore the trends, challenges, and innovations surrounding technology adoption in wealth management. Contributions come from a range of organisations, and cover many of the issues impacting the wealth management industry in Europe today (and tomorrow).
Interested in reading in the report?
Click below to read and download.
FEATURED REPORT
Showcasing the application of technology in wealth management in the US
Future-proofing the wealth management industry means reckoning with a new reality: artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise but an operational reality reshaping business models, client engagement, and the role of human expertise.
Market volatility, tightening regulation, evolving client expectations, and accelerating technological disruption are forcing firms to rethink not just their tools, but the durability of their entire operating models. Across the value chain, firms are harnessing AI to boost efficiency, enhance decision-making, and deliver hyper-personalised experiences. But they are also confronting deep organisational, regulatory, and technological challenges.
This trio of articles explores the forces driving this transformation from three complementary perspectives. First, we present insights from a global study of investment firms conducted by thought leadership and research firm ThoughtLab, revealing how investment firms are integrating AI at scale, the obstacles they face, and the best practices setting leaders apart.
Next, AI-focused strategic adviser James Ward argues that future-proofing requires an infrastructurefirst mindset, urging firms to prioritise modularity, integration, and disciplined governance over hypedriven adoption.
Finally, we present an examination from Deloitte Luxembourg of the rise of agentic AI and its potential to redefine the role of relationship managers.
The firms that thrive will be those that design and build for change itself — ensuring their people, processes, and platforms can adapt to whatever comes next.
By Lou Celi CEO, ThoughtLab
By James Ward CEO, Ward PLLC
These articles aim to equip wealth management leaders with the mindset and frameworks needed to future-proof their organisations. By highlighting resilient infrastructure, disciplined governance, and adaptable operating models, they show how firms can navigate rapid change with confidence, strengthen client value, and build systems that evolve as fast as the industry does.
By Julien Schaffner, Director - Strategy, Digital, and Operations Excellence at Deloitte Luxembourg
As AI reshapes wealth management, driving efficiency and innovation, human soft skills are now at a premium
By Lou Celi, CEO, ThoughtLab
The AI revolution is well underway in the wealth and asset management industry, according to a new study by ThoughtLab, a global thought leadership and research firm. Based on a recent survey of top executives at 500 investment firms in major markets worldwide, the study shows that nearly three-quarters believe that AI is critical for the future of their businesses.
Indeed, most executives say that AI’s new abilities to act and think like humans — and perform tasks autonomously — will galvanise all parts of the value chain for their firms. Client interaction will become more effective, as AI makes experiences more efficient, personalised, and seamless. Advisers will better optimise client portfolios through AI-enhanced data analysis. AI’s benefits will flow throughout the organisation as it relieves employees of repetitive tasks, allowing them to handle a higher order of work.
Investment firms have made significant strides in adopting AI from the back to the front office. “Strategic integration of AI across investment management, customer engagement, and operations helps us drive performance and innovation,” wrote the chief operating officer of a UK insurance firm quoted in the survey.
AI automation of back office functions — such as code development, business processes, and custody services — can yield enormous efficiency and productivity gains. Investment providers also harness AI in the middle office to automate compliance checks, or detect and respond to anomalies in real time, boosting data security and privacy. They use these same AI abilities to identify and head off fraudulent transactions.
AI has likewise elevated front office activities with clients. Nearly six out of 10 firms now use AI to deepen customer analysis. Slightly fewer offer AI enabled chatbots and self-service portals to provide clients with 24/7 personalised support. Almost half leverage AI to create highly-customised products for individual clients.
Conservative cultures can act as an invisible wall to AI adoption — and to hiring the AI talent firms need.
So far, most firms’ efforts have centred on earlier generations of AI, such as machine learning, to automate specific, pre-defined tasks, and natural language processing to power chatbots. More recently, more than a third of wealth and asset management firms have embraced GenAI.
Many are deploying GenAI to enhance the experience and capabilities of investment advisers and financial planners. One adviser interviewed for the study says that GenAI saves his team up to 15 hours each week by automating meeting notes, handling compliance procedures, entering customer relationship management system updates, and drafting follow-up emails to clients. AI-enabled automation frees advisers to focus on the human elements of their role, increasing the importance of skills such as empathy, listening, and emotional support, which clients value highly.
Beyond GenAI, firms plan to accelerate their adoption of the next wave of AI technologies over the coming three years, with usage more than doubling for some. These include explainable AI, to make AI decisions more transparent, and agentic AI, to take on tasks humans formerly handled. This new crop of AI innovations gives firms the tools to make a stepchange in their transformation strategies.
Figure 1: Percentage of firms using forms of AI now and in three years
Although wealth and asset management leadership teams understand AI’s potential, the study found formidable organisational, technological, and regulatory hurdles that limit successful AI transformation. Conservative cultures can act as an invisible wall to AI adoption — and to hiring the AI talent firms need.
Most investment firms are also struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovation. Their data is often fragmented, inconsistent, unreliable, and not AI-ready. Meanwhile, operational complexity and inadequate system and workflow integration prevent them from optimising and scaling AI innovation.
Driving AI innovation is particularly challenging in the highly-regulated investment industry. Unfortunately, AI regulation is still a work in progress: firms face unclear and shifting guidelines, causing them to move cautiously on AI adoption, rather than embracing full-fledged AI transformation.
Data integrity, security, and privacy are also critical concerns, given the sensitivity of financial information and the sums of money involved. Missteps in these areas can be extremely costly, eroding client trust, damaging a firm’s reputation, and exposing it to regulatory action.
Partly due to these hurdles, over two-thirds of firms are currently generating only small or moderate ROI on AI; 12 percent are seeing no or negative returns. Many management teams find that delivering hefty returns from AI takes time and money. With an average payback period of 22 months, achieving high ROI can take three years or more.
Source: ThoughtLab
The ThoughtLab study found an elite cadre of wealth and asset management firms that are well ahead in AI transformation, offering a successful roadmap for others to follow.
These ‘leaders’ scored highly on five key best practices:
Leaders take concrete steps to implement these best practices, mapping out strategies aligned with business goals, and laying the organisational, cultural, talent, and technology foundations for AI success. They also put in place the governance and risk management guardrails needed.
As a result, leaders are further ahead in implementing AI across their organisations — particularly generative and agentic AI. Almost half currently use GenAI for risk management and fraud protection. Robinhood, for one, developed a generative AI solution to help its team investigate suspicious activity that might indicate money laundering or fraud.
And leaders get better returns on their AI investments, averaging 4.7 percent, versus 3.1 percent for others. Indeed, 37 percent of leaders report large positive returns from their AI investment, versus 15 percent of others.
Source: ThoughtLab
Nearly two-thirds of executives predict they will hire staff with soft skills that AI cannot easily replace, such as emotional intelligence and creative thinking.
Close to three-quarters of investment firms believe that AI will fundamentally change the nature of work for their staffs and advisers.
For the future, investment management firms expect AI to rewrite how people and machines get work done across organisations. Over the next three years, some of the most exciting AI advances will occur in the front and middle offices. More than a third plan to use GenAI for tasks from customer analysis and self-service portals to regulatory monitoring and fraud protection.
Forward-looking firms will step up with agentic AI, particularly insurance firms and universal banks. RBC, for example, is using advanced AI technology to automatically make trades in a client’s best interest based on what it has learned from prior transactions.
The back office, which still handles many repetitive tasks manually, remains ripe for AI transformation. Among surveyed firms, three-quarters or more plan to employ AI for custodial services, asset valuation, trade processing and reconciliation.
“We are using AI to automate back office operations to help improve service levels for complex customer requests. The ROI we are seeing currently is about 15 percent,” reported the CEO of a large US universal bank’s asset management division.
As firms accelerate their adoption of these technologies, AI’s role will increasingly converge with the work of people in client and investment activities. AI models and agents will work with humans on key client activities, such as onboarding, administration, and communication.
As a result of these developments, close to three quarters of investment firms believe that AI will fundamentally change the nature of work for their staffs and advisers — triggering a big boost in human productivity. At the same time, firms say the technology will create new roles in areas like AI oversight and product development, refocusing staff and advisers on value-added activities.
The study found that AI is likely to play a bigger role than people in more straightforward activities, such as executing transactions, allocating assets, and compliance. In other, more nuanced areas, such as risk management, investment advice, and portfolio management, AI and humans will increasingly work hand-in-hand.
Humans will, naturally, continue to dominate in areas such as relationship management. Consequently, nearly two-thirds of executives predict they will hire staff with soft skills that AI cannot easily replace, such as emotional intelligence and creative thinking.
As the chief technology officer of a German asset management firm argued in the survey: “We found that AI definitely helps and saves time, but I believe AI cannot replace human judgment in complex investment decisions.”
"The AI-Powered Investment Firm" is available to read here
Lou Celi CEO, ThoughtLab
Future-proofing at scale means building systems for change, not hype
By James Ward, CEO, Ward PLLC
‘Future-proofing’ has become one of those phrases that sounds visionary but usually just means ‘we bought something shiny and hope it still works in five years’. The problem isn’t the technology: it’s the way firms approach it. Too many wealth managers are chasing the idea of AI rather than the reality of it, buying tools without a clear understanding of where those tools fit in the stack — or why they’re there at all.
A genuinely durable infrastructure for AI at scale doesn’t start with the model. It starts with the mindset.
A well-designed architecture treats AI as a means to achieve specific, measurable business outcomes — not as the goal itself. That may sound obvious, but much of what we see in the market suggests otherwise. The narrative of ‘using AI in business’ often conceals a deeper vagueness: using it for what?
In practice, future-proofing means building a modular architecture that allows AI capabilities to bolt in or unplug without disrupting the whole. The goal isn’t to have an ‘AI stack’; it’s to have a flexible, interoperable system that can absorb or reject innovations depending on business need, regulatory change, and risk appetite.
Think of it like designing a transport network. You don’t build a supercharger and then decide what kind of car you’ll buy. You build the roads, the junctions, and the traffic signals first — then choose the vehicles that best use them. The most resilient infrastructures treat AI as just another vehicle type in a broader, well-managed system of data, governance, and process design.
Governance, compliance, and risk oversight should be native to the system, not bolted on later.
The second principle of durability is psychological as much as technical: avoid the trap of AI exceptionalism. When firms adopt new systems as ‘special projects’ or standalones, they accumulate two kinds of debt — technical and cognitive.
Technical debt is familiar: bespoke code, unique data pipelines, and brittle interfaces that can’t scale. But cognitive debt may be worse. Teams begin to think of the AI system as separate from their core operations — something to ‘feed’ or ‘check’ rather than something that is part of the workflow. That separation leads to mistrust, misuse, and an eventual loss of value.
Instead, the best implementations treat AI like any other operational component. Governance, compliance, and risk oversight should be native to the system, not bolted on later. If you have to create a ‘parallel process’ to review AI outputs, you’ve already lost the integration game.
Firms that get this right are those which design AI systems to operate within existing governance frameworks, not above or around them. That ensures both scalability and survivability. When regulation shifts — as it inevitably will — those systems can adapt through the same change-management processes that already handle every other form of compliance
The third rule of future-proofing is cultural: stop letting fear of missing out (FOMO) drive procurement.
AI is at its frothiest moment since the first FinTech wave. Every vendor claims to be building ‘the future of the workplace,’ and many of them will fail before your next quarterly review. Yet FOMO continues to drive spending patterns, even among sophisticated firms.
The best safeguard against FOMO-driven adoption is a governance model that insists on justification before integration. Every AI procurement decision should begin with a written articulation of what problem it solves, what success looks like, what happens if it fails, and who owns the outcome. If that analysis reads like an afterthought — or if the answer is some version of ‘because everyone else is doing it’ — that’s your cue to walk away.
The future isn’t built by those who buy the most tools; it’s built by those who know when not to.
True resilience in AI infrastructure comes from restraint and clarity, not acceleration. Modularity, integration, and prudence sound unglamorous, but they’re what keep firms adaptable when the regulatory environment shifts or the next generation of AI models changes the game again.
To future-proof at scale is to design for change itself — to assume that what you adopt today will evolve, fragment, and require reinvention. The firms that succeed won’t be the ones that guessed right about which model wins. They’ll be the ones whose systems can absorb whatever comes next without losing coherence, compliance, or confidence.
James Ward CEO Ward PLLC
By Julien Schaffner, Director - Strategy, Digital, and Operations Excellence at Deloitte Luxembourg
Heightened client expectations, mounting regulatory demands, and the acceleration of digital disruption are reshaping wealth management, while competition intensifies across global financial centres. How can relationship managers (RMs) deliver strategic value when their time is increasingly divided between administrative burdens and client engagements?
This article explores the potential of agentic AI — artificial intelligence (AI) capable of autonomous, goal-driven actions — to address this challenge. By merging automation with intelligence, agentic AI offers an opportunity to rethink the RM’s daily workflow, freeing time for high-value interactions and strengthening the overall client experience.
Private banks are navigating one of the fastest -evolving landscapes in decades. Clients now expect hyper-personalised, real-time experiences, while digital transformation continues to redefine the rules of engagement. Competitive pressures are mounting, forcing traditional institutions to rethink their operating models and embrace innovation. As The Guardian recently reported, £100 billion (US$131 billion) in UK high street bank deposits vanished in a single year as savers flocked to digital-first challengers.
RMs remain at the forefront of value creation. Their daily reality is increasingly shaped by compliance checks, reporting obligations, and administrative work — reducing the time available for strategic advice and meaningful client engagement while also driving up cost-to-serve. Private banks face the dual challenge of improving accuracy in regulatory tasks and freeing client-facing teams to concentrate on revenue-generating activities.
AI adoption is already accelerating. Deloitte’s 2025 Predictions Report anticipates that half of companies using generative AI will deploy AI agents by 2027. Wealth management is no exception.
A new generation of AI, agentic AI, is emerging as a response to these challenges. Unlike traditional automation, it can pursue objectives autonomously, make decisions, and take actions with minimal human intervention. It can go beyond simple task execution and automation, and support end-to-end processes. It can handle routine activities such as monitoring portfolios, generating reports, or tracking regulatory updates. By automating these tasks, agentic AI frees RMs to concentrate on higher-value activities.
As Deloitte Luxembourg colleagues have underlined, agentic AI is best understood as part of a broader multiagent network that can collaborate across processes such as know-your-customer (KYC) maintenance or anti-money laundering (AML) investigations, going beyond traditional task automation.
Agentic AI does not replace human expertise. Instead, it amplifies it by multiplying productivity, strengthening client relationships, and enhancing overall service quality.
'Agentic AI’ refers to autonomous systems capable of executing complex tasks with minimal human intervention. It is both goal-oriented and adaptive. It continuously monitors changing conditions, analyses data in real time, and takes proactive steps to complete tasks with efficiency.
Unlike traditional generative AI, which responds to prompts, agentic AI initiates actions, connects multiple processes, triggers workflows, and interacts across systems to achieve defined objectives. Generative AI remains reactive; agentic AI is proactive.
For wealth management, the implications are concrete. Agentic AI can automatically flag portfolio risks, generate tailored investment proposals, or coordinate compliance checks without requiring constant RM oversight. This enables RMs to dedicate more time to high-value client interactions.
The impact of agentic AI on RMs is best understood through its effect on their daily activities. RMs constantly balance time-consuming administrative work with revenue-generating advisory activities. Agentic AI reshapes this balance by reducing the burden of nonrevenue tasks, while remaining regulatorily-compliant and completing administrative activities, and by enhancing efficiency in high-value engagements.
Compliance and reporting: Agentic AI automates the most time-intensive compliance processes. AML reviews that once required 90 minutes can now be completed in just 12. KYC onboarding that used to take four hours can now happen in seconds. Large universal and custodial banks are already reaping the rewards, with one global institution reportedly saving over 10,000 hours annually through AI-driven automation. Early adopters emphasise not only time savings but also fewer false positives and greater compliance scalability, even as challenges around explainability and data quality persist. However, private banks are still catching up, constrained by lower volumes, complex client structures, and legacy IT systems.
Administrative workflows: Pilots in large banks show agentic AI can automate up to 90 percent of meeting administration, from capturing discussion points to updating CRM, while RMs still provide key inputs and final validation.
Regulatory intelligence: Agentic AI can reduce manual compliance tasks by up to 70 percent by anticipating the impact of regulatory change on client portfolios and analysing a large volume of data points in seconds.
The true value of agentic AI in wealth management is in augmenting human expertise — not replacing it.
Personalised investment recommendations: By analysing client objectives, risk tolerance, and market dynamics in real time, agentic AI surfaces tailored investment opportunities. It can dynamically detect underexposure to sustainable assets and proactively recommend ESG-compliant instruments as market conditions evolve, resulting in time savings of up to 75 percent in ESG assessment.
Proactive client engagement: Agentic AI can pinpoint critical engagement moments such as liquidity events or unusual transactions, often before they even reach the RM’s radar. It sends alerts instantly, enabling timely outreach that strengthens trust and enables new business opportunities.
Scalable, personalised communication: AI can draft portfolio updates, investment proposals, and followups tailored to individual preferences. By combining scale with personalisation, it ensures clients receive timely, relevant, and human-validated communication.
The true value of agentic AI in wealth management is in augmenting human expertise — not replacing it. Its impact is clear across three dimensions:
For RMs: By automating compliance monitoring, data collection, and administrative follow-ups, agentic AI reduces the burden of routine work and enables RMs to dedicate more time to building trust and delivering strategic advice. As AI agents become increasingly embedded in enterprise workflows, professionals can concentrate on the activities that truly drive growth.
For clients: Clients reap the rewards of proactive, personalised, and seamless service. Agentic AI analyses portfolios in real time, uncovers opportunities, and anticipates risks. This empowers RMs to deliver timely, tailored insights at scale, boosting responsiveness, satisfaction, and client loyalty.
For private banks: Agentic AI offers private banks operational efficiency, stronger compliance, and a clear competitive edge. By automating KYC monitoring and remediation, audit documentation, and portfolio monitoring, it cuts costs, improves accuracy, and frees client-facing teams to focus on revenue-gene rating activities. Research shows that leveraging agentic AI not only strengthens compliance and manages complexity but also boosts RM productivity, unlocking growth.
Agentic AI demands careful governance and risk oversight. Success hinges not just on technical capability, but on ensuring trust, regulatory compliance, and seamless integration across enterprise workflows.
Human oversight: While agentic AI can operate autonomously, RMs remain responsible for client advice. AI supports decision-making but never replaces human judgment. ‘Human safeguards’ are essential for maintaining trust and accountability, but the oversight required is minimal compared to the effort these tasks previously demanded.
This perspective mirrors broader Deloitte findings that adoption introduces not only efficiency but also risks, ranging from model bias to rogue agent behaviour, that underscore the need for rigorous human oversight.
Data protection and regulatory compliance: Wealth management operates in a highly-regulated environment. Any AI deployment must comply with GDPR and emerging standards like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act). Robust safeguards for data security, explainability, and auditability are essential to comply with regulatory requirements.
Integration with existing systems: Agentic AI must seamlessly integrate with core banking systems, CRM platforms, and compliance infrastructure. Poor integration increases the risk of fragmented workflows and shadow IT, while orchestrating AI across multiple systems ensures performance, scalability, and operational coherence.
In private banking, addressing AI challenges is not only about managing risk, but also about strengthening client trust, enhancing resilience, and supporting long-term growth. Deloitte Luxembourg leverages advanced AI expertise and deep industry insight to help banks turn these challenges into strategic opportunities.
Deloitte is to define tailored AI and automation strategies, implement Generative AI solutions, optimise processes, establish governance frameworks, and develop staff capabilities. Drawing on its global network and proven methodologies, Deloitte enables private banks to transform the way they operate, compete, and deliver value in the digital era.
Agentic AI is redefining the private banking landscape and its workforce organisation. By taking over operational, data-heavy tasks such as compliance, reporting, portfolio monitoring, and client communications, it frees RMs to focus on what truly matters: delivering personalised advice, engaging clients at the right moments, and building lasting trust.
For private banks, this means stronger compliance, greater efficiency, and a competitive edge. According to one recent Deloitte study, depending on an individual bank’s organisation and agility, agentic AI could free up 30 to 50 percent of RMs’ time and that of their assistants.
With AI augmenting human expertise rather than replacing it, RMs can work smarter, clients benefit from proactive, tailored service, and institutions unlock sustainable growth — proving that the future of wealth management lies in the seamless partnership between human insight and intelligent automation.
Agentic AI is redefining the private banking landscape and its workforce organisation.
Julien Schaffner
Director - Strategy, Digital, and Operations Excellence, Deloitte Luxembourg
WealthTech 2026 will set the scene for the technology focus and investment spend of the global wealth management sector. Formed around a single global thematic report, a research project looking at the market’s focus and plans for the year ahead, and supported by individual events in London and New York, WealthTech 2026 will help to lead, shape and engage the industry in determining the ‘what, where and how’ of wealth technology investment in 2026.
Interested in participating in WealthTech 2026?
Discover more and book a meeting today.
Read online >
The WealthTech 2026 project will deliver:
The WealthTech 2026 report will feature contributions from a variety of market participants across the world, each shining a light on an aspect of the business and how, with technology, the industry should focus to deliver growth, innovation, change or other requirements for its business through the year ahead.
Alongside the report, we will also conduct a global research effort to understand the market’s view on where they will focus their technology spend and effort in 2026.
The highlights of this research will be included in the main WealthTech 2026 report and presented in more detail in one summary report that will be available for free to research respondents and project sponsors/participants.
We will present the report and research to the market, and support those with panel discussions and product demos, at dedicated events in the key wealth centres of London and New York. Each event will include 75 delegates.
FEATURED REPORT
Showcasing the application of technology in wealth management in 2024.
Read now >
This Showcase section includes six entries from technology vendors on the front line of future-proofing the global wealth management industry.
44
Showcase #1 Redefining adviser efficiency
Empowering advisers with intelligent, scalable and future-ready workflows.
Contributed by LSEG
58
Showcase #3 Securing investment platforms
How firms can protect themselves and their customers from digitally enabled forms of fraud
Contributed by LexisNexis Risk Solutions
76
Showcase #5 Family office technology consolidation
Consolidating digital infrastructure to future-proof family offices.
Contributed by Altoo
52
Showcase #2 Integration standardisation
Wealth without friction: Unlocking next-gen advisory through intelligent automation.
Contributed by Precept
68
Showcase #4 The rise of embedded wealth
Connecting digital lifestyles to financial products.
Contributed by Wealth OS
84
Showcase #6 Future-ready family offices
Where family-office governance meets real, productive AI.
Contributed by Lightbox Wealth
Empowering advisers with intelligent, scalable and future-ready workflows.
In a rapidly evolving wealth management landscape, advisers face mounting pressure to deliver personalised, timely insights. Yet fragmented systems and rising complexity hinder productivity. The industry must rethink workflows, embrace interoperability, and harness AI to empower advisers and elevate client experiences.
Contributed by
www. lseg .com/en
To stay competitive, firms must design adviser-centric ecosystems that streamline complexity, foster trust, and enable scalable, personalised engagement—empowering advisers to focus on what truly drives long-term client value.
LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) is a leading global financial markets infrastructure and data provider. With trusted expertise, open access, and global scale, LSEG enables sustainable growth across markets through data, analytics, capital formation, indices, and risk management across asset classes.
By Sune Mortensen, Global Head of Wealth Solutions, LSEG
The wealth management industry stands at a crossroads. As client expectations evolve and technology accelerates, firms must rethink how they empower advisers to deliver consistent, personalised, and high-value experiences. The next five to 10 years will be defined by how well firms can future-proof their operations — not just through innovation, but by simplifying the advisory experience and enabling scalable, trusted advice.
At the heart of this transformation lies a critical challenge: adviser workflows. Advisers today are navigating a fragmented digital landscape, burdened by what we call ‘toggle tax’ — the hidden cost of switching between disconnected systems. This inefficiency not only drains productivity but also detracts from what matters most: building strong client relationships and delivering timely, relevant insights.
The role of the financial adviser is evolving rapidly. No longer just portfolio managers, advisers are becoming data curators, helping clients navigate an overwhelming volume of market information. The challenge is no longer access to data, but the ability to filter, contextualise, and act on it.
Yet, many advisers are still working across siloed platforms — CRM systems, portfolio tools, market data terminals, and communication apps — that don’t talk to each other. This fragmentation leads to duplicated effort, missed opportunities, and a diminished client experience.
Our research shows that 68 percent of investors value a holistic view of their assets and liabilities, and 33 percent say adviser availability during difficult times adds the greatest value. Advisers need tools that allow them to be present, informed, and responsive — without being bogged down by operational friction.
68 percent of investors value a holistic view of their assets and liabilities, and 33 percent say adviser availability during difficult times adds the greatest value.
To future-proof wealth management, firms must embrace interoperability — the seamless integration of systems, data, and workflows. This means moving beyond point solutions and investing in platforms that support open architecture, standardised communication protocols, and intelligent automation.
Imagine an adviser moving effortlessly from a client record in Salesforce to a portfolio view in LSEG’s Adviser Dashboard, or from a security overview to detailed analytics in LSEG Workspace — without switching contexts or losing data continuity. This is not a distant vision. It’s achievable today.
Key strategies include:
Unifying the adviser experience through consistent, firm-defined workflows;
Breaking down data silos to enhance collaboration and insight generation;
Centralising communication to reduce noise and improve responsiveness; and
Leveraging agentic AI to surface insights, suggest next best actions, and automate routine tasks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping wealth management. From simulating human interaction to enhancing decision-making, AI is enabling advisers to deliver more personalised, timely, and scalable advice.
But the next frontier is agentic AI — systems that act on behalf of the adviser, not just assist them. These intelligent agents can monitor market movements, flag relevant client updates, and even initiate workflows based on predefined triggers. For example, an AI agent might detect a dividend payout and prompt the adviser to allocate incoming funds or suggest reinvestment options.
This shift allows advisers to focus on strategic conversations and relationship-building, while routine tasks are handled seamlessly in the background.
The challenge is no longer access to data, but the ability to filter, contextualise, and act on it.
Moreover, agentic AI can help advisers anticipate client needs before they arise. By analysing behavioural patterns, portfolio changes, and market signals, AI can proactively suggest engagement opportunities — whether they’re a check-in call, a portfolio review, or a timely investment idea.
As technology blurs the lines between digital tools and human advisers, the need for consistent, transparent client experiences becomes paramount. Clients expect the same level of personalisation and responsiveness from their wealth adviser as they do from Netflix or Google.
Firms must ensure that every touchpoint — whether digital or in-person — reflects a unified brand experience. This includes consistent communication styles, visual identity, and advice delivery. Transparency is key: clients must clearly understand the difference between advice, information, and background content.
Consistency also plays a critical role in compliance. Standardised workflows and centralised data help ensure that advisers are operating within regulatory frameworks while still delivering personalised service. This dual focus on trust and efficiency is essential for long-term success.
The generational shift in wealth is another driving force. Digital-native investors expect self-service options, real-time insights, and personalised recommendations. To meet these expectations, firms must develop scalable advice models that combine human expertise with digital efficiency.
This means enabling the creation and distribution of firm-wide investment views and recommendations through digital channels, while maintaining compliance and personalisation. Advisers can then tailor these insights to individual clients, ensuring relevance and trust.
For example, a firm might use AI to generate a weekly market outlook tailored to different client segments. Advisers can then personalise these insights based on individual goals, risk profiles, and portfolio composition — delivering value at scale without sacrificing quality.
Transparency is key: clients must clearly understand the difference between advice, information, and background content.
As the wealth management industry evolves, the imperative is clear: empower advisers to focus on what they do best — building relationships, delivering personalised advice, and guiding clients through complex financial decisions. Achieving this requires a thoughtful approach to technology and workflow design.
The right solutions must be built with the adviser in mind. They should simplify complexity, reduce friction, and enable seamless access to the insights and tools advisers need throughout their day. This means creating environments where data flows freely across systems, where communication is centralised, and where workflows are intuitive and aligned with how advisers actually work.
Solutions should also be agile and adaptable, capable of evolving alongside changing client expectations and regulatory requirements. They must support personalisation at scale, enabling advisers to tailor insights and recommendations without sacrificing consistency or compliance.
Importantly, these tools should not overwhelm advisers with more information — they should curate and contextualise it. Intelligent automation and AI driven insights can help surface what matters most, suggest timely actions, and eliminate routine tasks, allowing advisers to spend more time engaging with clients and less time navigating systems.
Ultimately, future-proofing wealth management means designing solutions that are not only technologically advanced but also deeply human-centric. By focusing on interoperability, intelligent workflows, and adviser empowerment, firms can create a foundation for longterm success in a rapidly-changing landscape.
The imperative is clear: empower advisers to focus on what they do best.
Future-proofing wealth management means designing solutions that are not only technologically advanced but also deeply human-centric.
The future of wealth management isn’t just about technology — it’s about empowering advisers to deliver what clients value most: trust, relevance, and personalised guidance. By minimising toggle tax, embracing interoperability, and leveraging agentic AI, firms can create a future ready advisory experience that drives growth, loyalty, and differentiation.
The firms that succeed will be those that simplify complexity, scale personalisation, and stay grounded in the core principles of transparency, consistency, and client empowerment.
LSEG is a leading global financial markets infrastructure and data provider that operates connected businesses to serve customers across the entire financial markets value chain.
With capabilities in data, indices and analytics, capital formation, trade execution, clearing and risk management, we operate at the heart of the world’s financial ecosystem and enable the sustainable growth and stability of our customers and their communities.
Together, our five business divisions – Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell, Risk Intelligence, Capital Markets and Post Trade – offer customers seamless access to global financial markets, across the trading lifecycle.
Your personal ecosystem of insights, news and analytics
The LSEG workplace (pictured) is a purpose-built, intuitive solution designed to help wealth advisers thrive in a competitive market. It integrates trusted insights, analytics, and proprietary data to deliver personalised, high-impact client engagements.
Advisers can monitor markets, generate ideas, manage portfolios, and deliver timely advice — all from a single, streamlined environment.
By leveraging AI-driven content, curated market monitoring, and efficient workflows, advisers save time and stay ahead of trends. The platform also fosters collaboration through an open, connected community, enabling tool sharing, co-creation, and innovation. With fast, synchronised access across devices, advisers are always client-ready—anytime, anywhere.
Foster client relationships and drive long-term business growth
Differentiated content and analytics. Access to global news, Lipper fund and company data, exclusive insights from Reuters and 10,000-plus sources, and personalised AI alerts from LSEG Digest help prioritise what matters most.
Intuitive and seamless user experience. Find what you need in no time wherever you are with our user-friendly interface, natural language search, and seamless integration across all your devices.
Market movements monitoring. Get insights into client portfolios through our Adviser Dashboard. Access curated alerts and Watchlist Pulse to stay informed of significant activities on client portfolios, allowing you to stay ahead and proactively connect with them.
Data-driven insights and portfolio analytics. Demonstrate the impact of your recommendations. Analyse multi-asset portfolios, including cross-asset distribution and contribution and identify primary performance drivers.
Idea generation and analysis. Identify investment opportunities and differentiate your services with powerful analytics, screeners, and macro and company data.
ESG data and sustainability. Explore proprietary ESG scores and ratings for funds and equities, as well as ESG exposures in portfolios to help educate investors, meet investment mandates, and drive business growth.
Sune Mortensen Head of Wealth Solutions
sune.mortensen@lseg.com
Deliver truly personalised advice and build more successful client relationship
Streamline the creation and distribution of house views and recommendations to create a consistent, digital and scalable advisory engine.
Keep advisers informed and create next best actions through co-mingling of Personal Investor Information and market data.
React to clients faster with access to relevant insights through AI Powered Smart Search and personalised Newsletters.
Save costs and reduce friction with flexible APIs that connect relevant LSEG data & insights into your adviser’s suite of tools (CRM, PMS, Order Management).
Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, South America, Western Europe CLIENT
Standardisation is the way out of vendor sprawl
Plotting a way out of fragmented tech stacks and towards more meaningful differentiation.
Contributed by
Standards make the right things invisible and standardising integrations will have the same result.
Precept eliminates the delays and rising cost of FinTech integrations and captures revenue quickly through an open ecosystem.
Plotting a way out of fragmented tech stacks and towards more meaningful differentiation
By Mark Ovaska, Co-Founder & CEO at Precept
Technology promised acceleration; instead, it delivered an obstacle course. We were told APIs and ‘native integrations’ would make systems play nicely, yet here we are decades later and most teams still face the same long onboarding cycles, brittle connectors, and opaque security reviews.
Things haven’t gotten easier — the work has simply been redistributed into endless one-offs: schema puzzles, edge-case error handling, and duct-taped authentication flows that quietly expand the backlog and then alarmingly appear in higher cost and lower margins.
One big reason for this is that the economics of software has fundamentally changed. SaaS and microservice architecture resulted in organisations assembling tech stacks measured not in handfuls but in hundreds of services. Sure, that democratised capability — but it also scattered data.
Every new product arrives with a new definition of basic things like customer, invoice, ticket, lead, or event. ‘Native’ integration is sales-speak for custom, proprietary, and fragile. Multiply that across dozens of tools and you don’t get leverage; you get fragmentation disguised as progress.
The costs are high — research suggests it’s somewhere around 20 percent of your tech budget. Worse, they have been normalised. Consider the costs of just the basics: coordinating security reviews, managing rotating secrets, updates and remapping, root cause investigations, etc. These don't appear on an invoice or budget line item, but instead on roadmaps that grow, incident postmortems, and an engineering culture that normalises heroics over hygiene.
The way out isn’t another proprietary connector marketplace. The way out is standardisation: the unglamorous, reliable substrate that lets creativity concentrate where it actually matters. We’ve all seen this movie before. USB didn’t kill innovation in peripherals: it created a predictable power/data layer and then got out of the way. PDF didn’t stifle documents: it gave them a durable, portable form that outlive devices, apps, and vendors.
Standards made the right things invisible and integrations deserve the same treatment. If APIs are millions of doorways, what we’re missing is a shared floor plan. A canonical contract for pieces of common business data — customers, products, invoices, tickets, messages, and files — plus an explicit approach for anything idiosyncratic. In this world, vendors would keep their trade secrets internally but expose shapes and behaviours as a predictable model.
Translate once at the boundary; reuse everywhere inside the enterprise. The payoff is compounding: every future connection costs less, every migration hurts less, and every audit takes less time.
This isn’t just a technical idea; it’s a risk and cost management strategy. Predictable interfaces improve security because policies bind to stable layers rather than bespoke scripts. Reliability improves, because fewer unique parts means fewer surprises.Observability improves, because telemetry can be compared across systems that speak the same language. And crucially, teams recover the one resource SaaS never bundled: attention. Engineers can stop baby sitting leaky pipes and start shipping value.
Integration of data — not more tools — drives satisfaction. Take Amazon’s one-click invention — all the tech and standardisation across dozens of systems achieves a level of simplicity and elegance that’s catapulted them to the very top of retail. Across industries, organisation-supporting applications, and specialised functions in the dozens or even hundreds, it’s integration that will win long-term.
This doesn’t necessarily mean spending the most, nor buying the biggest ‘all-in-one’. The winning teams are the ones that make data flow cleanly across their core systems, reduce swivel-chair moments, and treat integration quality as a first-class product. In other words: it’s not the vendor, or even the vendor assessment, as much as how it all comes together.
When the seams don’t fit or the ecosystems are guarded by tolls or gates, you’re mortgaging the future for what looks like short term gain. In these strategies, data access becomes a privilege, portability becomes a negotiation, and integration logic lives in places you can’t see, inspect or test. When providers monetise connectivity itself, customers pay twice — once for the product and again for the right to use their own data.
Integration of data — not more tools — drives satisfaction.
A healthier market treats connectivity as a right, not a premium. Vendors can still compete fiercely on outcomes — intelligence, UX, performance, domain expertise — while embracing open, portable contracts at the edge. Concretely, that means shipping schemas and mappings that are stabilised by standards. It means plain-speak documentation and decoupling data access from licence upsells. When these exist, the integration can be reviewed, tested, and easily automated. That’s also where AI becomes actually useful: not by ‘writing your integration’, but by proposing mappings, generating tests, validating contracts, and spotting drift — all possible because the structures are predictable enough to reason about.
This won’t be easy. The cultural shift is as, or more, important than the technical shift. For years, teams have measured integration success as ‘we made it work’. The new bar is repeatability: can the next team reuse this without reverse-engineering it? Can we swap engines without replacing the car? Can a security reviewer answer, ‘What data goes where, when, and why’ from a single view? Standards turn those from hero projects into hygiene.
So, what does a practical path look like? In short, it’s Precept, the platform my team has been building for years. We’ve taken this futuristic but straightforward approach and created a product you can adopt with just a few clicks. No more long lines or deep technical conversations. In short, no more work to integrate your data.
The most valuable work your company does isn’t another data mapping or one-off authentication dance. We know how to solve those together in real time. Standardise the boundary, let the inside of each system stay creative, and make integrations become the utility you can count on for scale. That’s how we trade complexity for real speed — and finally get the future we were promised.
Mark Ovaska
Precept exists to level the playing field. Rather than building another operating system, we bridge the gaps between them—connecting every part of an advisor’s financial universe so vendors can work together instead of in silos. This creates true interoperability: operating scale, capital scale, and a dramatically simpler path to serving the full financial life of every client household.
Precept customers want a better industry—one that democratizes access to best-of-breed solutions, reduces administrative burden, and transforms data into a universal, intelligent environment. Precept is the connective tissue that lifts the entire industry and gives advisors the modern connectivity they’ve always deserved.
Effortlessly connecting WealthTech’s data through our universal integration hub and tools. With Precept you can always say, “Yes, we’re already integrated with them.”
Precept unlocks real-time data capabilities via an AI-enabled platform—purpose built for solving for connectivity, authentication, mapping, distribution, and maintenance of data pipelines.
These tools collectively aim to solve all data-related challenges with the same approach: Standardisation, ai-automation, and visual validation.
Map fields across platforms automatically with AI and test the results using visual tools instead of code.
Browse and install integrations like an app store then share entire integrations just like you share a file.
Create and run data transformations through a drag & drop experience including MCP.
Finally, we meet platforms where they are today. For example, turn flat file processes into cuttintg edge processes.
Provide your customers with unprecendent support of any platform in real-time through a universal Hub.
Eliminate integration sprawl and backlog.
Mange wide-spread distribution using a highly efficient standardised model.
Modernise legacy integrations and systems without costly migrations.
Mark Ovaska
CEO & Co-Founder
Precept mark@precept.sh
Precept
COMPANY precept.sh
WEBSITE info@precept.sh
EMAIL Milton, DE HQ 2024 FOUNDED 1-10
CLIENTS
EMPLOYEES 1-10
EAMs, Bank Wealth Managers, Family Offices, Financial Advisers, Insurance-based, Trust & Fiduciary, Digital Wealth Platforms, FinTech/ WealthTechs (B2B) CLIENT TYPE
CLIENT LOCATIONS
Middle East, North America, Western Europe
How firms can protect themselves and their customers from digitallyenabled forms of fraud
Increasing digitalisation in investment services is expanding opportunities for fraud, highlighting rising threats like identity theft, account takeover, and AI-driven scams. This article explains how seamless customer experience can be balanced with strong fraud prevention, adopting layered risk controls, and meeting evolving regulatory expectations.
Contributed by
risk. lexisnexis .co.uk
Proactively strengthen identity checks, deploy layered real-time fraud defences, and improve compliance processes to stay ahead of evolving digital threats and protect customers throughout the entire investment journey.
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions provides customers with innovative technologies, information-based analytics, decisioning tools and data management services that help them solve problems, make better decisions, stay compliant, reduce risk and improve operations.
By Paul Brockway, Director of Insurance & Investments at LexisNexis® Risk Solutions
The investments industry is rapidly digitalising to meet consumer demand for instant access, transparency, and convenience. While this enhances user experience, it also opens new doors for fraudsters to exploit vulnerabilities in systems and data.
The shift to digital has introduced new fraud vectors such as compromised identities, account takeovers, and credential stuffing often powered by data harvested from breaches or social engineering. The LexisNexis® True Cost of Fraud™ Study (2023) showed that, 72 percent of businesses prioritised integrating digital and customer experience operations with fraud prevention efforts in the past year, highlighting the growing need to align security with user experience.
Fraudsters are increasingly using AI tools to mimic legitimate communications, making scams harder to detect and easier to scale. The LexisNexis® Global Cybercrime Report (2025) revealed that one in 11 new account creations are attacks, making onboarding one of the highest-risk steps in the customer journey, especially on financial mobile apps.
Investors expect their investments to be safe, but also demand real-time access to their portfolios, personalised insights, and frictionless digital experiences. To meet these expectations, investment firms must collect, store, and process vast amounts of sensitive data, making security and trust more critical than ever.
The challenge is finding the right balance: delivering intuitive, high-quality user experiences while ensuring that every interaction is secure. As digital engagement grows, so does the pressure on firms to prove they can protect client data, prevent fraud, and maintain the trust that underpins long-term relationships.
Investment platforms are increasingly attractive to fraudsters due to the high-value nature of assets and the frequency of fund movements.
As investment management firms strive to deliver fast, frictionless onboarding and digital-first experiences, especially for high-net-worth clients and younger investors, they often face a trade-off between convenience and security. The True Cost of Fraud™ Study revealed that 54 percent of businesses experienced an increase in scams over the past year, with 21 percent or more growth in scam activity for one in five firms.
This surge reflects how fraudsters are adapting to exploit gaps in identity verification and authentication systems.
As firms race to onboard clients quickly and reduce friction through a digital channel, they risk overlooking robust identity verification and fraud detection protocols. This can open doors for the likes of impersonation scams, phishing attacks, and synthetic identity fraud. As fraud tactics continue to evolve, firms must rethink how they balance user experience with robust fraud prevention, ensuring that trust is built into every step of the digital journey.
Investment platforms face a wide array of fraud threats, including Identity theft, account takeover, and synthetic identity fraud, especially as fraudsters gain access to breached data from other sectors. The likes of credential stuffing is fast growing concern, where bots test stolen usernames and passwords across multiple platforms.
Phishing scams are also becoming more sophisticated, as fraudsters now use AI to craft convincing emails and messages that mimic legitimate financial communications. These scams often target high-net-worth individuals, tricking them into transferring funds or revealing sensitive information.
As investment platforms scale and attract more users, the volume of traffic and data they handle will increase exponentially, putting pressure on authentication systems and making early fraud detection more critical than ever, underscoring the importance of building an end-to-end KYC and due diligence solution that can adapt to these threats.
Investors expect their investments to be safe, but also demand real-time access to their portfolios, personalised insights, and frictionless digital experiences.
The regulatory landscape for investment firms is undergoing significant change, with heightened expectations around fraud prevention, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and sanctions enforcement. In September 2025, the UK introduced the Failure to Prevent Fraud offence, increasing corporate liability for financial crime.
This reflects a broader global trend towards stricter compliance measures, as seen in the UK’s expanded sanctions regime and the EU’s new directive establishing common penalties for sanctions violations. Regulators are intensifying their focus on economic crime, prompting firms to reassess their compliance frameworks to mitigate risk and meet evolving expectations.
The UK’s Economic Crime Plan 2023-2026 outlines key reforms, including changes to Companies House, enhancements to AML regulations, and a greater emphasis on asset recovery through international cooperation. These initiatives underscore the urgency for firms to adopt more robust compliance processes.
Traditional manual due diligence and fragmented risk assessment tools can leave firms vulnerable to oversight errors and regulatory penalties. Instead, adopting real-time risk decisioning and advanced screening techniques can help firms identify financial crime risks more efficiently.
Traditional manual due diligence and fragmented risk assessment tools can leave firms vulnerable to oversight errors and regulatory penalties.
The investment market is more competitive than ever and customer experience is the key to standing out. Clients demand seamless, secure digital journeys, especially during login, where friction can quickly lead to abandonment. Layered authentication is essential for mitigating fraud, but excessive complexity risks frustrating users and damaging trust.
Striking the right balance between security and convenience is key. This approach allows low-risk customers to enjoy streamlined access while applying stronger controls only when necessary.
By integrating adaptive authentication into the login process, firms can protect against fraud without compromising the intuitive, fast experience customers demand. Ultimately, delivering security that feels invisible is not just a compliance requirement — it’s a competitive advantage.
To strengthen fraud prevention across the customer journey, investment firms should adopt a layered risk management strategy that enhances detection without negatively impacting the customer experience. While no solution can eliminate fraud entirely, firms can significantly improve detection and response by integrating multiple signals across the customer journey. This can be done by combining technology, behavioural insight, and collaborative intelligence.
By linking machine learning-powered analytics, digital identity intelligence, and behavioural biometrics, firms can build a dynamic risk assessment framework that adapts in real time. This includes detecting bots and credential testing attempts at login, identifying unusual behaviour during account setup and applying the right level of friction based on risk, ensuring genuine investors can access their accounts.
Alongside the layered approach, joining fraud intelligence networks or consortiums allow for anonymised data sharing across the industry.
The banking sector is already leading the way with shared intelligence and other sectors including investments can replicate this approach to protect their firm and their customers. These networks help identify emerging threats and enable firms to proactively defend against fraudsters using shared insights and behavioural patterns.
Equally important is the need for ongoing vigilance and collaboration. Firms should conduct regular data audits to ensure customer information is accurate and up to date, reducing the risk of identity manipulation.
Finally, education also plays a critical role, where both investors and staff must be trained to recognise fraud risks and respond appropriately, especially as the Failure to Prevent Fraud act is now in place, where large organisations can be held criminally liable if they do not have reasonable procedures in place to prevent fraud.
Paul Brcokway
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is a global leader in data and analytics, providing innovative solutions to help organisations manage financial crime, fraud prevention, and compliance. As part of RELX Group, a FTSE10 company, we leverage advanced technology to streamline, enhance, and automate fraud and compliance processes across the wealth and investments sector.
With our proprietary financial crime technology, and as one of the world’s largest repositories of data, we empower investment firms, trading platforms, and wealth managers to optimise onboarding, fraud detection, and transaction monitoring. Our unique approach to data insight also enables our customers to spot trends and patterns others may miss, uncovering risks and identifying hidden opportunities in the detail.
A smarter, more agile approach to risk management demands advanced models powered by trusted data to help you achieve your business goals while ensuring your customers are protected at every stage of the journey.
Oour solution transforms security into a seamless experience. By recognising and authenticating trusted customers instantly, we deliver effortless access while applying extra protection only when risk is detected. The result? A login journey that feels smooth and secure — building trust without adding friction.
LexisNexis® ThreatMetrix® combines rich, real-time data sources with industry-leading, AI-driven models that help wealth and investment firms to analyse nuanced fraud patterns and correlations, delivering risk decisions in real time with high accuracy.
All powered by an unrivalled global contributory network — the LexisNexis® Digital Identity Network® — sharing data from leading global organisations across the world.
Your organisation’s risk decisioning as effective as the intelligence
Get unique and actionable insights straight from one of the world’s largest risk intelligence networks.
Download The Global LexisNexis®
ThreatMetrix® unifies key components of risk technology into one, powerful decision engine:
• Best-in-class digital identity and behavioural intelligence
• Real-time insights from one of the largest crossindustry data networks in the world
• Shared insights from a community of leading fraud experts
• Sophisticated data processing and analytics
• Embedded AI-powered models with calibration for your risk-appetite
• A powerful platform for forensics investigations, case management, reporting and workflow orchestration.
risk.lexisnexis.co.uk/insights-resources/research/cybercrime-report or scan the QR code.
decisioning is only intelligence it can access.
insights into current fraud trends, largest cross-industry
risk.lexisnexis.co.uk/insights-resources/research/cybercrime-report
USE CASES
Protect your customers from complex fraud risks at every stage of the customer journey enabling you to differentiate between trusted and fraudulent behaviour.
New account opening: Protect against new account fraud and bot attacks while simultaneously approving genuine applications. Get a granular look at patterns associated with the digital identity within the network, like history and behaviour, even if the applicant is new to your business.
Logins and account management: Detect account takeover attempts, social engineering and unauthorised change of details while providing smooth logins and other actions for trusted customers. Predict fraudulent activity with the combination of historical patterns, behavioural signals and more.
Payments: Protect payments while safeguarding against account takeover, scams, money laundering attempts and more. Discover payment anomalies leveraging digital identity and behavioural intelligence from the network to detect high- risk behaviour like a potential scam in progress or mule account activity.
Paul Brockway Director of Insurance & Investments
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions paul.brockway@lexisnexisrisk.com
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions
WEBSITE
COMPANY risk.lexisnexis.co.uk
uk-irl-enquiry@lexisnexisrisk.com
CLIENTS
EMAIL Cardiff, United Kingdom HQ 2010 FOUNDED 1,000+ EMPLOYEES 1,000+
CLIENT TYPE
External Asset Managers, Bank Wealth Managers, Family Offices, Financial Advisers, Insurance-based, Trust & Fiduciary, Digital Wealth Platform
CLIENT LOCATIONS
Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, South America, Western Europe
Hosted quarterly, each edition of the Forum delivers a mix of educational and learning opportunities, a consistent mechanism for developing new and existing relationships, a chance to share experiences and engage in business-relevant discussions among peers, and an opportunity to participate in our collective WealthTech vendor community.
Interested in participating in our Forum events?
Get in touch to discover more and book a meeting.
UK Forum
22 January 2025
The inaugural Forum event of 2026 is scheduled for 22 January from 5 PM to 8:30 PM at the Eight Club Moorgate. This gathering promises a unique opportunity for technology and related vendors to discuss shared challenges, exchange experiences, and forge meaningful connections.
Sponsored by
Q1 2026
Our second US WealthTech Vendor Forum will be scheduled for New York in either Q1 or Q2 2026, bringing together a range of WealthTech and related industry participants to learn, share and network around key industry topics.
Q2 2026
Our first Swiss WealthTech Vendor Forum will be scheduled for Zurich in Q2 2026, bringing together a range of WealthTech and related industry participants to learn, share and network around key industry topics.
Embedded wealth transforms financial engagement by positioning savings, investment, and retirement products directly inside the digital services people use every day. This seamless integration makes responsible financial growth an effortless part of modern life. Expanding wealth access to digital spaces redefines how, where, and when people build their financial futures.
Contributed by
When wealth management meets daily digital routines, financial inclusion accelerates and new customer markets open up
Create digital wealth management products with WealthOS’ modular middle and back-office software-as-a-service (SaaS).
By Shri Krishnansen, CCO at WealthOS
The digital revolution has undeniably reshaped how consumers interact with the world, and financial services are no exception. From my vantage point as Chief Commercial Officer in the WealthTech space, I see a powerful new distribution model emerging that has the potential to fundamentally transform how wealth management products reach individuals: embedded wealth.
This isn't just a minor adjustment; it's a significant opportunity for wealth management product providers to reach previously underserved customer segments by seamlessly integrating their offerings into the digital environments where people already spend time.
So, what exactly do I mean by embedded wealth?
Simply put, it's about strategically distributing a range of wealth management solutions — from straightforward savings accounts to diverse investment portfolios and long-term retirement plans — through non-traditional (i.e. non-financial) channels. Instead of solely relying on individuals actively seeking out financial institutions, embedded wealth brings these solutions directly into their everyday online experiences.
Imagine someone browsing on their favourite e-commerce site and being offered the option to open a savings account specifically to fund that purchase.
Imagine a user engaging on a social media platform and encountering an opportunity to start a small investment portfolio aligned with their future aspirations. This is the essence of embedded wealth: meeting customers where they are, precisely when a financial need or goal arises.
The beauty of this approach lies in its mutually beneficial nature. It creates a ‘win-win-win’ scenario for customers, distributors, and, of course, wealth management providers.
For consumers, embedded wealth acts as a powerful antidote to the inertia that often prevents engagement with financial products. By offering relevant solutions within familiar digital spaces, it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for those who might feel intimidated or uncertain about traditional financial avenues.
Think about it: someone is looking at a new piece of furniture online but realises it's beyond their current means. Traditionally, they might either abandon the purchase or consider taking on debt.
However, with an embedded savings product, they could be offered a seamless way to create a dedicated regular savings pot, with automated contributions, directly through the retailer's platform. This not only helps them achieve their goal responsibly but also cultivates a saving mindset.
This is the essence of embedded wealth: meeting customers where they are, precisely when a financial need or goal arises.
Embedded wealth acts as a powerful antidote to the inertia that often prevents engagement with financial products.
For the distributors — the e-commerce platforms, social media networks, and other non-financial corporations — embedded wealth becomes a potent tool for deepening customer engagement and fostering loyalty. By providing valuable financial services, they can strengthen their relationships with their customers, encourage longer engagement on their platforms, and gain valuable insights into future purchasing behaviours.
The ‘save now, buy later’ model, for instance, not only empowers customers to reach their goals but also increases the likelihood of a future transaction with the distributor. Moreover, offering embedded wealth solutions can set them apart in a competitive landscape and even unlock new revenue streams through strategic partnerships and commissions.
The real game-changer is the immense opportunity that embedded wealth presents for wealth management providers. It unlocks entirely new distribution channels, allowing access to customer segments that might not typically interact with traditional banks or financial advisers. This can lead to significantly lower customer acquisition costs compared to conventional marketing strategies.
By collaborating with trusted consumer brands that boast established digital footprints and strong customer relationships, wealth management product providers can tap into a vast and previously inaccessible pool of potential clients. Furthermore, these partnerships can yield invaluable data-driven insights into customer behaviour and preferences, paving the way for more tailored and effective product offerings. This leads to higher conversion of a distributor’s client base and reduces a provider’s typical customer acquisition costs.
We’re already seeing compelling examples of embedded wealth in action globally, demonstrating its power to democratise access to financial tools.
Take Gojek in Southeast Asia. Best described as a super app that integrates ride-sharing, food delivery, payments, and various digital services, it recognised that its users heavily transacted with balances in their in-app GoPay wallet.
This presented a natural opportunity to offer investment products directly within the Gojek ecosystem through GoInvestasi. In partnership with the licensed Indonesian fintech platform Pluang, this feature allows users in Indonesia to seamlessly buy and sell digital gold starting from very small amounts, all in compliance with local regulations.
This service is a powerful, active example of how a nontraditional player can successfully distribute investment options to its existing user base, reaching individuals who may have never considered investing before.
On the savings side, we saw UK bank NatWest (through their "Boxed" initiative) partner with the AA (Automobile Association) to offer savings options to AA members directly through the AA platform.
This allowed AA customers to easily create savings accounts, perhaps to save for car repairs, servicing, or their next insurance renewal–a contextually relevant financial solution offered within a non-financial service they already used and trusted. This brought the convenience and accessibility of savings products to a demographic that might not have actively sought out these services through traditional banking channels.
These examples highlight how embedded wealth lowers the barrier to entry for many individuals who might find traditional wealth management intimidating or inconvenient. By integrating financial products into familiar digital experiences, it normalises saving and investing, making it a natural extension of everyday online activities.
To fully realise the potential of embedded wealth, robust and modern technology infrastructure is not just desirable–it’s essential. The seamless integration of wealth management products into diverse digital environments demands technologically sophisticated solutions. This necessitates robust Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable secure and efficient communication between product administration software and a distributor's systems. The entire customer journey must be digital-first, from initial onboarding to seamless transaction execution, requiring a high degree of automation to ensure efficiency and scalability, especially given the potential for large volumes of smaller initial balances.
Although wealth management firms possess crucial product expertise and regulatory compliance frameworks, they often face the challenge of legacy technology infrastructure that isn't ideally suited for seamless embedding. This is where modern wealth management software, like that of WealthOS, becomes in valuable.
To fully realise the potential of embedded wealth, robust and modern technology infrastructure is not just desirable — it's essential.
By providing the digital connective tissue between existing systems and the demands of embedded distribution, we enable traditional wealth managers to participate in this revolution without the need for a complete and costly overhaul of their core technology. Our software, for instance, can seamlessly wrap existing wealth management products with the necessary APIs, automation and orchestration capabilities, making them readily integrable into third-party platforms. Alternatively, providers could also use this technology for the end-to-end operations of fully digital wealth management products that are natively embeddable.
Embedded wealth represents a profound shift in the WealthTech landscape.
However, simply rebranding existing products under a distributor’s name — the traditional white-labelling approach — is unlikely to yield the desired results.
Trust is paramount in financial services, and consumers are far more likely to engage with embedded wealth solutions when they recognise and trust the underlying financial institution. Therefore, the partnership model, where the provider’s brand remains visible and their regulatory standing provides reassurance, is significantly more effective in fostering consumer confidence and driving adoption.
In conclusion, embedded wealth represents a pro found shift in the WealthTech landscape. It offers a compelling value proposition for customers, distributors, and wealth managers. However, unlocking its full potential hinges on the ability to embrace modern, API-driven infrastructure.
By strategically partnering with technology specialists and seamlessly embedding trusted financial products into the digital journeys of everyday consumers, wealth managers can tap into previously unreachable markets, promote greater financial inclusion, and secure their relevance in an increasingly digital world.
Embedded wealth lowers the barrier to entry for many individuals who might find traditional wealth management intimidating or inconvenient.
WealthOS lets you focus on building your customer’s experience, because we take care of all the backend technology, infrastructure and processes to run the next generation of digital investment and retirement products. Our modular platform significantly reduces operational time and costs through extensive automation, orchestration of processes as well as remote maintenance and updates. Whether you're launching or upgrading an existing digital wealth management product, you can get to market three times faster and 40 percent cheaper than other technology platforms today.
WealthOS’s cloud-native core wealth platform enables wealth managers to develop digital products 3x faster at 40 percent lower TCO and 99 percent up-time. WealthOS offers a modular operating system covering the entire client lifecycle, including onboarding, through to tax-wrapper administration (ISAs, accumulation to drawdown SIPPs), payments, portfolio management, trading, withdrawals, projections, fees, billing and more.
Built with microservices architecture, embedding extensive automated and orchestrated workflows throughout. WealthOS reduces manual processes, mitigates risk, and accelerates execution, enhancing client experience and operational efficiency. Its extensive features allow institutions to select necessary backend components, significantly reducing the time and cost of developing digital solutions or digitizing existing workflows.
WealthOS provides API access, enabling you to connect to a wide universe of technologies. For example, generative AI, internet of things, blockchain, and machine learning. Our built-in marketplace facilitates integration with specialist third-party vendors, empowering institutions to create their own wealthtech ecosystem.
WealthOS provides a future-ready, cloud-native operating system for digital wealth management through a Software-as-a-Service model. Our modular architecture supports the entire wealth management operations life cycle — from client onboarding and flexible account structures to automated transactions, real-time holdings, seamless payments, trade execution, and portfolio management. Additional features include support for tax-efficient products, rebalancing strategies, fee automation, multi-currency operations, and branded, compliant communications — allowing wealth managers to build tailored, end-toend digital products with speed and scale.
WealthOS’s serverless infrastructure enables automated provisioning, and zero-downtime, weekly releases that are fully regression-tested and backward compatible. A 99.9 percent uptime ensures reliability, while microservices-based design supports scalability and resilience. REST APIs allow rapid development and release of digital features, while WebSocket APIs enable quick implementation of push messages and notifications. The Unified API and no-code integration marketplace, enable seamless no-code connectivity with third-party services. An orchestration layer combines features into seamless, automated work flows for a smooth, efficient experience.
Augment your tech stack by adding new features and filling gaps. Run complete offerings, from investment platforms and wealth products (like ISAs/SIPPs) to DFM and execution-only services, custodian platforms, execution-only products, and adviser platforms. Replace legacy systems gradually or with a big bang migration. Launch entirely new propositions. Profitably serve new demographics (mass market, D2C, micro-investing) with efficient automation and a lower total cost of ownership.
WealthOS
COMPANY www.wealthos.cloud
EMAIL London, UK HQ 2019 FOUNDED 21-50
EMPLOYEES 1-10
CLIENT TYPE
WealthOS
shri@wealthos.cloud
WEBSITE contact@wealthos.cloud
CLIENT LOCATIONS CCO
CLIENTS Private Banks, Pension Providers, Third-Party Administrators, Business Process Outsourcers; Robo-Advisory Firms, Investment Platforms, Brokers, Custodians, IFA Consolidators/IFA Groups, Discretionary Fund Managers, Banks
Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, South America, Western Europe
Consolidating digital infrastructure to future-proof family offices
Family offices are consolidating their technology infrastructure through integrated digital wealth platforms. This article highlights trends in IT outsourcing, cybersecurity, data integration, and SaaS adoption — showing how unified, secure, and intelligent systems are becoming essential for efficient, futureready wealth management.
Contributed by
Family offices must adopt integrated digital platforms to streamline operations, enhance security, and stay competitive as technological complexity and generational expectations reshape wealth management.
Altoo provides a wealth management platform that simplifies the management of complex assets. Built and hosted in Switzerland, it offers secure data aggregation, intuitive visualisation, and seamless collaboration — empowering wealth owners and family offices to gain clarity, control, and peace of mind. www. altoo .io
By Ian Keates, CEO, at Altoo
Technological innovation has always shaped how business gets done in virtually every industry, but in the digital age this is happening faster than ever. How are family offices responding? Recent industry research reveals clear patterns: widespread IT outsourcing and growing emphasis on cybersecurity.
How should family offices prepare as technological change continues to accelerate? A clear trajectory is emerging — the most sophisticated family offices will increasingly consolidate their technology infrastructure around integrated digital wealth platforms. Not just for efficiency, but as a strategic necessity for managing complexity, ensuring security, and serving multigenerational family expectations.
According to the Campden Wealth/AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025, 94 percent of family offices now outsource IT services, making technology the third-most outsourced function after legal and tax planning services.
This widespread approach to digitalisation reflects a pragmatic recognition: today's technology demands exceed what most family offices can realistically manage in-house. The complexity of modern wealth management — spanning multiple jurisdictions, asset classes, and regulatory requirements — requires specialised technical expertise that few family offices can cost-effectively maintain in-house.
Meanwhile, cybersecurity has emerged as family offices' second fastest-growing service area after family education and engagement. 22 percent of surveyed family offices added cybersecurity services over the past two years, signalling both the rising threat landscape and families' increasing awareness of digital vulnerabilities.
Today's technology demands exceed what most family offices can realistically manage in-house.
The research reveals four foundational technology capabilities that define successful family office operations.
Unified data architecture
Cloud-based data storage, adopted by 85 percent of Campden survey respondents, leads family office technology priorities. Moving forward means moving beyond simple storage toward architectures that enable automated data integration and analysis across all wealth categories.
The key lies in application programming interfaces (APIs), data pipelines that connect family offices to financial institutions worldwide. This connectivity directly addresses what Campden identified as family offices' two greatest technology pain points: spreadsheet reliance and manual data aggregation.
With the right technology, team members no longer need to copy data from statements into spreadsheets or constantly maintain spreadsheet formulas. Machines handle these tasks faster, more accurately, and without fatigue.
Consolidated performance intelligence
The popularity of unified investment reporting has surged, with 64 percent of family offices leveraging technology solutions in 2024 versus 47 percent in 2023. This dramatic shift reflects families' growing expectation of comprehensive views across traditional and alternative investments, regardless of geography or currency.
API-powered integration transforms day-today portfolio management workflows. Instead of taking days or weeks to prepare presentations or reports, wealth owners and their advisers can generate comprehensive, up-to-date, and easily understandable data visualisations with just a few clicks. Investment decisions can be made in response to market movements as they happen, not weeks later.
Ubiquitous access to clear information
Mobile access to wealth data, also prioritised by 64 percent of family offices, will evolve from passive viewing to active engagement. This evolution becomes critical as families navigate the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history.
Digital-native generations expect seamless interactions with their wealth — with the same fluidity they experience in every other aspect of their digital lives. Simultaneously, family members across all generations benefit when complex financial data appears through intuitive visualisations rather than confusing spreadsheets.
Intelligent document management
As digital platforms become central to family office operations, security architecture is evolving from a compliance requirement to a competitive differentiator.
Campden found 66 percent of family offices prioritising document management. Traditional solutions rely on folder hierarchies, requiring wealth owners and professionals to track where information is stored. Tomorrow's systems organise information logically around specific wealth items rather than requiring manual navigation through traditional folder structures.
This contextual approach mirrors how family offices actually operate, making critical information accessible when and where it is needed most.
According to Campden's findings, managing multiple technology vendors has become untenable. "Too many single-solution applications" ranked as family offices' fourth-most common technology concern after spreadsheet dependence, manual data entry, and costs.
Forward-thinking family offices are consolidating around comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms that integrate multiple functions under unified security protocols. The SaaS model offers a crucial advantage: it shifts responsibility for system maintenance, security updates, and technical management to specialised providers, freeing family office teams to focus on their core mission of serving family objectives.
This consolidation addresses the fundamental challenge revealed in the research: family offices are struggling with labour-intensive processes and fragmented systems that consume disproportionate human attention.
As digital platforms become central to family office operations, security architecture is evolving from a compliance requirement to a competitive differentiator. Leading platforms now deliver enterprise-grade capabilities like multi-factor authentication, granular access controls, and in some cases private cloud infrastructure.
A private cloud involves dedicated cloud infrastructure owned and controlled by a single organisation — such as a SaaS platform provider — as opposed to relying on a cloud service provider (CSP) like Amazon or Google. While reputable CSPs implement world-class security precautions, working with them necessarily means relying on a third party to some extent. A private cloud can therefore provide the ultimate in cloud security from both the technical and organisational perspectives.
Swiss-hosted private clouds have especially gained traction among privacy-and security-conscious families. Switzerland's robust data protection framework, combined with world-class infrastructure, provides compelling advantagesinteroperability — enabling iterative rollouts — are best positioned to support firms' strategic transformation.
For family offices, the benefits of adopting a comprehensive digital wealth platform can multiply over time:
• Initial efficiency gains from automated data flows expand into enhanced decision-making as families access institutional grade analytical tools.
• Risk management improves through continuous monitoring and automated alerts.
• Compliance reporting becomes easier thanks to intuitive document management.
• Family communication improves thanks to secure, role-based information access.
Perhaps most importantly, an integrated digital wealth platform can scale seamlessly with family complexity — new generations, additional entities, expanded asset classes — without requiring architectural overhauls.
The family offices positioned for long-term success will be those making strategic technology decisions today. The critical insight: technology outsourcing transcends cost reduction to become capability acquisition. Expertise and infrastructure that would be prohibitively expensive to develop internally are now within realistic reach.
Family offices acting decisively will establish sustainable competitive advantages. Those which delay are risking operational obsolescence in an increasingly digitalised wealth management landscape, where technology excellence has become a baseline expectation.
Within five years, comprehensive digital platforms will likely be as fundamental to family office operations as email is today. The question isn't whether to adopt integrated technology infrastructure, but rather which platform to choose.
The optimal platform provider combines deep expertise serving family offices with world class security capabilities and a proven data integration track record. The families and family offices that recognise this inflection point, and act accordingly, will shape the industry's future.
As digital platforms become central to family office operations, security architecture is evolving from a compliance requirement to a competitive differentiator.
Expertise and infrastructure that would be prohibitively expensive to develop internally are now within realistic reach.
Altoo is a Swiss-based fintech company offering an intuitive digital wealth platform designed for high-net-worth individuals and family offices. The Altoo Wealth Platform provides a secure, consolidated view of both bankable and non-bankable assets, delivering transparency across complex portfolios. With Swiss-grade data privacy and a user-centric interface, Altoo transforms wealth management into a streamlined, insightful experience. Clients benefit from comprehensive reporting, intelligent visualisations, and customisable oversight - all in one place. Altoo enables wealth owners and advisers to simplify financial complexity, improve decision-making, and maintain full control of their assets in a secure, trusted environment.
The Altoo Wealth Platform is a Swiss-engineered digital solution that simplifies the complexity of wealth management. Tailored for high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and their advisers, it securely consolidates both bankable and non-bankable assets into a single, intuitive interface.
The platform provides real-time insights, visual overviews, and powerful reporting tools. It also enables users to manage their entire wealth with clarity, control, and confidence.
Our platform delivers a powerful combination of automation, intuitive design, and advanced functionality.
Key features include secure data aggregation from multiple banks and custodians, visual dashboards, transaction tagging, CSV data exports, API integrations, and robust cybersecurity backed by Swiss-hosted private cloud infrastructure.
The platform also offers seamless support for multifactor authentication and flexible data visualisation across asset types.
Altoo is ideal for family offices, wealth owners, and advisory firms managing diverse portfolios across multiple institutions.
For example, a family office requiring consolidated performance tracking across bank and private equity holdings can use Altoo to automate reporting, streamline liquidity planning, and enhance collaboration.
Using our platform results in more efficient workflows and consistently reliable data.
Ian Keates
Chief Executive Officer
Altoo
ian.keates@altoo.io
Altoo
COMPANY www.altoo.io
WEBSITE hello@altoo.io
HQ
Baar, Switzerland
2017 FOUNDED 21 - 50
EMPLOYEES
CLIENTS
101 - 500
CLIENT TYPE
External Asset Managers, Bank Wealth Managers, Family Offices, Financial Advisers, Trust & Fiduciary
CLIENT LOCATIONS
Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, South America, Western Europe
Where family-office governance meets real, productive AI
Family offices are stuck in inefficient, costly workflows while AI capabilities accelerate ahead of governance. This article explains why meaningful transformation requires structured policies, controls, and full-scale integration, showing how governed AI can reduce drag, improve decision-making, and future-proof the organisation.
Contributed by
AI transforms family offices only when paired with strong governance; without it, technology becomes liability. AI becomes a powerful productivity layer that reduces inefficiency and strengthens long-term resilience.
Lightbox Wealth is founded by a deeply experienced Wealth team including the Former Chief Innovation Officer and Lab Head at Citi. They deliver a future-ready operating system for family offices, combining rigourous investment governance with agentic AI to create simpler, smarter, and safer decision-making. It enhances risk management, accelerates insight, and amplifies the capacity of lean teams.
By Phil Watson, CEO and Co-Founder at Lightbox Wealth
Family offices are spending millions to stay inefficient. A typical setup runs US$3 million to US$7 million per year, mostly on people and vendors doing low-leverage work — email routing, spreadsheet reconciliation, formatting reports, repetitive compliance tasks. All of it is ripe for intelligent automation. And yet, very little changes.
Why?
Because the tool that could change everything — AI — is arriving faster than governance frameworks, CIO buy-in, or board literacy can keep up. That’s the muddle. Most of the sector has vaguely heard about digital assistants, LLMs, or ‘AI tools’, but can’t distinguish between a clever chatbot and a tightlygoverned, agentic productivity layer that’s actually fit for purpose.
And without a standard, everything looks like a toy. Or worse — a risk.
Let’s be blunt: you can’t ‘trial’ AI with a single licence and an intern. What’s needed is a full-scale rethink of how the family office operates. And that is entirely doable — but not casually.
The leap isn’t from manual to automated — it’s from static to context-aware. LLMs can now ingest the entire activity set of a family office:
• Inbound comms
• Reporting
• Product / Manager selection material
• Research and thematics
• Internal investment notes
• Administrative workflows
The right assistant can structure that flow, surface insights, prompt decisions, and learn from your behaviour. Not to replace the team — but to make sure the team is spending its time on investment sourcing, strategic priorities for their clients, and succession readiness, not formatting PDFs.
And when deployed well, AI helps the office achieve its real goal: institutional quality without institutional bloat.
This isn’t just about a few offices tinkering with technology. The family office sector is exploding:
• According to Deloitte’s Defining the Family Office Landscape report, there are about 8,030 single-family offices globally today, up from around 6,130 in 2019 — a 31 percent increase in just four years.
• Deloitte projects this number will surpass 10,700 by 2030.
• Families with family offices hold around US$5.5 trillion in wealth, forecast to rise to US$9.5 trillion by 2030.
• Of that, roughly US$3.1 trillion is managed as family office AUM, projected to reach US$5.4 trillion by 2030.
That means assets per office are rising faster than headcount. In practice, each family office adviser is being asked to steward ever-larger pools of capital without the governance scaffolding to match. That imbalance — more assets, without better controls — magnifies inefficiency and compounds risk.
Here’s the hard truth: AI without governance isn’t innovation — it’s liability. You can’t bolt AI on. You must rebuild the scaffolding. That includes:
• Data policies: what’s ingested, how it’s classified, retained, and cleaned.
• Vendor controls: including IP protection, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 equivalence, audit trails.
• Role definition: digital assistants aren’t CIOs. They don’t make decisions. They support them.
• Governance clarity: risk committees must know what’s being automated, what isn’t, and where accountability sits.
If that’s in place, the upside is enormous. If it’s not, you’re just adding cost, liability, and confusion — one more SaaS line item that looks “innovative” but serves nobody.
The leap isn't from manual to automated — it's from static to context-aware.
Family offices don’t feel cost pressure the way institutions do. That’s a problem.
Even a seemingly small 40 basis-point drag (and coincidentally the average cost of running a family office) can erode more than 11 percent of total wealth over 25 years — the equivalent of losing nearly US$500,000 on every US$1 million invested.
That drag is already built in — not just through fees, but through wasted time, misdirected headcount, and duplicated effort. You won’t see it in a budget line, but it’s there.
Here’s what full-scale AI integration saves:
• Labour: skilled people stop doing dumb work.
• Vendors: point solutions get consolidated or eliminated.
• Performance: not just marginal gains — actual improvement in idea capture, investment flow, agility, and reduced asset management fees.
• Transfer readiness: the office becomes legible to the next generation. Documented. Governed. Runnable.
Sure. Should you? Probably not.
If you’re a CIO or CEO with deep technology experience and spare time, you can run the transformation internally. But you’ll spend twice as long, reinvent basic controls, and miss the benefits of cross-office experience.
Better to partner. Not with vendors selling magic boxes, but with people who’ve done this before — with real AI deployments in real family offices, who understand the standards needed for control, resilience, and real-world function.
That’s the difference between AI as a toy and AI as a governed productivity layer.
At Lightbox Wealth, that’s exactly the model we’ve built. We operate less like a vendor and more like a central information clearing house — embedding the AI layer into governance, operations, and decision-making. Strategy, control, execution — all in one place.
If you’re not sure whether your office is ready, start here:
Source: Lightbox Wealth
In the not-too-distant future, a family office won’t just own a portfolio of investments — it will own a portfolio of agents.
Each office will differentiate itself not by human and financial capital alone but by the uniqueness, adaptability, and depth of its digital estate.
You’ll pass down not just capital, but digital capital to the next generation. Beneficiaries will think a lot more about agents: allocating governance, budget, and oversight to them just like they do to private equity, real assets, or venture.
The customisation and control of your agent suite will become one of your most defensible advantages.
Digital assistants aren’t just inevitable. They’re going to define the next decade of private capital. The only real choice is whether your office leads that change or scrambles to catch up.
Family offices don’t have a technology problem. They have a governance problem. Solve that, and AI stops being a muddle — and becomes the multiplier.
Family offices don't have a technology problem. They have a governance problem.
Lightbox Wealth stands out by redefining what a modern family office should expect from its investment and governance infrastructure. In an environment where wealth structures are growing more complex and traditional tools lag behind, Lightbox delivers a future-ready operating system built on rigorous investment discipline and nextgeneration AI. Designed by seasoned practitioners, it integrates fragmented data, enforces IPS-level governance, enhances risk management, and accelerates decision-making through intelligent, context-aware automation.
Lightbox acts as both partner and force-multiplier—amplifying the capabilities of lean teams, reducing operational drag, and enabling families to focus on strategic priorities rather than administrative burden. Unlike generic platforms or legacy systems, Lightbox combines institutional-grade analytics with intuitive workflows that make sophisticated oversight simple and safe. For families seeking clarity, control, and long-term compounding advantage, Lightbox offers a fundamentally different proposition: a smarter, safer, and truly modern way to manage, grow, and protect multi-generational wealth.
The Lightbox Wealth OCIO solution (standing for Optimised CIO solution) delivers a modern operating system for family offices, combining institutional-grade investment governance with agentic AI. It unifies data, streamlines portfolio oversight, strengthens risk management, and automates core analytical and reporting workflows. The result is a simpler, smarter, and safer decision-making environment that amplifies the capacity of lean investment teams.
Efficiency: Automates workflows and saves teams considerable time.
Governance: Strengthens controls and IPS alignment.
Insight: Turns complex data into clear, contextual intelligence to help make smarter decisions.
Client experience: Delivers clarity, speed, and confidence.. elevating trust and deepening relationships.
The Lightbox Wealth OCIO solution brings together a suite of integrated capabilities that strengthen governance, accelerate insight, and optimise portfolio outcomes. It unifies all data sources into a single intelligent environment, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and real-time portfolio visibility. Investment oversight is enhanced through an IPSaware analytical engine that monitors exposures, risks, liquidity, and performance against strategic objectives, surfacing issues before they become problems. Portfolio construction and asset allocation are supported by advanced scenario tools and optimisation techniques grounded in practical, realworld constraints.
Continuous risk management is embedded into daily workflows, from factor and stress testing to volatility and drawdown surveillance. Reporting becomes fully automated, consistent, and audit-ready, freeing teams from administrative burden. Agentic AI enhances every step—summarising insights, generating analytics, and supporting decision processes with transparent, contextual reasoning. Together, these features create a future-ready OCIO model that elevates investment governance to the highest standard.
Phil.Watson@lightboxwealth.com
What the Lightbox optimised CIO enables:
Set and refine investment strategy
Align long-term objectives with clear portfolio actions, supported by deep analytics and governance discipline.
Construct and optimise portfolios
Build, size, and structure portfolios with smarter allocation tools, scenario testing, and optimisation techniques.
Monitor IPS compliance
Embed continuous IPS oversight to maintain discipline, highlight breaks, and ensure alignment with approved mandates.
Analyse risk across dimensions
Evaluate exposures, sensitivities, correlations, tail risks, and concentration—bringing clarity to complex portfolios.
Perform product and manager analysis
Assess suitability, performance drivers, and alternatives with transparent and comparable analytics.
Evaluate decisions before implementation
Run simulations and stress tests to understand outcomes and trade-offs before acting.
Automate Investment reporting and oversight
Produce customised, audit-ready reports that reduce administrative workload and enhance governance.
Transform data into actionable insight
Agentic AI converts complexity into clear contextualised intelligence, supporting better, faster, and more confident decision-making.
This research colleciton is part of The Wealth Mosaic’s WealthTech Insight Series (WTIS), an ongoing research process, mixing online surveys and interviews, and focused exclusively on technology in the wealth management sector across the world.
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This WealthTech Insight paper looks at the past, present, and future of technology spend and transformation in the UK wealth management sector.
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TWM - built for a dynamic wealth management marketplace
The Wealth Mosaic (TWM) is an increasingly well-known and highly-regarded knowledge resource, closing the gap between the evolving business needs of wealth management businesses across the world and the growing marketplace of technology and related solution providers selling into the market.
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry. Built around a curated and constantly growing and evolving directory of solution providers to the wealth management sector across the world, our business is founded on five core principles that make us different from other offerings in the market:
• Wealth management-focused
• Directory-first
• Research-led
• Online-first
• Accessible
Behind this report, the engine room of our business in delivering all of the above is our website. This is available to any user 24/7, 365-days a year. As of April 2025, our website hosts over 3,000+ solution provider profiles and hosts over 6,750+ solution profiles from these businesses. Each of these solutions is tagged to at least one of the 39 headline Business needs categories across our first two live marketplaces (Technology and Data, and Consulting, Research and
Support Services). These Business Needs categories create the first level of filtering around our Solution Provider Directory.
Alongside our core directory (SPD) focus, we continue to add and further develop the content, knowledge resources, and tools within our platform to support the user in their discovery, learning and engagement process.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, TWM is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.
For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, TWM exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development Needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
Our offering pivots around the following six core components which can be used individually or pieced together to support your needs.
As part of our goal of creating a deep knowledge resource for the wealth management sector, alongside the maintenance and development of our SPD, we offer the market six core ways of working with TWM:
• Membership
• Content
• Reports
• Campaign
• Events
• Research & Insights
Offering a supporting fuel to help drive the engine that is the SPD, each of these service pillars also features standalone service offerings available to both wealth managers and solution providers to support their specific business needs whether that be positioning, exposure, insight, learning, networking or more.
If you are interested in discovering more about our offering, projects and plan for 2026, please don't hesitate to get in touch. You can access more detail on how you can work with us in our overview document below.
Stephen
Wall Founder
stephen@thewealthmosaic.com
Mungo
Hamlet Managing Director
mungo@thewealthmosaic.com
Douglas Thomson Head of Content douglas@thewealthmosaic.com
The Wealth Mosaic is a curated online marketplace directory of solution providers and solutions relevant to the business needs of the global wealth management community.
Our online directory includes 3,000+ technology and related Solution Provider profiles and well over 6,950+ categorised solutions from across this community. This resource is supported by an extensive library of knowledge resources including New & PR, video and video interviews, podcasts & webinars, white papers & thought leadership, solution information and more.
2 Marketplaces
39 Business needs
3,000+ Business profiles
6,950+ Solution profiles
6,000+ Knowledge resources
