Parting Shot continued from page 60
their advisors and ops teams already know and use. They consolidate insight, not just infrastructure. Here’ s how you avoid becoming Newark: 1. Start with your data. You should integrate your systems in a way that surfaces truth— firmwide reporting, valuation clarity, advisor experience— all from a single, trusted layer.
2. Protect what’ s working. Don’ t break adoption just because you want uniformity. Adoption is earned. If a system is delivering results, build around it— not over it.
3. Think like a network, not a hub. Your firm isn’ t one big machine— it’ s a network of people, preferences, and client needs. Consolidation should support that, not flatten it.
4. Focus on experience, not systems. Whether it’ s a client onboarding process or an internal workflow, build an experience layer that brings cohesion without heavy replatforming.
The Final Boarding Call
Are you operating like Newark airport— overburdened, delayed, clinging to an outdated centralization play? Or do you run like a well-run private fixed- based operator at the airport— nimble, client-ready, grounded in flexibility?
The race to simplify is understandable. But simplicity achieved through bruteforce consolidation rarely works. What does work is intentional unification— with data as the backbone, and respect for your firm’ s DNA at the center.
Let’ s not wait for a radar blackout to reevaluate our approach.
JUD MACKRILL is the co-founder of Milemarker, helping wealth management firms unify data, streamline operations, and build firmwide intelligence. He is also the creator of The Connected Advisor newsletter.
Cover Story continued from page 35
up their CRM or financial planning software,” he adds.
Take Pure Financial, which was already happy with its Tamarac portfolio management software, which it has used since 2008— and which Envestnet acquired in 2012. According to Ben Littman, one of Pure’ s founding partners and its first chief investment officer, a big part of his firm’ s value proposition is that it offers mass affluent clients a tax overlay program once available only to the ultra-affluent.
Tamarac today already provides“ tons of scale” and allows the firm to screen its client portfolios daily for tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing and asset location moves.“ With a couple of clicks, we can see if there are opportunities,” Littman says.
Pure primarily uses ETFs to invest in different asset classes. It has meetings every few months with Tamarac’ s product design team, and when the team asked what it could do to improve service quality, Littman had only one suggestion— that it make the transition from Tamarac to Portfolio Center, another Envestnet product acquired from Schwab in 2019, more seamless.
Yet he doesn’ t see a screaming need for Envestnet to enter the custody business. Pure splits most of its roughly $ 9 billion in assets between Schwab and Fidelity, and
Littman says,“ We prefer to stick with the players who are really good at their individual services.”
Given the amount of private and public capital going into artificial intelligence today, fintech executives are swarming advisors’ offices probing their operational needs in the hope of finding a silver bullet or magic solution. Industry consultant and former Orion executive Jud Mackrill thinks that in recent years private fintech investors have asserted their control of companies, sometimes at the expense of advisors.“ In the AI age, that needs to change,” he says.
There are also certain roadblocks getting advisors to switch products or integrate different technologies. Envestnet’ s financial planning software, MoneyGuidePro, is considered an industry leader, as its $ 500 million acquisition price would attest. But if a major advisory firm has spent a decade working with the product’ s leading competitor, Fidelity-owned eMoney, such a firm is unlikely to switch programs because it has spent years getting not only its advisors but also its thousands of clients acclimated to the system.
This doesn’ t mean there won’ t be opportunities for the next generation of advisors and their clients.“ MoneyGuide is a super important part of our portfolio,” Todd says.“ It’ s a leading planning tool in and of its own right. And when our cus- tomers talk to us, one of the areas where they would like us to integrate more— and where we would like to integrate more on their behalf— is making planning a more natural part of the entire portfolio management process.”
For Todd, the near-term opportunity for Envestnet appears to be AI enhancements. With its vast wealth of advisor and client data, it likely has a head start over many competitors.“ We’ re big believers that AI is as transformative a technology as it’ s purported to be,” he says.“ We’ re super focused on the advisor experience. We believe that AI, machine learning and other related technologies are going to allow advisors to be more efficient in the future, allow them to focus more on their relationships with their customers.”
Most people who meet Todd quickly observe that he is gracious and has exceptional listening skills. These traits were on display at Envestnet’ s Elevate conference, when he paid a moving tribute to his predecessors, Bergman and Crager, according to attendees.
These personal qualities will serve him well as he tries to sort through Envestnet’ s portfolio and prioritize services. But nothing is guaranteed. How the company develops the next generation of AI-enhanced services will be key in determining how successful he is over the next 18 months.
58 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | JUNE 2025 WWW. FA-MAG. COM