Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, the hybrid national wealth management firm managing more than $36 billion in assets, has partnered with data and technology platform Invent to consolidate its enterprise data from multiple custodians, business lines and technology platforms into a single, governed data foundation.
Wealth management firms of all sizes, whether hybrid or pure RIA shops, are increasingly wrestling with this state of affairs, even as new all-in-one agentic platforms are coming to market to address it.
“Before I joined, a lot of our work was distributed across four or five different systems, some homegrown, some off the shelf, with a few connectors between some of it,” said Advait Kulkarni, senior vice president of technology operations at SEIA.
“But basically, we had a very fragmented tech stack with multiple layers being shoe-horned to do specific things,” he said, noting that, for example, SEIA had been making do with a homegrown system of data architecture but its upkeep was difficult and the system depended on several legacy connectors that had their own challenges, meaning that interoperability and integration did not work that well.
“When I started, I wanted to identify a single source of truth and build off it,” said Kulkarni.
The unified data environment from Invent, he said, provides the foundation for “SEIA Brain,” the firm’s proprietary AI framework designed to help employees across marketing, sales, finance, operations and compliance securely access information, automate routine workflows and uncover insights using natural-language interactions.
SEIA previously managed data across multiple custodians, its advisory and broker/dealer businesses and its in-house turnkey asset management platform, requiring significant manual work to clean, reconcile and prepare for reporting.
The collaboration with Invent has improved the firm’s reporting capabilities, reduced its reliance on legacy software and freed technical resources to focus on higher-value initiatives, according to Kulkarni.
With the new platform, authorized users can now create, publish, filter, sort and export dynamic reports without relying on third-party reporting specialists.
“Data is the biggest challenge,” said Oleg Tishkevich, founder and CEO of Invent, which was launched in 2019.
“Having an independent ecosystem means we are completely agnostic, allowing the firms to use whatever [existing technology] they want to use [from third-party vendors], and that is the key difference between what we do and many of the all-in-one agentic AI systems on the market,” he said.
Many RIAs already realize that their status as SEC-registered firms requires them to rely only on deterministic technology that provides consistent, repeatable and reliable answers, whereas AI platforms remain probabilistic.
Both Kulkarni and Tishkevich declined to discuss just how much the buildout cost SEIA.
Tishkevich said this varies greatly and depends heavily on how many data sources and third-party providers wealth management firms rely on.
“The scalability and cost analysis is at the heart of every engagement with clients,” he said, noting that it requires firms to think about where they are today and where they want to be in the future.
“The starting point is pretty low, especially for smaller firms, and we work with firms under $1B in AUM and are able to provide the growth platform and ability to scale,” said Tishkevich.