The Wealth Mosaic Live 2026: US brought together senior figures from across wealth management at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York on November 2nd for a day of discussion and demonstrations.
Across 15 sessions, 200 executive delegates, and over 40 speakers, the event explored changing client expectations, the economics of serving different market segments, the importance of connected technology and data infrastructure, and the growing influence of AI.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a series of in-depth reflections on the insights and key takeaways from these panels, keynotes, and technology demos. This article offers an initial overview of the day, drawing together the conversations, ideas, and recurring themes that shaped the event, and providing a first set of reflections on what they tell us about the direction of US wealth management.
The Leaders' View: an industry in transition
The opening panel, moderated by Tricia Rothschild, President and CEO of CFA Institute, brought together Natalie Wolfsen, CEO of Orion; Mike Durbin, CEO of Cetera; and Aaron Schumm, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Vestwell, highlighted the convergence of retirement, workplace savings, and traditional wealth advice.
We heard that:
- The next AI challenge will be how to effectively coordinate agents across providers, raising new questions around governance, accountability, and cost.
- AI-informed clients are now changing advice conversations, making the ability to challenge assumptions and expose gaps increasingly important.
- Traditional boundaries between retirement and brokerage, and public and private investments, are now breaking down, creating demand for more connected workflows.
Firms are looking to engage individuals earlier in their financial lives, with technology creating opportunities to serve segments that were previously harder to reach economically. Meanwhile, clients increasingly arrive having researched their options and formed their own views, shifting the advisor's role towards interpreting complex decisions and challenging assumptions.
The panel also explored the implications of AI agents for workflow orchestration, vendor dependency, pricing, governance, and fiduciary responsibility.
AI in Play: from experimentation to operational change
The morning's AI program moved from VastAdvisor Co-Founder Ian Karnell’s examination of AI-native operations to the practical challenges of implementation within established wealth management firms. Karnell demonstrated how VastAdvisor uses AI agents alongside shared organizational knowledge, human decision gates, and performance monitoring. He argued that automation requires mechanisms to identify failures, verify outcomes, and feed learning back into the system.
A subsequent panel on how to create return on AI investments focused on the foundations of successful deployment: reliable data, governance, permissions, measurable use cases, and early involvement from operational and compliance teams.
A pair of technology demos showed how AI tools can enhance everyday advisor work. d1g1t showed how an embedded AI assistant can support meeting preparation, household reporting, portfolio analysis, and optimization using live platform data. Unique demonstrated Remy, an AI teammate designed to carry tasks such as onboarding, meeting preparation, and account reviews across the client lifecycle, drawing on a living record of client information that develops over time.
Two further sessions examined how AI-enabled tools are changing client engagement and advisor productivity. David Navama, CEO and Co-Founder of Storyline, explored data-driven short-form video as a way to make portfolio information more accessible and create more consistent client communication. Equitable Advisors’ Chief Digital and Client Experience Officer Anthony Montufar and Liam Hanlon, VP Strategy and Head of Insights at Jump, presented a case study examining the relationship between technology adoption, advisor productivity, client experience, and revenue performance.
We heard that:
- Some of technology's most valuable returns come from moments that happen only occasionally. A smoother account-opening process or a more focused client meeting can leave a lasting impression that conventional productivity metrics rarely capture.
- AI's value lies in integration, not simply access. The strongest results come about when tools are connected across existing advisor workflows, rather than operating in isolation.
- Time savings alone don't prove ROI. Measuring client experience, advisor effectiveness, and revenue impact provides a much fuller picture of technology's contribution to growth.
Together, these sessions connected the capabilities on screen with the workflows, client relationships, and business outcomes that matter to wealth management firms.
The breakouts: connected infrastructure and better data
In the afternoon Michael Casciano of EVO Wealth brought together eight technology providers to demonstrate a connected client journey, from prospecting and discovery through financial planning, portfolio implementation, private investments, communication, and data management.
Featuring Karnell and Navama along with speakers from Conquest Planning, SmartLeaf, Zocks, Field, VettaFi, and Proteus, this first-of-its-kind mega-demo illustrated how firms can connect capabilities that often operate across separate applications. The discussion reinforced the importance of designing the client experience and service model first, then assembling the technology to support it.
In a simultaneous panel focused on the operational realities behind effective data management, a team from Docupace examined how inconsistent data definitions across custodians, CRMs, and planning systems can create integration problems and undermine AI outputs. The discussion emphasized the need to understand data relationships, resolve conflicts, and build appropriately scaled connections rather than defaulting to expensive, over-engineered projects.
Strategy in practice: portfolios and technology choices
The event also explored how AI can support investment research, idea generation, and portfolio analysis, while highlighting the importance of data quality, context, and due diligence, in a practitioner-led panel featuring speakers from A2 Investment Partners, Tamarisk Capital, Barnabas Capital, and NextFolio. With clients increasingly bringing AI-generated research into advisory conversations, practitioners need to assess portfolio overlap, understand underlying exposures, and explain the role of different strategies.
Rich Walker, CEO of Quik!, brought the discussion back to the choices firms must make when embedding AI into client and advisor experiences. He identified three foundations of trust: visibility over who can see what data, and when; predictability in how systems behave; and control over which decisions are automated and where human oversight remains.
These are architectural and governance decisions, shaping how firms manage consent, transparency, access, and the ability to intervene when AI gets something wrong. Walker argued that trust is a design decision, shaped by how firms manage consent, transparency, data access, automation, and human oversight. These choices will influence whether clients and advisors trust AI-enabled services, and whether firms can deploy them with confidence.
The final panel of the day, chaired by Hilda Wong-Doo, Founding Partner of Greenline Consultants, explored how firms should approach technology investment as AI changes what can be developed internally and sourced externally. Panelists from SoftLab360, FIS, and Envestnet emphasised that these key strategic decisions must begin with business strategy, client needs, and the capabilities a firm wants to differentiate.
The key question is not so much whether to buy, build, or rent, but whether the final decision is supported by clear ownership, realistic economics, reliable data, and effective change management.
The industry's next chapter
In a fireside chat, Lori Hardwick, Senior Strategic Advisor at Genstar Capital, outlined the commercial considerations shaping investment in wealth management businesses, including organic growth, profitability, client and employee satisfaction, and opportunities to expand addressable markets.
She cautioned against adopting AI simply to demonstrate activity, encouraging firms to understand their providers' roadmaps, improve data foundations, and experiment within defined budgets before committing to wider deployment.
Across the day, discussions pointed to an industry moving beyond isolated technology initiatives towards more connected operating models. Firms now need to identify where change can make a meaningful difference, then build the data, infrastructure, and organizational capabilities to deliver it.
The Wealth Mosaic will be returning to New York on March 4th 2027 for WealthTech 2027: US Edition. Tickets for this event are on sale now here. If you’d like to participate in this event, discover your options here.
In the meantime, watch this space for further reflections and insights from The Wealth Mosaic Live 2026: US over the coming weeks.
About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic 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, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
