For this issue of WealthTech Talks, we caught up with Ian Karnell, CEO & Co-Founder of VastAdvisor, an AI-native growth infrastructure platform for RIAs and enterprise wealth management firms. VastAdvisor is the platform behind Audience IQ, Campaign IQ, Firm IQ, Compliance IQ, and Agent IQ.

In this interview, Karnell shared their insight into how AI-native organic growth infrastructure is reshaping advisor growth strategy. Karnell also shared their views on why proprietary data compounding — not any single product feature — is becoming the real moat in wealth management technology.

1. Could you provide a brief introduction to your business?
VastAdvisor was founded to close a specific gap in wealth management growth: advisory firms have deep client relationships but almost no systematic infrastructure for converting digital engagement into new business. We built VastAdvisor as an AI-native platform — spanning audience intelligence, campaign automation, and compliance-aware content generation — that gives RIAs and enterprise wealth platforms the same growth infrastructure that consumer tech companies take for granted. We work directly with RIAs as our proof engine and are now extending into enterprise partnerships with custodians, broker-dealers, and aggregators who want to bring this capability to their advisor networks at scale.

2. In the wealth management sector, what types of clients do you primarily work with and target?
Our direct clients are RIAs of varying sizes who want to grow AUM without expanding headcount, particularly firms competing for next-gen and mass-affluent clients where digital-first engagement matters. Alongside that, we work with enterprise wealth management platforms — custodians, broker-dealers, and aggregators — who want to deploy this growth infrastructure across their advisor network rather than build it internally.

3. Why do your existing and target clients choose to work with you? What makes your solutions relevant and distinct from your competitors
Most advisortech vendors sell point solutions — a CRM, a marketing tool, a compliance checker. VastAdvisor's advantage is that we treat growth as a compounding data problem: every campaign, every piece of content, and every client interaction feeds a proprietary layer that gets smarter over time. That learning velocity, not any single feature, is what clients are actually buying — and it's also our moat, because the real competitor isn't another vendor, it's the internal inertia that keeps firms doing things the old way.

4. What's next for your business? Can you share the firm's current focus and future plans, such as product development, market expansion, and strategic goals?
We're deepening our enterprise motion — working with custodians, broker-dealers, and aggregators on land-and-expand partnerships that bring VastAdvisor's infrastructure to their advisor networks — while continuing to use our direct-to-RIA business as the proof engine that keeps our product grounded in real advisor workflows. Compliance-aware content generation is a particular focus, since it's the biggest blocker to firms adopting AI-driven growth tools at scale.

5. Based on your experience in the wealth management sector, what key opportunities and challenges do you foresee for firms today and in the next three years?
The opportunity is that AI is collapsing the cost of producing compliant, personalized content and campaigns, which levels the playing field for smaller RIAs that could never previously compete with wirehouses on marketing sophistication. The challenge is that most firms are approaching this piecemeal, bolting AI onto old workflows rather than rethinking growth as a data-compounding system. The firms that treat their client and prospect data as a strategic asset, rather than an operational byproduct, will pull ahead of firms that don't.

About VastAdvisor
VastAdvisor is an AI-native organic growth infrastructure platform built for RIAs and enterprise wealth management firms. The platform combines audience intelligence, campaign automation, and compliance-aware content generation to help advisory firms convert digital engagement into compounding, sustainable growth. VastAdvisor is built by VastAssembly.ai, based in Austin, TX.

For more information, click here.

About the WealthTech Talks Interview Series
In the WealthTech Talks interview series, we interview senior executives from leading wealth management firms, solution providers, and WealthTech influencers to learn more about them, their journey, their perspectives on the market, and how they see the future of wealth management.

Read the latest editions in the series below!

• Sanjay Kulkarni, Chief Revenue Officer of Croesus – click here to read the interview
• Enrique Sacau, CEO of Infront – click here to read the interview
• Stefanos Athanasiadis, Managing Director Investment Solutions – CEO Profile Centevo, at Profile Software – click here to read the interview