Firms with unified data architectures achieve 3-5x better ROI on technology investments compared to those maintaining fragmented legacy systems. The gap compounds annually.

Why the Next Era of Competitive Advantage Will Favor Focused, Data-Coherent Firms, Not Necessarily the Largest Ones

The transition from automation to agency in wealth management is not a feature rollout. It is a staged institutional redesign that begins with architecture, not autonomy

Open architecture reshaped wealth management by separating advice from captive product shelves. Now the same principle is emerging in AI, where open-weight models, semantic data layers, and provider-agnostic infrastructure can give firms more flexibility, lower costs, and greater control over how intelligence is deployed across the business.