Recapping the Tiburon CEO Summit XLVIII

Hi Friend of Wavvest,

I hope you and your families are doing well wherever you are in the world. As we move deeper into spring, Chicago is finally becoming an enjoyable place to be again.

I was invited to speak at the Tiburon CEO Summit XLVIII, hosted this week. I wanted to send a quick note to some of our closer friends and share a few thoughts from the event.

For those unfamiliar, The Tiburon CEO Summit is a semi-annual, invitation-only gathering of senior executives, CEOs, and decision-makers across wealth management, fintech, and investment management. It’s hosted by Chip Roame, founder of Tiburon Strategic Advisors.

Speakers included Peter Mallouk (CEO, Creative Planning), Rafael Loureiro (CEO, Wealth.com), Brandon Krieg (Co-CEO, Stash), Hasan Malik (CSO, Edward Jones), Chris Todd (CEO, Envestnet), Jason Wenk (CEO, Altruist), and — yours truly.

Below, I’ll share a few takeaways.

“RIAs have their heads in the sand.”

These aren’t my words. They’re Chip Roame’s. In his keynote, Chip shared a story from the mid-‘90s. Executives at Merrill Lynch watched Charles Schwab gather up $5k–$10k accounts. At the time, Merrill dismissed this. “We don’t want those folks. We’ll get them when they have real money.”

Fast-forward 30 years. Schwab now has 4x the number of million-dollar accounts Merrill does.

That same story is unfolding again today, but the roles have changed. Schwab is now Merrill, and Robinhood is the new Schwab. And it’s not just Robinhood. Stash, Titan, M1, Acorns, and a handful of others already have your clients of the future. Robinhood alone has 13 million accounts. They’re not going anywhere.

Let me be clear: If RIAs don’t modernize - their tech stacks, their client experience, the ability to deliver services digitally - this same thing is going to happen again. You won’t get those clients back and you’ll never service the next generation.

Again, these aren’t just my words. This is coming from one of the most respected voices in our industry, beating on the same drum we’ve been pounding at Wavvest from day one.

“If you don’t want to serve them now, you’ll never serve them.” — Chip Roame

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What I Shared on Stage

I was part of a panel focused on the future of wealth-tech. Below are the three main points I made:

1. Point solutions are plaguing the industry. We’ve now spoken to hundreds of RIAs. Nearly all of them say the same thing — they’re using too many tools that don’t talk to each other.

Nate Lenz, CEO of Concurrent, described this as “a game of telephone,” where advisors are forced to manually relay data between disconnected systems.

One CEO of a $30B RIA that we met privately with at the event put it even more clearly:

“All my vendors want to be the center of my universe, so they don’t play nice with each other. I want to be the center of my universe.”

It's a great insight. One we've thought a lot about.

If you truly want to be the center of your own universe, which means you own your data and can move it wherever you want, you have three options:

Option 1: Build a centralized data lake. Hire engineers.

Good luck. Engineers that can actually do this don’t want to work for an RIA (I don’t mean this disparagingly, I’m just being realistic) . They’re going to Salesforce, Meta, or Google or a funded startup. If you do decide to try and build your own tech stack, I hope you have incredible cyber insurance.

Option 2: Try to get your vendors to “play nice.” Envestnet, eMoney, Orion, Salesforce, Wealthbox, etc., have been around for decades. If they were going to integrate well, it would’ve happened already.

Option 3: Use a single platform that acts as the source of truth. There needs to be a platform where a native CRM, financial planning tool, client portal, etc. can all live and coexist properly in one single ecosystem. We firmly believe that this is the only path forward, and it’s the path we are building towards.

But what about all my existing data? Migrating is hard. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. But if you really want control, it’s the only way forward. The firms we are working with are starting with the next generation. The same clients we want to help RIAs own in the future, instead of Robinhood and the others. Ignore this trend at your own peril.

2. The great wealth transfer is happening.  Everyone talks about the wealth transfer, so I won’t belabor it.

That said, one of the points I picked up on that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is regarding design and user experience. Jason Wenk, CEO of Altruist, made the point that the modern investor (and really the modern advisor too) demands a more intuitive and modern-looking interface. The software that’s been created in this industry still looks like it was built decades ago. We need better design. We need interfaces more like what you see with Robinhood. If we want to appeal to the next-gen clients, RIAs should probably use software that looks and feels like where all those clients tend to keep going.

3. Wealth-tech needs more ambition.We’ve all been talking about the “disconnected systems” problem for years. At some point, someone actually needs to fix it.

And by “we,” I mean every founder, every product leader, every exec building tools in this space. If the incumbents won’t integrate, and most RIAs don’t have the scale to build internally, then let’s stop pretending duct-taping APIs together is a real strategy. You need a platform that moves data seamlessly. Across CRM, planning, investments, documents, insurance, tax - all of it. Without that, there’s no real efficiency. And without efficiency, RIAs can’t truly serve the next generation.The biggest pushback we hear from RIAs is: “These clients don’t have enough wealth yet. Why should we serve them now?” Robinhood loves hearing that.

AI has made it easier than ever to build real platform solutions. Engineers now have better tools to ship faster. For advisors, AI makes it easier than ever to serve more clients at scale. But AI isn’t magic. It’s only as good as the data and context it’s given. If your systems are siloed, your AI strategy is worthless.

At Wavvest, our mission is simple: Help advisors create better financial outcomes for more people. But we won’t get there unless the tools we use are built with that level of ambition.

This industry needs to raise the bar. Let’s get our heads out of the sand and do it now.