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Mercer Advisors has acquired NorthAvenue Financial Advocates, a Columbus, Ohio-based wealth management firm with more than $220 million in assets under management, expanding Mercer's presence across the Ohio Valley.

Mercer Advisors and Compound Planning bet big on AI for family offices. The mega-RIA and the digital family office are making separate AI platform launches as the broader industry doubles down on the technology. JUL 30, 2026 Amid what's been a busy week for AI fanfare at wealth firms, Mercer Advisors and Compound Planning each announced their own major rollouts and launches aimed at helping advisors manage complex client relationships at scale. Mercer Advisors unveiled the second generation of Aspen, the proprietary AI-enabled platform that has underpinned the firm's full-spectrum family office offering for the past two years. The system is now deployed across more than 1,100 of the firm's wealth professionals, according to the company. Meanwhile, New York-based Compound Planning announced CompoundAI, a set of AI agents built directly into AdvisorHQ, the digital family office's advisor operating system. The near-simultaneous announcements land at a moment when AI spending across wealth management is climbing sharply, according to new industry research, even as many firms struggle to quantify what that investment delivers. Aspen connects the dots across client relationships. Mercer Advisors, which only recently crossed the critical $100 billion milestone, describes Aspen as a unified knowledge graph that maps relationships between clients, advisory teams, and the services being delivered, rather than simply displaying data drawn from disconnected systems. The platform integrates with a raft of outside technology providers including Orion, eMoney, Pontera, Salesforce, Microsoft and Zoom, along with custodial links to Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs, among others. Daniel Gourvitch, president of Mercer Advisors, said the goal is to let the firm deliver the resources of a large family office through the work of individual advisors. "Our ultimate aspiration is to deliver the highest standard of financial care to families and create the context where leading fiduciary professionals can do the best work of their careers," he said in a statement. "For families, Aspen allows us to deliver the full capabilities of a $110B+ family office through each of 450 advisors. For our teams, it is the engine that simplifies the coordination and execution of work, so they can spend more time with clients while also doing more for them." CEO Dave Welling credited the firm's technology team led by Chief Technology Officer Christine Cataldo, as well as Avantos, an AI-native operating system focused on financial services firms. Mercer Advisors reports serving more than 42,000 clients, with Aspen powering hundreds of thousands of discrete actions annually, from financial plan updates to portfolio management and tax preparation. CompoundAI embeds agents inside the advisor's operating system. Compound Planning's approach centers on a set of AI agents built into AdvisorHQ that draw on a client's full financial record - including account holdings, meeting transcripts and communication history - to prepare work for an advisor's review rather than simply answering questions. The firm's General Assistant agent summarizes recent client activity and drafts follow-up emails and meeting agendas, while its Service Request agent converts routine tasks, such as a gift of appreciated stock to a donor-advised fund, into a structured ticket ready for advisor sign-off. Compound Planning has also redesigned its Activity Monitor, the firm's in-house dashboard for tracking clients' financial events, to run based on CompoundAI. Alex Farman-Farmaian, chief executive and co-founder of Compound Planning, emphasized his frm's focus on supporting advisor-client relationships rather than disintermediating them. ""The relationship between an advisor and a client is built over years, and it runs on trust," Farman-Farmaian said. "Our technology is built to accelerate and augment that." Steve Fallat, the firm's head of engineering, said every output from CompoundAI is sourced back to the underlying transcripts, emails or records it drew from, so advisors can trace the basis for any recommendation rather than act on an unverified suggestion. "This is why the household record is the backbone of CompoundAI," Fallat said. "Our goal isn't to replace advisors. It's to give them the context and seamless tooling to do the work that actually requires them." While firms are rushing headlong to embed AI into their operations, a survey conducted by consultancy F2 Strategy, covering firms representing $31 trillion in assets under management, concluded that most wealth managers have not established a formal method for measuring the return on their AI projects. Doug Fritz, co-founder and executive chairman of F2 Strategy, said the industry is seeing only a loose relationship this year between AI spending and traditional measures of business value. At least for now, he said many firms appear to be treating the long-term survival of the business itself as the expected return on their AI investment. "[W]e're showing firms how to connect AI spend to ROI and impact on the business, and it's important for the industry to understand how to make an authentic business case," he said.

FINNY launches enterprise AI growth platform with Mercer Advisors. By: Leo Almazora InvestmentNews Summary. The AI prospecting startup expands beyond individual advisors, targeting centralized marketing groups at firms with large home offices.