Vice President / Vice President Wealth Advisor

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.

Bluespring Wealth launches RIA channel with centralized compliance. Texas-based Bluespring Wealth Partners is adding a compliance option to its existing legal, billing and HR support, aimed at easing operational burdens for independent advisory firms. Alex Ortolani, Senior Reporter, Wealth Management June 2, 2026 Bluespring Wealth Partners, the Austin, Texas-based hybrid registered investment advisor arm of Kestra Holdings, has launched the Bluespring RIA, a new channel that gives partner RIAs the option to access centralized compliance services, along with existing legal, billing and human resources functions. Partner RIAs that join the Bluespring RIA channel will be added to the Bluespring RIA's Form ADV and take on the Bluespring Wealth brand name, according to the RIA. The goal is to give firms a way to hand off back-office compliance work so advisors can focus on clients and growth, said President Pradeep Jayaraman. "We've invested heavily in practice management, and this was just the next evolution," Jayaraman said. "This was feedback that we consistently heard from firms wherein they wanted help with compliance, both from an efficiency perspective as well as the advisors spending time thinking about compliance." Five Bluespring partner firms will be among the first to transition into the Bluespring RIA in 2026: Bedell Frazier Investment Counselling, Capital Planning Advisors, Joule Financial, Ritter Daniher Financial Advisory and Vector Wealth Management. Rochelle Levy, Bluespring's chief compliance officer, will lead the expanded compliance function. Levy joined the firm in October 2025 from her role as chief compliance officer for wealth management at City National Bank, according to her LinkedIn profile. She had previously spent more than three years as the head of compliance for investment management in North America for BNY Mellon. Compliance has been a crucial area for acquisitive RIAs as they seek to attract firms by promising to take such back-office burdens off their plates. This year, Hightower Advisors poached Bob Lavigne from Edelman Financial Engines to be CCO. Similarly, Atlanta-based Aprio hired CCO Courtney Holt from Compound Planning for its $5.5 billion Aprio Wealth Management RIA subsidiary. Jayaraman said Bluespring began considering the setup in the middle of 2025, following discussions with partner RIAs. "A lot of firms started raising their hands and saying, 'You're helping with all these other things, can you help with compliance?'" he said. The new channel is optional for existing partners to consider, Jayaraman said, though he anticipates more will join in the coming months and sees the addition as a recruiting driver. "We will continue to invest significantly in practice management and organic growth capabilities, compliance, infrastructure and technology," Jayaraman said. "These are things that will make us a very differentiated wealth management platform, and one that people will come to us and see the value because we put our advisors and their clients' needs first." Bluespring hit a high mark for acquisitions in 2025 with nine transactions totaling $6 billion in assets. This year, the firm has made several more acquisitions, including a $1.1 billion New Jersey-based practice this May. It has 33 partner firms to date. Private equity firm Stone Point Capital is the majority owner of Bluespring, and Oak Hill Capital also owns a minority stake in the firm. Senior Reporter, Wealth Management Alex Ortolani is a New York-based senior reporter with Wealth Management with a focus on deals, moves and trends in the registered investment advisor space. In addition to financial and business reporting, he has worked in media relations and corporate communications for tech firms and Fortune 500 companies.