Tech Platforms Reshape Independent RIAs
Ritik Malhotra, CEO of Savvy, on the rise of tech-enabled wealth management
This is why subscale RIAs increasingly look less like full-service firms and more like coordinators of separate vendors. A small advisory firm needs software for planning, risk, reporting, billing, onboarding, CRM, and client communication, then still has to send clients to outside accountants, estate attorneys, and insurance brokers for the rest. The cost is not just licenses, it is also staff time spent retyping data, reconciling reports, and managing handoffs across disconnected systems.
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Savvy describes the typical independent RIA target as one to five advisors and $50M to $1B in AUM, with a sweet spot around $200M. At that size, even a normal 1% fee base often does not support dedicated in house teams for tax, estate, operations, and custom software work.
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The real bottleneck is workflow sprawl. Advisors often assemble many separate tools for planning, risk, billing, reporting, prospecting, and onboarding. One advisor estimated 40% of time goes to moving data between systems and cleaning it up for clients, which is overhead a larger platform can spread across many advisors.
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Larger platforms win by bundling more jobs into one system. Addepar sells RIAs not just portfolio reporting, but billing, rebalancing, trading, forecasting, and partner integrations. That shows where the market is heading, toward fewer point solutions and more integrated operating systems for the advisor and the client.
The next step is a split market. Smaller RIAs will keep outsourcing pieces of the client relationship, while tech-enabled consolidators and software rich platforms absorb more of the workflow and more of the wallet. That shifts wealth management from a local advice business toward a scaled product and operations business.