Best New Technology and Software for Investment Management Professionals | New Technology Report

 

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Faster than a New York minute

Tech is a game changer for wealth managers, giving them the one thing they can’t create – time.

No matter what role a technology solution is designed for, its primary benefit is completing a task faster. This, in turn, cascades into delivering outcomes more efficiently and in greater detail.

Orion’s 2025 Advisor Wealthtech data shows time constraints present the largest hurdle to growth, emphasizing the need for time-saving tech.

The best in the business have pushed themselves apart from the competition and, after lengthy research, 26 standout firms were awarded 5-Star Technology status by InvestmentNews for their ability to develop leading-edge products and platforms.

Ray Ortiz, managing principal at global tech consultant Capco, highlights that from a capability perspective, leading solutions should deliver intelligent, intuitive tools that include advanced analytics for anticipating client needs and centralized data for seamless, real-time access, with mobile accessibility.

“They should support goals-based investing and scenario planning aligned to client risk tolerance, tax efficiency, and preferences,” he says. “There should be customizable reporting dashboards with clear performance metrics and a rules-based engine for regulatory compliance and risk management. It should enable workflow automation and integration across CRM, compliance, planning, and trading to drive operational efficiency.”

Andrew Rose, associate analyst of wealth management at financial researcher Cerulli Associates, selected what he believes to be the key components of a leading tech platform.

• Streamlined research and analysis: solutions that guide an efficient research process, enabling advisors to analyze securities and 
  identify investment opportunities that align with client objectives.
   

• Effective comparing and filtering tool: makes it easier for advisors to choose options that match client goals.
   

• Comprehensive tool (more than one solution): for conducting investment research, trading/rebalancing, and even solutions for alternatives and other specialized investment strategies.
   

• Integration with adjacent tools such as CRM: advisor efficiency is key, but part of the efficiency is seamless integration.

Rose adds, “A well-integrated system reduces errors, streamlines workflows, and creates a more positive experience for both advisors and clients.”

According to the 2025 Connected Wealth Advisors and Technology report, 65 percent of advisors would like to upgrade their technology stack, and only 35 percent say their platform is state-of-the-art. This demonstrates a noticeable gap between firms’ demands and the services provided – a gap that the best wealth tech firms are addressing.

 

 

 

Zocks is an AI-powered client intelligence platform purpose-built to transform how advisors and firms capture, organize, and leverage client information without recordings.

Typically, advisors spend anywhere from 10 minutes up to an hour to prep for a meeting, but the platform means they can scan that in a couple of minutes.

The company states advisors save around 45 minutes per client meeting through Zocks’ Client Intelligent Platform, which uses AI to determine the most important topics to cover based upon previous meetings, emails, and CRM systems including Redtail, Wealthbox, Practifi, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot.

Zocks CEO Mark Gilbert says, “For people who are dealing with extremely high-net-worth clients, it will often today take one-and-a-half to two hours post-meeting to get all the details in. We can get it down to about 10 minutes.”

The platform can automate notetaking, follow-ups, and CRM updates across virtual, phone, and in-person meetings, helping advisors to be fully present during client conversations while ensuring no important details are missed.

“If they have five to 10 meetings a week with clients, which is pretty common, that adds up really quickly and it’s giving them real time back,” says Gilbert.

 

Privacy is also assured as Zocks creates structured, actionable data without recording conversations. This aligns with SOC 2 Type 2 certification and HIPAA compliance. Its genius is that it listens to the audio and determines who the speakers are, similar to closed captions on TV.

Gilbert explains, “It is building up a big database, essentially the same as database tables for financial information, personal information, metadata, as the meeting is going on, so that allows us to get the structured data.”

That also enables the platform to guide the advisors during the meeting if they want to cover certain topics that they haven’t mentioned. Zocks can also aid significantly with post-meeting administrative work, delivering essential details from a meeting to determine an advisor’s next steps with a client.

Chief strategy officer Dani Fava of Carson Group, which uses the product, reported a 97 percent weekly active usage rate among the firm’s advisors, while portfolio manager AJ Norris of Norris Financial Group believes it outperforms other tools such as FinMate AI and Jump.

He says, “After our 14-day trial with Zocks, I can confidently say it saves me at least twice as much time. The pricing is in line or less than competitors, but the features are far beyond.”

Zocks can be set to predetermine what data is processed, significantly easing fears over data sharing with third parties.

Gilbert explains, “We have very advanced data protection policies. Let’s say there’s social security numbers they don’t want in the system or they don’t even want to be processed. We can redact anything early on.”

He emphasizes how rival notetakers tend to use third parties to record, connect with Zoom or Teams, which creates another type of risk.

“We don’t need to send data out to all of these other third-party services to process it and that’s been very impactful, especially for larger firms.”

 

 

Wealth.com is another firm that has received 5-Star Technology 2025 status for its Family Office Suite, designed to help advisors serve high-net-worth (HNW) and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) clients. According to estimates, what used to be more than 50 hours of advisor work can be slashed to a matter of minutes while unlocking scale and enhancing precision.

Family Office Suite combines advanced automation, intuitive visualizations, legal rigor, and deep integration capabilities designed with multigenerational estate planning.

Advisors go beyond static spreadsheets and PDFs with dynamic modules such as Heritage Map, Legacy Navigator, EstateFlow, and Irrevocable Trust One-Pagers, which bring to life highly nuanced estate structures – including sub-trusts, generation-skipping transfers, and distribution strategies – in an interactive and easy-to-understand format.

Dan Bolton, head of marketing, explains, “There’s just so much complexity when you serve the UHNW. We offer that high-touch collaboration across legal, tax, and investment teams. The goal is to give families a private, secure hub to manage that entire estate ecosystem.”

 

 

Part of Family Office Suite’s benefits is it provides access to attorneys in all 50 states while advisors can leverage scenario builders and estate tax calculators to identify tax alpha opportunities, quantify exposure, and model optimal strategies for preserving wealth across generations.

Bolton adds, “We’re able to service from the most basic to the most complex of client needs.”

All of Wealth.com’s technology is proprietary, including its AI tool, Esther, akin to a digital co-pilot that reads and parses information for advisor and client.

“We have an AI team dedicated to building out our capabilities and doubling down on those has been a major differentiator,” says Bolton. “Also, from a compliance and security standpoint, it’s leagues different.”

The Family Office Suite also enhances firm branding and communication through its dynamic Report Builder. In seconds, advisors generate personalized, white-labeled presentations that combine all estate insights into a single, elegant report. This elevates the client experience and positions advisors as thought leaders.
 

 

Connectivity is where MCO (MyComplianceOffice) stands out. The multi-tenant SaaS platform allows compliance teams to proactively manage the regulated activities of the company, employees, and third-party vendors and provide proof of regulatory compliance via one system. 

Split across four product suites, MCO ensures that firms have a clear view of potential risk and can remedy conflict before it becomes a problem:

• Know Your Employee provides compliance with an easy and affordable way to monitor, manage, and ensure adherence to policies, mitigating the risk of misconduct. 
   

• Know Your Transactions helps firms mitigate risk that can originate from trading activities including market manipulation, insider trading, and suitability. 
   

• Know Your Third Party delivers due diligence of third-party risk from vendors, customers, counterparties, agents, and partners. 
   

• Know Your Obligations enables firms to manage regulatory change and structure policies, procedures, and controls to drive understanding of compliance requirements across the organization and assure compliance.

Being so adaptable is why the product’s clients range from small firms to companies with up to 100,000 seats.

Chief revenue officer Dave Kubersky says, “Lots of companies talk about something being integrated, but more often than not, it’s just a veneer and you still have the underlying challenges. The fact that we’ve got a unified compliance platform allows us to add capabilities very quickly and because the data is in a single place, there is an ability to cross surveil between different capabilities.”

MCO acquired the firm Pythagoras and has integrated that into the platform, ahead of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) implementation of its AML (Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism Program) program in January 2028.

“It cements our ability to provide that capability and it’s actually a company that’s headquartered in Switzerland, so it gives us a strong base in Europe and brings us into the private banking space more firmly,” says Kubersky.

 

 

Ease of use is important as MCO focuses on being intuitive with the number of keystrokes limited. Another key benefit is its alert-based technology to flag issues.

“Not all demand a high degree of scrutiny, but we’ve also been able to set up a number of workflows where manual approvals happen automatically,” explains Kubersky. “This allows our customers to focus on the most important things, as opposed to having to wade through volumes of data to figure out where those anomalies might be.”

With the onslaught of AI, many firms focus on their priorities first, and second on compliance and looking for a problem to solve, whereas MCO adopts the opposite viewpoint.

“We’re really looking at AI as an enablement tool and it’s ability to identify areas of efficiency for our customers,” says Kubersky. “We’re selectively using it because the regulators are still wary of systems that are operating exclusively as a black box.”
 

 

Being custom-built enables The Sycamore Company’s Compliance Manager to stand out from other regtech platforms. Every feature in the 5-Star Technology winner’s package, from trade review workflows to client correspondence supervision, is tailored to FINRA and SEC expectations.

While some compliance systems lack native integration or offer only limited point-in-time reporting, Compliance Manager has dynamic, role-based dashboards with real-time feeds from CRMs, email archives, trade systems, and communication platforms.

“The number one pain point in the industry is data quality,” says president and founder Mike Overdorf. “We aggregate and normalize it, which is very important, because everyone sends data a little bit differently and then puts it into a single database.”

Advisors have to go through millions of records – an impossible task to complete manually. However, Compliance Manager users report up to a 70 percent reduction in time spent on routine surveillance tasks, along with enhanced audit readiness and improved advisor satisfaction.

 

 

Compliance Manager integrates seamlessly with other modules in Sycamore’s cloud-native ecosystem such as onboarding, compensation, billing, and trade blotters. This enables a single source of truth across operational and compliance domains, eliminating the fragmented data silos that have long plagued wealth management firms. The result is faster issue resolution and better transparency.

In addition, Sycamore is native to Salesforce and its development is driven by those with client-facing experience, ensuring all features are appropriate for the real demands advisors face.

Overdorf says, “I tell my team 95 percent of the world’s problems are due to bad communication, so, if anything, we overcommunicate.”

And he also takes pride in the firm’s transparency. “Our clients can log into our case tracking org and see all communications that we have back and forth with developers and project managers.”

 

 

Disconnected solutions (24 percent) and costs (22 percent) are the biggest tech-related challenges, followed by lack of training and rapid tech changes, according to Orion’s 2025 survey. At the same time, 14 percent of advisors mention insufficient training as a barrier.

The more problems or anticipated issues a platform’s introduction poses, the less likely advisors are going to use it. Ease of use is paramount, according to Rose.

“Advisors will not dedicate large amounts of time simply learning how to use a tool,” he explains. “We have talked to advisors who have changed vendors because the solution is too hard to use.”

Advisors also want assurance that their account tracking, client meeting management, and investment analysis are all tightly woven into a seamless system that can be swiftly incorporated into an advisor’s workflow. Tech firms that miss the mark on integration will inevitably lose out.

Rose says, “Integration is a major challenge for many advisors when adopting new technology, but overcoming this obstacle is crucial.”

Echoing that sentiment is Ortiz, who agrees that one of the largest hurdles to overcome is the often-excessive time needed to learn a new operating system.

“Many platforms present a steep learning curve, with complex and unfamiliar features that make it difficult for advisors to find time to adapt,” he notes. “Integration and data quality issues can lead to data silos, inefficiencies, and excessive manual effort to fulfill client requests.”

Ortiz also feels there’s a need to turn complex data into intuitive stories that support advisor decision-making and improve client understanding with interactive visuals.

He adds, “Platforms should also be optimized for mobile and accessibility, offering 24/7 access, personalized self-service, and consistent experiences across channels.”

 

Advisors are leveraging tech to reclaim time, to better serve their clients and use their financial skills where they have the most impact.

The crucial elements that enable tech platforms to offer this are:

Without these, tools and solutions are not market-ready for what the nation’s advisors demand and need to service their clients.

 

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