“The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.” — Richard Dawkins, British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author This month, we cover six stories in wealth management technology related news.  Four of them are acquisitions.

“The fact that we’re new technology and we have very low tech debt, our tech debt is measured in weeks not months or years, decades, in some cases with older companies, we think that’s an added advantage. With RBC BLACK,

“The most compelling thing you can have when you go to market in any industry is simply providing immense value to your users. So the combination of people who are frustrated with their current solutions, so it’s not like we had to go manufacturer dema...

“I think that Merrill embraces that opportunity which has multiple entry points, Merrill Edge, Merrill One. They have something that they announced last year called the customer experience workstation. So in other words,

“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” A phrase attributed to Aristotle and misquoted by those seeking to understand one of the most mysterious properties of a system: Emergence. [read my exploration into that topic] The phrase is also used ...

European geography has become almost irrelevant as FinTech markets have flattened out, enabling technology firms to more easily reach customers beyond national borders. Boosted by cloud software efficiency, specifically productivity tools,

“I know this from my many years at Jefferson National, it was difficult to get the Orions and the BlackDiamonds of the world to build insurance functionality, because they didn’t have demand. Their advisors aren’t really using these products,

“Firms like Cetera, and certainly Genstar, at the private equity level, we see a lot of value there because we are already a well oiled engine inside Cetera. So we know that when we bring on this number of advisors and this number of assets,

“For markets to work there have to be winners and losers. It’s not a good look for Robinhood to change the rules of the game and effectively turn off one side of the GameStop trade. It’s also not a good look for the DTCC, the prime brokers,

“Data as an asset is a theme that comes up in conversations time in and time out. It’s almost universally across size of customer, market segment, go to market strategy in terms of employee or independent contractor model.