2025 was a bumper year for wealthtech. 

At this time of year, Spotify sends everyone a Wrapped report of their most-played songs and listening habits. Wealthtech doesn’t offer anything similar, so we spoke directly with industry leaders to to find out the year’s real insights.

Global family office reports unanimously highlighted an increased adoption of more sophisticated tools. 

And 2025 was the year AI use became normalized, this year’s Citi report stating respondents deploying AI almost doubled since last year.

For family offices, there’s never been so many wealthtech choices available.

Many running legacy systems are either actively exploring an upgrade or waiting for the next generation to usher in change. 

As one family office head remarked, “Our switchover point will come with certain retirements!”

So where did wealthtech providers make the most progress in 2025?  

Visibility on private markets data became crucial, shown in BlackRock’s $3.2B acquisition of Preqin to bolster their Aladdin platform.

This was also a priority for Addepar, arguably the platform most vendors compare themselves to, managing over $8 trillion in assets.

“On the product side, we meaningfully advanced our alternatives strategy — launching Alts Data Management, Private Fund Benchmarks, and cash flow forecasting in Navigator,” says Chief Client Officer at Addepar, Janeen France. “These capabilities bring more structure, automation, and insight to private markets, which represent over 40% of the assets on Addepar.”

Automation became commonplace with AI, not surprising considering ‘too many manual processes’ was repeatedly voiced as a family office pain point.

“Over the last year we turned AI in accounting into day-to-day reality for our clients,” says Joshua Wasser, Vice President of Global Sales at FundCount, noting their new AI Document Intelligence tool that turns alternative investment documents into structured, audit-ready data in minutes.

For Masttro, who recently launched a comprehensive suite of AI features under the Masttro Intelligence label, reward has come from being explicit in how these tools add value to clients.  

“AI has become a catch-all label in wealthtech, and it’s often unclear what’s real and what’s marketing,” says Masttro CEO Jay McNamara. “For us, the hard work has been turning a three-year AI build into something tangible: a product that actually reduces manual work through document ingestion, reconciliation, and proactive insight, and then explaining that in plain language to family offices.”

AI breakthroughs this year even resulted in spinoff offerings, as is the case with Arta Finance, the company that launched in 2022 as the ‘digital family office for the world’. 

CMO Melissa-Ann Chan says this year they unbundled their AI services from their own wealth platform to make arta.ai independently available, and have since deployed with leading banks.

“The strong response from both digital-native banks as well as traditional financial institutions demonstrates that our approach and technology works regardless of where a financial institution is on the AI adoption scale.” 

Amidst all the progress, there are still challenges faced in an industry historically slow to adapt. 

Dean Palmiter, co-founder of Asseta, says they’re aware of the dilemma family offices face in needing to modernize but being overwhelmed by the process.

“Our challenge has been meeting families where they are, helping them understand the landscape, simplifying implementation, and serving as an extension of their team rather than a vendor they have to manage.”  

He notes that modernizing outdated systems isn’t easy though, especially when family office resources are limited.

“These are lean organizations, often two to seven people, responsible for a level of financial complexity that rivals institutions with hundreds of staff.” 

For some vendors, this year’s challenges have been growth-related, and the need to support clients wherever they operate around the world.

“Navigating a period of exceptional growth presented us with a distinct set of strategic imperatives: more assets, more clients, and a broader global footprint,” says Addepar’s Janeen France, noting that the company entering new markets brought additional regulatory and operational challenges. 

So where do wealthtech providers see the most opportunity looking ahead? 

France says at Addepar they believe the biggest opportunity is creating technology that proactively guides investment professionals, not just supports them. 

“It’s about moving from reactive tools to a proactive, intelligence-driven operating model—one that gives investors the ability to act faster, deliver more personalized insights, and spend more time in front of clients. The firms that build toward this future will redefine what ‘modern wealth management’ looks like.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by McNamara at Masttro, who says in 2026 they will start moving beyond prompt-based AI to agentic capabilities that proactively deliver insights based on behaviors. 

“We see the future in anticipatory systems. These systems will observe family office activities, usage patterns, data, and then surface the five things they need to care about today without being prompted.” 

How such AI systems and humans work together going forward is something Melissa-Ann Chan and the team at Arta see enormous opportunity in.

“Beyond raw automation, we are particularly excited about the new use cases and how the ‘relationship’ will form between AI and humans. AI is so early in its adoption curve, that the field is wide open for the killer use-case or deployment strategy.” 

At FundCount, Wasser believes the biggest opportunity still lies in turning messy, high-value data into something reliable with intuitive, accounting-integrated tools. 

“Wealth managers do not need more dashboards for their own sake; they need systems that can answer complex questions quickly, explain the numbers and support better conversations with investors and family members.”

While wealthtech platforms get more powerful and AI makes them more immediately usable, the process of selecting and implementing the right system doesn’t necessarily feel easier at the end of 2025.

It’s something that still daunts family offices who are often convinced they need fully customized tech solutions to meet their unique requirements. 

This is slowly changing though: the industry is far less opaque than it was just a few years ago and patterns of similar needs have emerged. 

Patterns that apply to technology, as Palmiter from Asseta notes: 

“We share a viewpoint many offices haven’t heard before: family offices are more similar than they believe. Their differences often come from a lack of structure, not fundamentally different needs.”

-