Envestnet is putting serious capital behind its vision for the next era of advisor technology. At the 2025 Future Proof Festival in Southern California, the company unveiled a five-year strategic roadmap anchored by a $1 billion investment in research, development, and client support. The plan calls for enhanced unified managed account (UMA) infrastructure, flexible household modeling, and deeper integration of alternatives—all designed to give financial advisors a more seamless way to trade, report, plan, and engage with clients.
The initiative reflects a belief that the advisor experience needs more than new code. “You hear from a lot of folks in the industry, when they go ask for headcount or they ask for increased business justification, it’s always, ‘Well, can you solve it with AI, or can you solve it with tech?’ That’s not the feeling that I get within the organization,” Sean Meighan, Envestnet’s Head of RIA Distribution, tells The Wealth Advisor. “We know that our clients still want to talk to the people, the consultants, the people with the cases. It’s a big part of what we do—and frankly, I think why firms have stayed with Envestnet over the years.”
The $1 billion infusion will fund next-generation portfolio management tools, expanded alternatives access, and significant improvements to Envestnet | Tamarac—the market-leading RIA platform at the core of Envestnet’s offering. Meighan underscores that the money supports both technology and the teams who help advisors use it. “We will continue to invest in the people within our organization,” he says, “taking that core Tamarac technology that we know is critical to the daily operating experience of our clients and bridging it to the other solutions that we have and improving that experience for our end investors and clients.”
Expanding What RIAs Can Do
Meighan has spent months on a listening tour, meeting top RIA clients to learn where the company can deliver more value. A recurring theme is awareness. “We’ve always had an awareness challenge, an awareness of what Envestnet can bring to bear across the entire firm,” he explains.
He recalls meeting an advisor in Milwaukee who insisted he had no relationship with Envestnet until it emerged that for years, he had been using MoneyGuide—Envestnet’s interactive, goals-based financial planning platform that supports everything from retirement distribution analysis to tax management and Social Security optimization. “If you’ve been using MoneyGuide for 15 years and you don’t know how MoneyGuide fits in within the rest of our ecosystem, it’s an awareness problem,” Meighan says. “The good thing is that’s one we can fix, not just with technology but also putting people in a go-to-market strategy to work with RIAs, to really leverage the power of what Envestnet can bring.”
Unified managed accounts will be a major part of that power. Envestnet is enhancing its UMA capabilities to allow advisor-traded sleeves, seamless integration of alternative investments, and true household-level rebalancing. Advisors can bring their existing portfolios into the UMA system, maintaining control over investment decisions while outsourcing trading and rebalancing tasks. “It’s their models. It’s their portfolios,” explains Meighan. “They can make all of the changes that they want, but when they go in and update those changes, all of those trades will flow across the custodial accounts that they have underneath that multi-custodial chassis.”
The result can be simpler management of complex households. “The benefit to using our UMA alongside Tamarac is that from a reporting perspective, when your client goes into the portal, they get their statements, they see those sleeves as you’d want them to be reported,” he says. Instead of sifting through hundreds of unlabeled securities, clients see a clear narrative of strategy and intent.
Solving Problems Across the Spectrum
Envestnet’s new investment isn’t just about headline technology; it’s designed to tackle the everyday operational headaches that slow advisors down. From the smallest boutique RIA to the largest national enterprise, firms face a tangle of trading, reporting, and compliance demands that pull focus from clients. The company’s broadened toolkit—spanning portfolio management, planning, data aggregation, and AI-driven analytics—aims to simplify that complexity and let advisors scale without adding overhead.
In wealth management, those problems vary widely. A small RIA might need automatic rebalancing without adding staff. A large enterprise might struggle to rebalance direct separately managed account (SMA) business across multiple custodial accounts. Others look to outsource small accounts with no manager or platform fee or tap into AI-driven portfolio oversight.
To support that range, Envestnet has been integrating its platforms more tightly so that planning tools, trading engines, and client-facing portals all speak the same language.
“I have not been in a meeting with a current firm or a prospect where we couldn’t solve incremental problems for that firm,” Meighan says.
For him, the ability to meet RIAs wherever they are mirrors his own path in the industry—a progression that made his move to Envestnet in June feel inevitable. Meighan saw firsthand, as a longtime client, how the firm’s capabilities could evolve with an advisor’s needs and scale alongside a growing practice.
When he left a comfortable role in the independent broker-dealer world to work for Envestnet, he knew exactly where he wanted to focus. “My thesis coming to the firm—leaving a reputable organization to come here—was that it was going to be in the RIA space,” he says.
Meighan had been an Envestnet client for 15 years and watched the company grow to a national platform. “Somebody made the joke to me earlier, ‘You’ve been a fan of this team for your entire career, and now you get to play for them,’” he recalls. “I’ve always admired the organization, and thinking about the competitive position that Envestnet’s in now, to me, it was a no-brainer.”
Better Outcomes at the Core
Through every initiative, Meighan circles back to the same goal: results. “It’s all about better outcomes,” he says. “We are a better outcomes organization, and we believe in that. It is in our roots, and we keep going.”
Envestnet’s billion-dollar plan is not at heart a technology refresh. It is a commitment to unify advisor workflows, expand investment options, and keep human relationships central to the experience. “We’ll have that tech investment, but a lot of what we’re also doing is increasing our go-to-market footprint—and in my world, on the RIA side,” Meighan emphasizes. With the resources now in place, those coveted client conversations—and the outcomes they produce—are set to become even more powerful.
For more information, go to www.envestnet.com.
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Additional Resources
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Disclosures
The information, analysis, and opinions expressed herein are for informational purposes only and represent the views of the speakers, not necessarily the views of Envestnet. The views expressed herein reflect the judgement of the speakers as of the recording date and are subject to change at any time without notice. Information obtained from third-party resources are believed to be reliable but not guaranteed. Any graphical information contained herein is for illustrative purposes only and not based on actual client data.
