Solo and small-team RIAs are facing a pressure point. Clients now expect wide-ranging financial guidance, ongoing planning, and sophisticated investment management. But many of the firms best known for deep relationships are still run by two or three people—professionals who want to deliver more without losing the personal touch that defines their practice.
For Cormac Murphy, CEO and CIO of CacheTech Advisor Solutions, that tension is exactly where his firm’s platform is designed to help. Murphy built CacheTech to give independent advisors access to institutional-grade capabilities while preserving the autonomy and culture that make RIAs unique.
CacheTech ended 2025 with several new partner firms, and Murphy says the conversations with those advisors tend to follow a similar arc. The push to expand isn’t coming from fee pressure. It’s coming from rising expectations around planning, specialization, and breadth of service. “People need to know they have to have a depth of offering right now,” he says.
The firms reaching out aren’t struggling—they’re growing—but they’re clear-eyed about their limits. “They want to have expertise throughout an RIA, which can be hard to achieve when you’re a two-, three-man shop,” Murphy points out. CacheTech’s value, as he describes it, starts with financial proficiency but extends across operations and technology.
“We bring some expertise on the investment side right off the bat,” he says. The platform is built to give advisors more capacity without stripping away what makes an RIA an RIA. “I think CacheTech provides a really great way to broaden that offering and deepen it without forcing everybody to be the same and taking that ‘I’ out of RIA,” adds Murphy.
A Partnership Model That Prioritizes Collaboration
One of the biggest differences between CacheTech’s approach and a traditional TAMP relationship is structural. Instead of working across separate systems connected by email chains, CacheTech and its partner firms operate inside the same environment. Murphy says that change unlocks a different level of collaboration.
“We’ve streamlined that to the point of when we are having two human beings talk to each other, we want it to be about something meaningful,” he explains. Operational noise is minimized. “We’re solving a problem. We’re addressing a client need and really getting layers deeper than I think the traditional model has typically allowed for.”
Technology Designed to Remove Friction—Not Add More
CacheTech’s technology isn’t built around flashy features. It’s constructed to eliminate the countless operational snags that slow advisors down. When an advisor submits a request, it doesn’t vanish into an inbox. “We have a live chat back and forth as opposed to emails that get buried in an inbox and all of a sudden a request that should have taken 10 minutes takes two days,” Murphy says.
Because advisors and CacheTech’s operations team work inside the same platform, both sides can instantly see where a request stands. If a distribution is delayed or paperwork is missing, there’s no guessing game—just shared visibility and quick resolution.
This transparent communication also enables advisors and CacheTech to focus human conversations where they matter most. Automation handles routine tasks, but Murphy is clear about its limits. “That’s something that can never be automated,” he says of deeper discussions around concentrated positions, complex tax issues, or nuanced planning needs. “And that’s where we want to all be in the same room and having that meaningful conversation, but we have to get on the same page on the technology first to unlock that scale.”
Advisors often stretch the platform in ways the CacheTech team didn’t anticipate, becoming “power users” who discover new workflows and help shape development. The dynamic is intentional. “What we’ve found with some of our firms is that they’re really invested in us getting better too,” Murphy notes. “We are never going to be the nickel and dime, ‘Oh, look, we have a new feature. We’re going to sell it to you.’ We always tell our partner firms that as the platform grows, you grow with us.”
As a result, trust builds not because everything is perfect but because transparency is baked into the system. “I think everybody knows things go wrong from time to time,” he says. “Having that transparency and that back and forth builds trust in the overall relationship even when things do.” Also, the shared systems are designed to reduce delays and confusion. “I think the delay tends to be a lot smaller because we’re all looking at the same thing, so course correcting’s a lot easier.” And because everyone operates inside the same ecosystem, Murphy emphasizes, “the same mistake doesn’t get made twice.”
High-Conviction Investment Management for a Volatile Market
Murphy’s investment philosophy mirrors CacheTech’s technology approach: practical, risk-aware, and grounded in what clients need. The goal isn’t to win every quarter. It’s to protect financial plans. “We always say we never want our bad call to change someone’s financial plan,” Murphy explains. “At the end of the day, goals are not to quarterly returns, it’s to get our clients retired, get them through retirements, all of those much, much bigger goals than any quarterly number could ever capture.”
CacheTech runs four global tactical asset allocation (GTAA) models, from 20% equity to 100% equity, with room to adjust fixed income allocations by ±20%. The team also manages individual equity portfolios. Both operate from a unified global macro view—one that stays consistent across risk profiles. When the tactical models underweight equities, that outlook flows across the entire platform. When the team leans into risk, it may show up through high-yield exposure in bond portfolios rather than piling into equities.
Murphy says the consistency reduces complexity for advisors and clients. Everyone can follow the reasoning without juggling competing narratives.
The market backdrop in 2025 strengthened the case for this approach. International markets outpaced U.S. equities for the first time in years, and several of CacheTech’s best performers came from nontraditional exposures. Vietnam delivered standout returns. European defense stocks surged—CacheTech entered the EUAD ETF two days before the February 2025 Zelenskyy–Trump meeting that sparked a jump.
Murphy credits the ETF landscape for making this level of precision possible. A decade ago, global tactical strategies required broad strokes. Today, managers can express nuanced views with targeted ETF exposure.
The team avoids token moves or small benchmark deviations. “We want to find something that is off the beaten path, that has a story to it, and then go in there with some conviction,” Murphy explains. In practice, that meant a 5–6% Vietnam allocation in the more aggressive portfolios—large enough to matter but still bounded by risk controls. CacheTech’s job, he believes, is to support advisors serving real clients with real financial timelines—not chase headline-grabbing bets.
The AI Infrastructure Play and Long-Term Equity Conviction
CacheTech’s high-conviction equity portfolios follow a different mandate than the GTAA models. They’re not shaped by Federal Reserve expectations or near-term macro calls. “If someone said, ‘What do you think the Fed’s going to do, and how is that reflected in my portfolio?’ It 100% is reflected there” in the GTAA models, Murphy explains. The equity portfolios, however, focus on long-term structural winners. “I don’t care what the Fed’s going to do,” he says. “That’s what the GTAA models are for.”
The portfolio concentrates on companies building the infrastructure behind AI, not the software layer. Murphy uses an analogy: “If you went to San Francisco during the gold rush and sold pickaxes and shovels, you did fine. And that’s where we think we are in the AI trade right now. We want to own the companies that are creating the infrastructure—the pickaxes and shovels.”
That includes data center builders, chip manufacturers, and firms powering the physical expansion of AI. Murphy is skeptical of software monetization, especially as OpenAI approaches what he expects will be a trillion-dollar IPO. The clearer path, he contends, lies with companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia—businesses generating revenue tied to AI infrastructure.
The portfolios have performed strongly, Murphy notes. Early cloud positions and a long-held Nvidia stake (initiated in March 2020) have contributed meaningfully. Concentration is intentional: he believes advisors need both tactical flexibility and long-term conviction, and blending the two dilutes their purpose.
Customization, Tax Intelligence, and Client-Specific Portfolio Design
CacheTech’s flexibility also extends to customization. Murphy recalls a partner conversation early in 2025 about adding gold exposure. Though he personally struggles to build conviction around gold, the CacheTech team worked with the advisor to design a custom model—including tax-loss harvesting tools—that could be combined with existing models while maintaining appropriate risk levels.
For Murphy, this engagement encapsulates what distinguishes RIA-focused asset management. “I think that having that flexibility as an asset manager in the RIA space is really important because when you start to get client accounts and to do things tax efficiently, you have to be able to wrap your head around different circumstances and different trade-offs rather than, ‘I think stock A will outperform the S&P 500,’” he says.
Managing individual accounts is fundamentally different from running a mutual fund. “If you’re running a mutual fund, that’s what you need to know,” Murphy acknowledges. “When you’re managing individual client accounts, you need to know that plus tax situations, plus all these multitudes of other things.”
Tax optimization is a major development priority in 2026. Murphy explains the limitations of existing tax-budgeting approaches—monthly caps that feel arbitrary—and outlines CacheTech’s work on optimization tools powered by AI and reinforcement learning. Advisors will be able to set a total annual gains budget, such as $15,000, and let the system determine optimal timing and execution within that limit.
While the technology can serve ultra-high-net-worth clients, he highlights mass-affluent retirees as a group that may benefit most. Crossing income thresholds can trigger benefit cliffs, and thoughtful tax management can help avoid those shocks.
Even so, simplicity at the client level remains essential. “They need to have trust that you know what you’re doing,” says Murphy, “but you’re trying to create it in such a way where we can make it transparent or digestible to the end client.”
Why Culture Fit Matters More Than AUM Growth
Throughout the conversation, Murphy returns to the importance of relationships. CacheTech screens prospective partners for culture fit, not asset size. The first call is conversational—he wants to understand the firm’s story, the challenges they’re trying to solve, and whether CacheTech is the right fit. The second call is a tailored demo built around those needs.
He remembers speaking with one firm specializing in municipal bond trading for government agencies. They were enthusiastic about CacheTech, but Murphy ultimately suggested alternative solutions better aligned with their model. “We’ve always said relationships are the most important thing, more than AUM. Culture fit is what we’re going for,” he says. The approach parallels advisors’ MO in building their own client relationships—no hard pitches, no rushing.
CacheTech’s thoughtful methodology has created a network of firms that actively participate in platform development and share candid feedback. Murphy notes that several partners saw record inflows in 2025, even in a challenging environment.
He and his firm aren’t trying to become the largest TAMP. Their focus is advisors who want depth without sacrificing independence—firms looking for a partner invested in their growth, not a vendor measuring success in quarterly flows. For those RIAs, CacheTech’s blend of technology, flexibility, collaboration, and conviction-driven investment management offers a potential way to deliver comprehensive service without losing the identity that made them successful in the first place.
_____________________
Additional Resources
______________________
Disclosures
For informational purposes only. Not investment advice or a recommendation. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Examples discussed are illustrative and subject to change.
