Natalie Wolfsen, CEO of Orion, doesn’t measure success in just features shipped or integrations launched. She tracks something more fundamental: whether the advisors using her firm’s platform grow faster than other advisory practices. The answer, according to Orion’s 2025 Advisor Growth Survey, is a resounding yes—in 2024, advisors on the platform achieved an organic asset growth rate nearly 10% higher than non-users.[1] The gap reflects Orion’s core commitment to building technology and wealth solutions designed to accelerate advisor growth.
Of course, Wolfsen monitors other success indicators too. As of September 30, 2025, Orion services $5.6 trillion in assets under administration and $124 billion of wealth management platform assets.[2] Client satisfaction is closely monitored and top-of-mind every day. But when pressed to choose the most important metric, Wolfsen returns to advisor growth every time. After all, a platform’s true value lies in how well it helps advisors expand their practices.
“Our mission is to help create a community where every advisor and investor can thrive,” Wolfsen explains. “And in order to do that, we need to make sure that our advisors can achieve their business objectives and their clients can achieve their life goals.”
Building an Ecosystem, Not Just a Platform
Orion positions itself not simply as a technology company but as infrastructure built for advisor success. Every tool, integration, and innovation is designed with one goal in mind: helping advisors deliver better outcomes for clients.
“Everything we do at Orion is geared towards helping advisors, and the enterprises they serve, do what they set out to do for their investors,” Wolfsen says. “And that means that we need to build the technology that helps advisors save time.”
Speed and efficiency matter, but so does growth capacity. Wolfsen emphasizes how Orion constructs “the technology and wealth solutions that can help advisors grow faster than their peers.” The platform acts as a research and development hub for the firms using it, taking on the burden of staying current with industry shifts so individual practices don’t have to.
Innovation sits at the heart of Orion’s strategy—not for press releases or headlines, but in the areas where advisors feel the most pressure to evolve. Behavioral finance tools integrate seamlessly across the ecosystem. Account structures adapt to client needs. AI capabilities move from novelty to native functionality. Investment solutions expand, and reporting becomes more sophisticated. “Those are the things that our advisors need, our clients need, to be successful,” Wolfsen notes.
Measuring Everything, Improving Constantly
Wolfsen brings an operations mindset to technology development. “We do whatever it takes to achieve that goal, and then also we measure it and improve on it every day,” she says. In an industry where innovation happens across multiple fronts simultaneously, resting on past success is not an option.
The stakes run high because wealth management touches individuals’ lives directly. Investors build portfolios with financial advisors using the technology Orion provides, making reliability and performance non-negotiable. “We’re an important industry, we’re an important provider in the industry, and we’re serving great clients,” Wolfsen observes. “And what that means is we need to be relentless in how we continue to deliver for our clients.”
Relentlessness requires breadth. Technology and wealth management are no longer separate domains—they intersect across servicing, support, and solutions. “That can’t just be tech anymore,” Wolfsen explains. “The lines between tech and wealth are blurring. The lines between tech and servicing and wealth and servicing are also blurring. So, at Orion, we have to deliver pioneering technology. We have to deliver reliable and stable services and support. We have to deliver comprehensive wealth solutions, growth resources, and be highly flexible to meet the needs of financial advisors.”
Where the Top Performers Focus
Orion’s highest-growth advisors consistently adopt new platform capabilities faster than their peers. Today, artificial intelligence development is a key focus, with Orion collaborating directly with select practices to ensure tools provide tangible value at scale. “We’re working with a group of advisors to make sure we get that just right on their behalf,” Wolfsen says.
AI’s immediate value lies in processing power and information synthesis. Beyond efficiency gains, it promises to transform how advisors allocate their time and mental energy.
Workflow transformation ranks as another priority. New account opening stands out as particularly ripe for improvement—a complex process prone to errors and delays that creates friction at the exact moment when first impressions matter most. Streamlining client onboarding can help eliminate unnecessary administrative burden while ensuring accuracy.
On the investment side, Orion continues expanding its framework—reporting, diligence, models, and market perspectives—so advisors gain access to institutional-grade resources without building everything internally.
Customization represents another major development trend, moving beyond boutique offerings into broader advisory practices. “The last megatrend is personalization, and we want to make sure that we deliver personalization, tax management, custom indexing, long-short portfolios at scale,” Wolfsen says. “So, we’re investing in that part of our platform, to deliver that to our clients.”
Direct indexing has evolved from breakthrough innovation to table stakes. Orion introduced custom indexing in the late 2010s, initially focusing on managing tracking error and concentrated positions, then tax optimization, tax-loss harvesting. Today, the goal is to build comprehensive, scalable portfolios at the household level. “All of those things, you can’t just stop,” Wolfsen notes. “You have to keep innovating and keep investing.”
Integration as Strategy
With more than 500 integration partnerships, Orion approaches ecosystem development with an open-architecture philosophy that promotes creation of genuinely practical experiences for producing measurable results.
“Our goal isn’t to just integrate, check the box, move on to the next thing. It’s ultimately for things to be useful, and for outcomes to be achieved,” Wolfsen explains. Realizing utility requires constant attention and refinement. Strong client relationships provide external pressure to improve, but internal standards must push even harder.
One strategic choice stands out: meeting advisors where they work. CRM systems function as command centers for most practices, serving as the hub for daily operations. Orion deliberately builds solutions into the CRM environment rather than requiring advisors to jump between platforms.
“Advisors, they really live day to day in their CRM,” Wolfsen observes. “And so, when they’re looking at a client contact and they’re preparing for a meeting, they should be able to see all components of what they need for that meeting in the CRM.” Portfolio construction, risk analysis, financial planning, and portfolio evaluation should all happen without leaving the system. AI-powered meeting preparation should flow seamlessly. Notes and action items should remain centralized. “We’re very much focused on trying to build solutions that help advisors spend less time navigating and reconciling, and more time just serving their clients.”
An open data strategy strengthens integration. Orion’s transparency allows comprehensive business and client reporting across an advisor’s tech stack, providing operational visibility.
While some firms take a walled-garden approach, Wolfsen sees competition differently. “I genuinely believe you need competition,” she says. “You need competition at all positions, because if you don’t [have it], then it becomes really easy to rest on your laurels and to not be as innovative as you need to be.”
Openness benefits everyone—investors, advisors, Orion, and even competitors who become integration partners. The industry improves when participants compete on merit while collaborating on infrastructure.
The Exponential Future
Looking ahead, Wolfsen envisions AI transforming wealth management. Much of the work currently consuming professionals’ time—whether evaluating stocks, assembling portfolios, or reviewing financial plans—will be AI-powered, she believes.
“Much of that synthesis, which is a lot of our work right now, is going to be very much powered by AI,” she predicts. Development cycles will accelerate as artificial intelligence enhances coding, quality assurance, operations, and straight-through processing. Integration will deepen across the industry.
Meanwhile, consolidation will continue reshaping the competitive landscape. Advisors will acquire other advisors. Large firms will buy practices. Large firms will merge with each other. Yet entrepreneurship will remain vibrant. “I still think we’re going to have an industry that is very attractive for entrepreneurs. So, we’re going to have the smaller end of the market as very robust, and then also growing and evolving as well,” Wolfsen says.
Many compare AI’s impact to the internet revolution, but Wolfsen prefers a computing analogy. “With computing, all of a sudden, basic writing, basic calculations, presentation, the synthesis of all of that, all the processing of all of that became so much faster,” she explains. Mathematicians stopped doing manual calculations. Finance professionals moved beyond general ledger work. AI promises similar liberation—not primarily about information availability, though that matters, but about processing power that enables faster decision-making and implementation.
Financial services must maintain data integrity, rigorously evaluate AI outputs, and enhance privacy protections. “All these things that in financial services we’re good at anyway,” as Wolfsen says, “and we’re going to have to get even better at it, but the potential is absolutely there.”
When considering whether AI advancement follows linear, geometric, or exponential patterns, Wolfsen doesn’t hesitate: exponential. “It’s really important that you, we, all companies that we work with, those of us who want to serve clients, we’re evolving along with it,” she insists.
Continuous adaptation, measurement, and improvement define the future. The nearly 10-percentage-point growth advantage Orion advisors achieved in 2024 [1] reflects yesterday’s innovation. Sustaining and expanding that edge requires building tomorrow’s solutions now—in close partnership with the advisors whose success defines the platform’s purpose.
[1] In 2024, Orion clients achieved an organic asset growth rate that was 9% higher than that of non-Orion clients. Source: Orion’s 2025 Advisor Growth Survey. Sample size: 372 (238 Orion, 134 Non-Orion). Question: Thinking about your organic asset growth rate excluding market appreciation and acquisitions, what do you estimate was your firm’s organic asset growth rate in 2024?
[2] Wealth Management Platform Assets include assets managed on a discretionary and non-discretionary basis by Orion Portfolio Solutions, LLC (“OPS”) and TownSquare Capital, LLC (“TSC”) on their proprietary platforms, assets in proprietary and third-party models made available through OPS’s Model Marketplace platform, and assets in OPS’s proprietary models managed on third-party platforms.
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Disclosures
Information contained herein is not intended to constitute accounting, legal, tax, security, or investment advice, nor an opinion regarding the appropriateness of any investment, nor a solicitation of any type. Orion Portfolio Solutions does not render tax, accounting, or legal advice.
Wealth management services provided by Orion Portfolio Solutions, LLC (“OPS”), a registered investment advisor. Orion OCIO services provided by TownSquare Capital, LLC (“TSC”), a registered investment advisors. OPS and TSC are affiliates and wholly owned subsidiaries of Orion Advisor Solutions, Inc.
Custom Indexing offered through Orion Portfolio Solutions, LLC a registered investment advisor.
Custom Indexing is an investment strategy wherein a portfolio is managed to mimic an index or other portfolio, while taking into account the tax position, holdings, and individual investing preferences of a client. The performance of a portfolio using custom indexing may vary significantly from the target index (referred to as tracking error or tracking difference), and this variance may increase with greater customization within a portfolio.
Tax-loss Harvesting is a process by which securities trading at unrealized losses are sold to realize a taxable loss. Proceeds from the sales are then used to reinvest in alternate securities to maintain market exposure. Tax-loss Harvesting can be used as a strategy to offset realized gains from other investments and/or carried forward to later calendar years to offset future taxable gains.
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