In the pre-internet era, it was hard for financial advisors to have much insight into their clients' financial lives other than what the client was willing to give them. Helping clients to "get organized" was often part of the value proposition of doing a financial plan in the first place, where often the first time clients ever saw a consolidated balance sheet of all their assets was in their first financial plan. With the caveat that advisors would only know what was in the accounts that they managed for the client, and information on any "held-away" assets like bank accounts, 401(k) plans, and other non-managed assets came piecemeal in the form of paper statements collected during client meetings or mailed ahead of time (and sometimes clients simply neglected or refused to provide any information on these accounts, making them effectively invisible for planning purposes).
But as peoples' financial lives moved increasingly online in the 21st century, it became more possible for financial advisors to gain visibility into the clients' outside accounts by electronic means. In the late 1990s and through the 2000s, solutions like Yodlee, ByAllAccounts, and CashEdge (along with eMoney's popular client portal) all arose, and suddenly advisors had ongoing, automatically-updated views into clients' aggregated account- and transaction-level data across their entire households. Which allowed advisors to provide new features like consolidated investment performance reporting on managed and non-managed accounts, "personal financial management" (PFM) portals for real-time net worth and expense tracking, and eventually even management of 401(k) and other held-away assets through platforms like Pontera.
Amidst the rising popularity of these account aggregation capabilities, a number of platforms made big investments into aggregation providers in the early 2010s. CashEdge was purchased by FiServ for $465 million in 2011, followed by ByAllAccounts being acquired by Morningstar for $28 million in 2014, and eMoney being acquired by Fidelity for $250 million and Yodlee being acquired by Envestnet for $590 million in 2015. The massive price tags for these acquisitions were in most cases far beyond what could be supported by 'just' the revenue and profits of the aggregation providers. Neither were they justified by the added value that each of these platforms could achieve from deeper data integrations within and outside of their platforms (which they could have mostly achieved by simply licensing the data from the providers rather than buying the providers themselves). Instead, the main driver of these acquisitions seemed to be the notion that by owning the pipes through which all the data flowed, the platforms could gain considerable insight into the behaviors of advisors and their clients – which in turn would in theory create immense value by the Big-Data-driven decision making and product strategy it allowed.
In reality, however, the platforms that invested heavily into Big Data initiatives through account aggregation providers struggled to realize significant returns on those investments, and have in many cases scaled back their initial ambitions. Fidelity's acquisition of eMoney was significant initially for the client portal aspect that differentiated it from all other financial planning software, but as other software like RightCapital came along offering its own data aggregation capabilities (at a lower cost), eMoney focused more on improving the financial planning side of its platform than on continuing to emphasize data aggregation as a differentiator (to the point that eMoney doesn't even charge extra for its account aggregation capabilities anymore). Envestnet sold Yodlee in 2025 at likely a fraction of its original $590 million purchase price after Envestnet found that the promise of "big data" insights improving strategic decisions proved difficult to achieve in the reality of a multifaceted (at the time) public company.
And now we have the news this month that Morningstar has become the latest platform to offload its 2010s-era account aggregation acquisition, having sold ByAllAccounts for an undisclosed amount to a tech startup incubator called Pello Companies.
Notably for financial advisors and fintechs who are still using ByAllAccounts for data aggregation, there's no indication that any major changes will immediately come to the platform. But as has been noted elsewhere, it's striking the firm that acquired ByAllAccounts is an investor called Pello Companies that aims to "unlock the full potential of open finance", while the incoming CEO whom they've hired to run ByAllAccounts is talking about delivering "an expanded set of capabilities that extend beyond pure data aggregation". So at the very least it seems like Pello is looking to revamp the ByAllAccounts platform, and potentially expand on it – e.g., to leverage its existing data movement infrastructure to provide a unified data layer for advisory firms to run AI agents on top of in the mold of providers like Dispatch and MileMarker Navigator, so they can finally (maybe?) fulfill the promise of Big Data in the AI era?
For Morningstar, the sale of ByAllAccounts continues a trend of shedding lines of business outside of its core investment data and research functions, having also sold its TAMP to AssetMark in 2024 and wound down its Morningstar Office portfolio management platform (sending most of its users to Black Diamond) in 2025. After divesting from those solutions – both of which drew clear benefits from the ability to weave in outside account data through ByAllAccounts – there may have simply been little strategic value for Morningstar in continuing to own an account aggregation solution.
From an industry perspective, though, what's notable is how, after nearly 30 years of promises of how data aggregation would reshape how advisors give advice and manage their businesses, the reality has fallen frustratingly short. Both for advisors – who in the most recent Kitces AdvisorTech Research gave account aggregation tools the lowest satisfaction score among all other commonly used categories – as well as for the owners of the technology itself, who have suffered massive writedowns in the account aggregation investments they made during the last decade. To be fair, not all of these struggles could have been predicted – for instance, rather than financial institutions becoming more comfortable sharing client data with third-party aggregation providers as those providers have matured over time, they've instead increasingly gone in the opposite direction and gotten more reluctant to share their data (e.g., Fidelity's crackdown on "screen-scraping" aggregation providers and held-away account management tools like Pontera). And the current Trump administration has sought to roll back the CFPB's long-awaited Open Banking Rule, which would have forced many institutions to make client data more readily available to clients (and the advisors and AdvisorTech they may have wanted to share their data with). All of which are at odds with what seemed like growing momentum for "open finance" and fewer restrictions on consumer data movement a decade-plus ago.
But what's really ironic is that the wave of divestment from account aggregation providers is occurring just as AI has brought back a renewed wave of promises about the possibilities of Big-Data-driven insights. As tech providers envision a future where AI agents pulling data from multiple sources 24/7 can automate workflows from marketing to client outreach to financial plan creation, it's worth remembering the lesson of ByAllAccounts, Yodlee, and other providers: That client data from third-party institutions is often going to be quite messy, nonstandard, and highly dependent on how much data (if at all) those institutions are willing to share. The only question is whether RIAs and AdvisorTech platforms will remember this lesson the next time they're tempted to make a sizeable investment in a "big data" solution without a clear plan for how exactly they'll derive value from it?
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-may2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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