Data Aggregation & Analytics Platforms

Data aggregation at a crossroads

Data aggregation has been pitched as the connective tissue of wealth management – a single, automatically refreshed view of every client account, from managed portfolios to held-away 401(k)s, bank balances, and insurance policies. The technology promised to transform how advisors plan, report, and prospect. The business of selling that technology, however, has been much more volatile.

The past 12 months brought the clearest evidence yet. In May 2026, Morningstar sold ByAllAccounts, the data aggregation provider previously acquired for $28 million in 2014, to tech start-up incubator Pello Companies for an undisclosed amount. That deal followed Envestnet’s 2025 sale of Yodlee, the data aggregator it bought for approximately $590 million in 2015, to private equity firm STG, with terms of the new deal also undisclosed.

Two of the industry’s flagship “big data” bets, made within a year of each other in the mid-2010s, have now been unwound within a year of each other a decade later. Kitces AdvisorTech Research notes that advisors gave account aggregation tools the lowest satisfaction score of any commonly used software category.

And yet the underlying demand has never been higher. AI tools are only as useful as the data they can reach, and every agentic workflow being pitched to advisory firms today, from automated plan updates to client outreach, depends on clean, connected, permissioned client data. Before Morningstar sold ByAllAccounts, the platform was among several financial services impacted by an Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025.

This Annual Guide examines the year’s deals, the structural reasons behind data aggregation challenges, the regulatory wildcard hanging over data access, and an overview of the platforms now competing to own the advisor data layer.

The mid-2010s acquisition spree is worth recounting because its unwinding defines the current landscape. Fiserv bought CashEdge for $465 million in 2011. Morningstar acquired ByAllAccounts for $28 million in 2014. Fidelity bought eMoney Advisor for a reported $250 million in 2015, and Envestnet acquired Yodlee the same year for roughly $590 million.

The thesis for these acquirers was that owning these aggregation platforms would yield proprietary, big data-driven insight into advisor and client behavior. That insight seemingly largely failed to materialize at scale.

The exits tell the story. Envestnet, taken private by Bain Capital in 2024 in a deal valued at $4.5 billion, sold Yodlee to STG in a transaction that closed on September 2, 2025. CEO Chris Todd framed the divestiture as allowing Envestnet to “focus more deeply on its core connected wealth management platform,” while Yodlee joined an STG fintech portfolio that includes RSA, Trellix, and SurveyMonkey.

Morningstar followed in spring 2026, selling ByAllAccounts to Pello Companies, a fintech investor based in Salt Lake City. The sale extends Morningstar’s retreat from advisor-facing operations after it also sold its TAMP business to AssetMark in 2024 and wound down its portfolio management system, Morningstar Office, in 2025, migrating most users to Black Diamond. With those businesses gone, an aggregation engine like ByAllAccounts had little remaining strategic value to its parent.

Three structural problems undermined aggregation economics, and all three remain live issues for buyers evaluating platforms today.

First, data access got harder, not easier. Rather than institutions growing more comfortable with third-party data sharing as aggregators matured, many moved the other way. The most prominent example is Fidelity’s crackdown on screen-scraping aggregation providers and held-away account management tools such as Pontera. When custodians and recordkeepers can throttle access at will, the “seamless real-time visibility” pitch collapses into a patchwork of broken connections and stale balances, which is reflected in advisor satisfaction data.

Second, the data itself is messy. Third-party institutional data arrives nonstandard, inconsistently labeled, and incomplete, which makes the leap from raw feeds to reliable analytics far more expensive than acquirers modeled. In November 2025, JPMorgan Chase struck new contracts with data middlemen Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, and Akoya to enforce new pricing structures on data requests made by third-party apps connected to customer bank accounts.

Third, the regulatory foundation remains unsettled.The CFPB’s Personal Financial Data Rights rule under Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank, finalized in October 2024, would have required large institutions to make consumer data available generally free of charge, with the first compliance deadlines arriving in 2026. Instead, the rule is enjoined by a federal court in the Eastern District of Kentucky while the Bureau reconsiders it, following an August 2025 advance notice of proposed rulemaking that signaled the CFPB intends to substantially revise the rule and extend compliance dates. For aggregators and the advisor platforms built on them, the open question of who may access consumer data, and at what cost, remains unanswered currently.

The market now sorts into several distinct layers, and senior decision-makers should evaluate them as such rather than as a single “aggregation” category.

Standalone aggregation infrastructure. Yodlee (under STG) and ByAllAccounts (under Pello) remain the wealth-specific incumbents, now operating under owners with stated intentions to reinvest; STG’s Marc Bala described Yodlee as sitting “at the intersection of trusted data access and intelligent analytics.” General-purpose aggregators such as Plaid, MX, and Mastercard’s Finicity are also active in financial services, though advisors should verify current wealth-specific coverage directly with each vendor, as connectivity footprints change frequently.

Planning-embedded aggregation. Fidelity’s eMoney, once differentiated by its aggregation-driven client portal, no longer charges separately for aggregation and has shifted its emphasis to planning functionality, while RightCapital built its own lower-cost aggregation into its planning software.

Portfolio analytics and reporting. Platforms including Orion, Black Diamond, and Addepar consume aggregated data to power performance reporting and analytics. Black Diamond absorbed much of the former Morningstar Office user base in 2025. Held-away asset management remains a Pontera-led category, albeit one squarely exposed to custodian data-access disputes.

The emerging AI data layer. The most consequential new entrants are firms positioning themselves as the unified data fabric on which AI agents run, with Kitces’ analysis naming Dispatch and MileMarker’s Navigator as the mold Pello may pursue with ByAllAccounts. Other consolidation moves in this space included Advisor360°’s bundling of Conquest Planning.

Mid-market integrations. The category is also moving downmarket. In July 2025, Advisor CRM announced a partnership with aggregation and prospect-engagement platform SmartData to automate onboarding data capture, including portfolios, insurance policies, and external accounts; Advisor CRM partner and CTO Leibel Sternbach said advisors “are tired of duct-taping point solutions together.” Advisor CRM also made CRM data accessible to AI assistants via Model Context Protocol, a sign of where small-firm data strategy is heading.

Three signals will define the next 12 months. Watch what Pello actually builds on ByAllAccounts and whether STG’s reinvestment in Yodlee produces wealth-specific innovation or harvest-mode economics. Watch the CFPB’s revised Section 1033 rule, which will determine whether data access is a right or a negotiation. And watch whether RIAs pursuing internal software builds and AI agent deployments heed the decade’s central lesson: third-party client data is messy, nonstandard, and only as available as institutions allow. The open question is whether the industry will remember that lesson before making its next sizeable big data investment without a clear plan for extracting value from it.

Flyer Financial Technologies