AssetMark executive Yi-Ching Wu departs to lead Orion's wealth management product

RIA technology giant Orion has hired ex-Schwab and AssetMark veteran Yi‑Ching Wu to lead its wealth management product and platform strategy, filling a role previously held by Michael Mandelos. 

Mandelos, a former UBS executive, was announced as Orion’s wealth management product leader in March 2025, but the company confirmed to InvestmentNews that he departed Orion earlier this year. Wu now joins as Orion’s EVP of wealth management product and platform after most recently being SVP, head of investment products at AssetMark, where she worked from November 2015 to April 2026, according to her BrokerCheck page.

“Orion is advancing a unified investment framework that combines capabilities like custom indexing, tax-aware trading, proprietary investments, and unified managed household overlay, helping advisors bring more coordination across accounts, improve asset location, manage tax impact more effectively, and align portfolios more closely to long-term household goals,” said Ron Pruitt, president of Orion Wealth Management. 

“Yi-Ching's role is to continue advancing and unifying Orion's investment product offerings and platform capabilities so advisors can scale personalization, improve efficiency, and deliver better outcomes for the households they serve.”

Before AssetMark, Wu worked for roughly a decade at Schwab, where she managed proprietary investment lineups and helped launch Schwab’s entry into exchange‑traded funds. Pruitt told InvestmentNews that Orion will introduce AI-native investment proposals for advisors later this year.

“Orion is an AI-native company, and AI is central to how we're advancing wealth management. We're making our largest-ever R&D investment in 2026, with AI and advisor workflow innovation at the heart of it,” said Pruitt. “Orion Denali AI is already live for enterprises, with broader availability to advisors and firms of all sizes coming in 2026 — bringing trusted, permissioned data into one connected experience so advisors spend less time searching across systems and more time advising.”

Orion announced its partnership with Anthropic in February when the AI giant debuted its wealth management plug-ins. Anthropic released additional AI agents for financial services professionals earlier this month, intended to automate research and tasks such as building pitch materials and running compliance checks on client files.

“Our work with Anthropic, alongside our broader multi-model orchestration approach that also includes OpenAI and AWS Bedrock, lets us bring the best available AI capabilities into Orion's secure, enterprise-grade data environment, so firms are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap or limitations,” said Pruitt. 

Pruitt added that AI’s wealth management applications will focus on automated investment proposals with tax overlay, custodian statement analysis, as well as integrating CRM and trading opportunities across full client households for advisors. Orion’s technology is used by 8.3 million accounts, spanning $5.9 trillion in assets under administration and $185 billion in wealth management platform assets.