Dispatch taps former Hightower, eMoney, and Focus leaders for founding board of advisors

Dispatch, the New York-based data infrastructure company that powers back-office workflows for wealth management firms, has establshed its first board of advisors, bringing on four executives with decades of combined experience in advisory, custody and financial technology.

The board includes Bob Oros, who spent six years as chairman and chief executive of Hightower Advisors before stepping down from the CEO post last year; Rajini Kodialam, co-founder and former chief operating officer of Focus Financial Partners; Stephen Langlois, a former president of Kestra Financial who also held senior roles at Fidelity Investments, LPL Financial and eMoney Advisor; and Sachin Shah, a fintech operator who helped build 55ip through its sale to J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Dispatch revealed the appointments as it announced a banner period of growth, having increased its customer base fivefold over the past year while the collective assets managed by firms on its platform skyrocketed from roughly $900 billion to more than $9 trillion.

A board built around scale

Dispatch's pitch to the industry is that operations teams at wealth management firms have hit a ceiling. As firms grow through acquisition or organic advisor recruiting, the manual work of opening accounts, onboarding clients and reconciling custodial data compounds faster than headcount can keep pace with it.

"Historically, scaling a wealth management business has meant asking operations teams to absorb more work and complexity – a model that simply doesn't scale," Oros said in the announcement.

In a previous interview with InvestmentNews, Dispatch CEO Rob Nance argued that firms across the wealth industry still leans too heavily on spreadsheets and manual data entry to move client accounts between firms.

"Transitions are among the most operationally complex workflows in wealth management, and until now, the industry hasn't had purpose-built software to manage them on," Nance said. "Firms have been forced to choose between a custodial program they may not qualify for and a manual process built on spreadsheets and people."

Each new board member brings a different vantage point on that problem. Oros led Hightower through a run of acquisitions that took the firm's assets under advisement from $57 billion to $1.8 trillion before moving to a newly created president role at PPB Capital Partners earlier this year.

Read more: Former Hightower CEO Bob Oros surfaces in newly created role at PPB Capital Partners

Kodialam co-founded Focus Financial in 2004 and later served as its chief operating officer, overseeing the partnership model that helped consolidate dozens of independent registered investment advisers before the firm's 2023 take-private sale.

Langlois has moved between technology vendors and distribution platforms, including a stint leading Fidelity's acquisition of eMoney Advisor before running Kestra's broker-dealer and RIA businesses.

Finally, Shah spent nearly three decades building fintech companies, most recently helping scale 55ip's tax-management platform to roughly $70 billion in assets before its 2020 acquisition by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

A tangled web of tech

Kodialam's comments in the release point to a specific pain point for multi-firm platforms.

"Home offices supporting large, diverse networks of firms across fragmented technology ecosystems have long been expected to centralize operations and scale without the infrastructure to do so effectively," she said.

That's a familiar complaint among RIA aggregators, many of which have grown primarily through a wave of mergers and acquisitions that shows little sign of slowing this year, and which often inherit incompatible back-office systems from the firms they buy.

Read more: Can mega RIAs go public? Integration may decide it, veteran leaders say

Dispatch's core product maps the data fields each custodian requires, pulls in whatever information already exists across an advisor's CRM and planning tools, and generates a single client request rather than several redundant ones. The company says its workflow has cut complex household onboarding from hours to roughly 30 minutes in at least one case study involving Sanctuary Wealth.

"Deep connectivity into custodians is essential to making complex wealth management operations work at scale," said Langlois.

Advisor mobility as the backdrop

The board announcement lands roughly two months after Dispatch introduced Advisor Transitions, a tool it built specifically to move advisors and client assets between firms. That launch came in the wake of what Diamond Consultants' 2025 Financial Advisor Transition Report described as a record year for advisor movement, counting more than 11,000 experienced advisors who switched firms last year.

A separate count by ISS Market Intelligence found nearly 39,000 representatives moved to another firm in 2025. "What we continue to see across the U.S. wealth landscape is steady migration toward independence, with advisors and reps increasingly moving to a more fragmented RIA market," said Alan Hess, vice president at ISS MI.

Shah, whose background is on the operating side of fintech deals rather than advisory practice, tied the board appointments to that same growth story. "The company is solving an urgent, expensive problem that is critical to revenue across the wealth and asset management ecosystem," he said.