Farther, the New York-based wealthtech firm building its own proprietary wealth platform, has recruited two senior technology leaders to push the usability of its advisor tools further.
Kai Conragan, a 15-year Google veteran, joins as vice president and head of UX, while Allan Smith, who led hardware research and development at Facebook and served as a space program director at NASA, takes the role of vice president of product.
The hires signal a deliberate pivot toward design as a competitive differentiator at a moment when advisors are increasingly vocal about the usability shortcomings of the technology they depend on daily. As wealthtech vendors embed AI agents deeper into advisor workflows, the pressure to make those tools genuinely intuitive has grown sharper across the industry.
"Technology should expand what advisors and their clients can do, not replace them," said Brad Genser, Farther co-founder and chief technology officer. "Kai and Allan have the right set of skills to bring together deep engineering and usability."
Conragan spent 15 years at Google working on UX for Google Search, where he built and scaled a global team as the product evolved from desktop to mobile to AI-powered interfaces.
During his tenure, he contributed to the launch of several major products, including Knowledge Graph, Google News, Gboard, and Gemini in Search. In his new role at Farther, he will apply what the firm describes as a "design-first" approach to the development of its Intelligent Wealth Platform.
"Farther is spearheading an approach to fintech that establishes trust and transparency between advisors and clients," Conragan said. "I'm excited to bring world-class, user-friendly design to systems that do the work, and to see them transform this industry."
Smith brings a markedly different background. As a systems engineer, he served as a Rapid Response Space Program director at NASA before moving to Facebook (now Meta) where he built the company's Area 404 hardware lab from the ground up and designed its high-performance computing prototyping environment.
He also co-founded Syvius, a machine learning company that built athlete performance optimization systems for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and the National Hockey League.
"By building better systems, we can empower advisors everywhere to focus on what is most valuable: the emotional relationship between people and their finances," Smith said.
Farther has positioned itself as a technology-native alternative to legacy wealth management since its founding in 2019. The firm raised $150 million in a Series D round led by General Atlantic in May 2026, and has reported five-times year-over-year AUM growth across multiple reporting periods.
That trajectory - detailed when the firm more than doubled AUM to $1.6 billion in late 2023 - has been built on a premise that technology inefficiencies cost advisors time they should be spending with clients.
Conragan and Smith chose Farther, according to the company, because of its commitment to building proprietary in-house technology rather than assembling a stack of third-party tools - an approach that gives product and design teams greater control over the user experience end to end.
Both executives will be based in California and will oversee the continued development of Farther's Intelligent Wealth Platform, the foundation of the firm's broader ambition to serve high-net-worth individuals and their advisors as a generational financial institution. The platform's roadmap now includes an expansion from wealth management into asset management services.
The appointments come as scrutiny of wealthtech usability has intensified across the industry. A 2025 report from Orion found that advisors expected technology investment to rise 16% year-over-year, even as integration gaps between platforms remained a leading pain point - a challenge that firms like Farther are banking on design leadership to solve.
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