A record-breaking year of advisor movement has exposed a persistent gap at the heart of wealth management operations: when advisors switch firms, they are largely on their own.
Relying on a loose collection of spreadsheets, manual data entry, and fragmented client records, transitioning practices often have to navigate a highly disruptive process that stresses out both advisors and their clients.
Dispatch, a Miami-based data orchestration platform for wealth management firms, is now betting on a purpose-built software to fix that pain point. Last week, it launched Advisor Transitions, which it describes as the industry's first software built specifically to manage the movement of advisors and client assets between firms.
The launch comes as advisor mobility hits levels not seen in years. According to Diamond Consultants' 2025 Financial Advisor Transition Report, approximately 11,172 experienced advisors changed firms in 2025 alone – a 16.2% increase from 2024 – driven by a push for greater autonomy, better technology, and more flexible business models.
Read more: Along with Commonwealth, add Osaic and UBS to firms that lost a lot of advisors last year
Rob Nance, co-founder and CEO of Dispatch, spent nearly a decade as an advisor at private banks before moving into fintech. That background shapes his view of the the transition problem as a fundamental barrier to advisor freedom.
"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 told InvestmentNews.
"Firms have been forced to choose between a custodial program they may not qualify for and a manual process built on spreadsheets and people. We built Transitions to give them a third option."
The friction starts with data fragmentation. As the technology available to advisors has expanded dramatically over the past two decades, client information has become increasingly hived off across CRM systems, financial planning tools, billing platforms, and reporting software. When an advisor moves, every one of those records has to be reconciled.
"You have data living in different silos. Imagine you're an advisor going from a practice you started to a larger aggregator ... That data typically doesn't live in one place," Nance said.
On top of that, advisors have to consider the rights they have to move data depending on how they leave. Non-protocol transitions require a different approach than a protocol move, where five specific data points are permitted, or a full-data portability scenario.
Automating that workflow can have a huge operational payoff. According to one case study involving Sanctuary Wealth, Dispatch's software helped compress complex household onboarding times from anywhere between three and eight hours down to roughly 30 minutes. In one recent protocol transition, Sanctuary reportedly moved more than $200 million in client assets onto its platform in less than two weeks.
In the Advisor Transitions launch announcement, Rob Gaudio, head of operations at Sanctuary Wealth described the ROI and operational efficiency from Dispatch's technology as "incredible."
As Nance explained, his platform begins by mapping what data each custodian requires for a given account type – say, an individual brokerage account and an IRA opened simultaneously. It then pulls whatever information already exists in the advisor's systems, identifies the gaps, and generates a single, optimized client request that avoids asking for the same information twice.
"If we know the address is on both applications, we're only asking for the address once," he said. "By blending it together, understanding the required data, and determining the data you have, it makes it really seamless."
The platform generates custodial forms for client signatures, opens accounts across multiple custodians in parallel – a plus for RIAs running on multi-custodian arrangements – and keeps data synchronized across the advisor's technology stack once the transition is complete The same software serves ongoing account-opening needs after the move is done.
For advisors weighing independence, Nance said the operational complexity of a move has historically been a turn-off for wantaway advisors.
"Imagine you're an advisor making the decision to move your book of business. It's kind of a scary moment because there's a lot of uncertainty there. Will your clients move with you? Will it be painful for your clients to do so?" he said.
"One reason advisors don't go independent is they don't want to deal with the headache of moving everything," he explained. "They don't want their clients to have a bad experience."
According to the Diamond Consultants report, the advisors jumping firms in 2025 had an average of 22 years in the industry. In other words, it's experienced, large-book advisors who were most willing to take the leap, but also the ones with the most to lose if a transition goes poorly.
The stakes were especially high for the high-profile launch of OpenArc Corporate Advisory, led by a team that had previously managed approximately $129 billion in assets at Merrill Lynch.
“What I would say to anybody contemplating [a breakaway], follow the rules. Wear the white hat, follow the rules, and we did,” Fletcher, chief operating officer at OpenArc, previously told InvestmentNews. “Protocol is an accepted industry standard that Merrill actually has led and supported when it first came out years ago, so we are simply following something that they put in place 15 or 20 years ago."
Nance said Dispatch can handle all transition scenarios – regardless of whether advisors can take no data, some data, or all of it. That flexibility is central to the product's design, given the varying legal frameworks governing advisor departures.
Built on Dispatch's core data platform, Advisor Transitions applies proprietary AI to merge, match, and reconcile records across custodians, CRMs, and financial planning tools. But Nance also made it clear that AI shouldn't be seen as a silver bullet to transition problems, and focusing on workflows might be better.
"When you think about completing an application, it's the same every time," he said. "There's never a change in what's required for an individual account type at a custodian."
In that context, AI is used to accelerate processing and speed up delivery to end users, rather than to generate outputs that require judgment. That can make all the difference in a highly regulated industry where error tolerance is essentially zero, compared to other software contexts where a 5% failure rate might be good enough.
"When we built this transitions tool in particular, correctness and preciseness were very important," he said. "You've got to be extremely precise."
As Americans transition from saving for retirement to spending in retirement, new research suggests sustainable income matters more than account balances.
The agreement marks the end of a four-decade sub-advisory partnership while giving Wellington a scaled distribution platform for financial advisors.
LPL recently has softened its antipathy to mainstream marketing.
The veteran independent broker-dealer executive brings crisis-tested leadership to the AI-powered data platform
Arax and Waverly also staged their own East Coast expansions by acquiring a family-owned practice and a Maryland-based wealth firm.
As $84 trillion prepares to change hands, advisors who treat estate planning as peripheral are quietly building a sieve, not a book.
In volatile markets, the advisors who win aren't the ones with the best calls - they're the ones whose clients stay the course.
