Mercer Advisors announced that it has completed the rollout of Aspen Investing, a proprietary investment platform that puts the firm’s centralized portfolio management capabilities directly in the hands of every advisory team in its network.
The Denver-based mega-RIA's update, revealed Tuesday, effectively brings client portfolios fully inside Aspen, the advisory technology system Mercer uses to coordinate planning, tax and estate work.
Aspen Investing now functions as that system’s investment engine, drawing on what the firm describes as a centralized investment platform of more than $100 billion.
Mercer said the platform is meant to give access to customized strategies at scale while lowering portfolio costs through strategic relationships with asset managers, though the announcement did not disclose specifics on fee levels or projected savings.
Mercer developed Aspen Investing with wealth technology provider Orion. The platform relies on unified managed accounts, or UMAs, which hold strategies from multiple third-party managers within a single account and consolidate reporting. Advisors can align each portfolio with a client’s financial plan and add tax management, security-level exclusions or additions, values-based screens and alternative investment allocations.
Several capabilities are new. Mercer’s own investment team now builds and manages direct indexing portfolios, in which clients own the individual stocks of an index rather than a fund that tracks it.
The platform runs tax-loss harvesting daily and lets advisors set a capital gains tax budget. It can also work around low-basis legacy holdings, a feature aimed at clients sitting on large unrealized gains and at advisory firms joining Mercer through acquisition.
The firm also touted the platform's capability to support proposal generation, advanced reporting with proprietary business intelligence, and help enhance risk monitoring.
“Aspen Investing was designed to give every client access to the kind of portfolio management typically reserved for endowments and large institutions, delivered in a way that reflects their specific goals and circumstances,” said Donald Calcagni, Mercer’s chief investment officer, who leads an investing force of more than 125 professionals.
Mercer Advisors President Daniel Gourvitch framed the launch as a break from standardized model portfolios.
“We’ve moved beyond models to create truly customized investment programs, built to reflect each family’s unique financial context and preferences,” he said.
The platform works with multiple custodians including Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments and Raymond James. Avantos, an AI-native operating system for financial services firms, supported its development.
“Mercer Advisors’ Aspen Investing platform is a case study in personalization where every family can have a portfolio tailored to their unique goals, without sacrificing efficiency,” said Natalie Wolfsen, chief executive of Orion.
Aspen Investing is the latest layer on a platform Mercer has been expanding since 2024. In June 2024, the firm introduced Aspen Partners, a private markets offering built with Opto Investments, as a way to bring private market investments to qualified clients. That offering was built to give qualified investors access to private equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate and infrastructure strategies, and is now built into Aspen Investing.
In July this year, Mercer released the second generation of its AI-enabled Aspen platform, which it describes as a knowledge graph linking clients, advisory teams and the services they receive. The firm said then that the system was in use by more than 1,100 of its wealth professionals.
Mercer's push into in-house direct indexing comes as the strategy moves more prominently into the mainstream. Direct indexing assets reached $1.2 trillion at the end of 2025, according to Cerulli Associates, though a recent FTSE Russell survey of advisors on direct indexing found client education and advisor knowledge remain obstacles to adoption.
The firm's Aspen platform announcement also comes shortly after it tapped the syndicated loan market to refinance $1.9 billion of private debt backing, which it swapped out with a seven-year term loan and revolving credit facility.
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