Orion has surpassed $6 trillion in assets under administration, the RIA technology giant announced Tuesday, while also extending the capabilities of its Denali AI platform.
The assets under administration figure marks a significant 29% jump since the company crossed the $5 trillion-mark one year ago.
“Clients are choosing Orion - small, medium, large enterprises - our pipelines are really full, and we've had a lot of success in those areas,” Orion CEO Natalie Wolfsen told InvestmentNews. “Second is our advisors are growing about 40 percent faster, on average, than the industry, and the third is that we participate in 75 percent of industry M&A.”
The advisor growth number is based on data from Orion’s 2026 Advisor Wealthtech survey and regulatory filings.
On the technology side, Orion also said Tuesday that it now supports over 8.6 million technology accounts and has nearly doubled its wealth management assets year over year to $211 billion.
The Omaha, Neb.-based company, like many others in the wealth management industry, is beating the AI drum, specifically around its Denali AI platform.
Many financial advisors and financial advisory firms are at different phases of their AI journey, according to Wolfsen. “We are seeing tremendous interest across the industry in AI generally and then in Orion AI specifically,” she said. “It's important for our AI solutions to flex into different client needs.”
Orion launched Denali AI in February at the company’s Ascent conference and is now expanding the platform into three different tiers – the original Denali AI; Denali Solutions, which is customized to clients’ strategies; and Powered by Denali, which is embedded across Orion’s individual products, such as Redtail CRM, portfolio accounting, trading, risk, compliance, and planning.
“Each of these is available right now, but again, this is another arms race,” said Wolfsen. “We are going to be adding to the AI solutions powered by Denali throughout the fall and into next year – we’ll probably never stop adding solutions.”
To illustrate her point, the Orion CEO explained that the company is working on a client intelligence system to be delivered through Denali Solutions. The system, which provides ways for advisors to prospect more effectively, is expected to be launched in the fall.
“And so, we're looking at those parts of the advisor business that are most difficult or time consuming for advisors right now, and we're launching AI tools to help,” she said.
More specifically, Wolfsen pointed one of the biggest challenges facing the industry – its talent shortage. In particular, the Orion CEO highlighted McKinsey research from 2025 that said that, by 2034, the industry will be facing a shortfall of about 100,000 advisors.
At the same time, the financial lives of investors in the U.S. have never been more complex, according to Wolfsen, who notes that financial advisors can only serve so many investors. Even at the high end, this is about 120 investors, the Orion chief said, adding that the amount of services investors are demanding from advisors is also going up.
“So you have this real capacity challenge and AI tooling automation has the potential to really unlock that,” she told InvestmentNews. “So not only is there not a deficit of financial advice, you can actually deepen the penetration of great financial advice into lower wealth tiers of clients.”
Wolfsen also addressed some of the wealth management industry’s broader questions around AI, something that has been flagged by other senior figures. Earlier this year, for example, Raymond James’ CEO Paul Shoukry discussed the limitations of AI, and emphasized the importance of the “deeply personal relationships” that advisors have with their clients.
Specifically, Shoukry said that he sleeps better at night knowing that his own financial advisor at Raymond James, if something happened to him, knows his wife and his family and knows what their financial objectives are.
Then there are concerns about AI’s impact on jobs in the financial advice industry.
“I think some financial advisors are really concerned about AI taking over and I just don't believe that to be true,” said Orion’s Wolfsen. “I think that when the stakes are really high, when it's your wealth, when it's your health, you have a very educated consumer that'll come to you with ideas about what they're looking to do with their financial life, at the same time, these are big decisions, folks want to bounce that off of a trained professional.”
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