Cerity Partners has named Will Peng as its first chief innovation officer, adding another AI-focused executive title to a wealth management industry racing to formalize its technology leadership.
The New York-based registered investment adviser announced the hire on Wednesday, tasking Peng with overhauling its service model, connecting expertise across business lines, and applying artificial intelligence to build scalable workflows for advisors and clients. The role is new to the firm, which has grown rapidly through a strategy built on mergers and acquisitions.
"As Cerity Partners continues to grow and evolve, bringing someone of Will's caliber to lead our innovation agenda is a defining moment for the firm," said Kevin Hilden, president of Cerity Partners. "His rare combination of entrepreneurial experience, fintech expertise, and deep understanding of AI positions him perfectly to accelerate how we deliver the CP Way for our clients, advisors, and colleagues."
Peng joins Cerity Partners after founding Northstar, a fintech company that built an employee financial wellness and advisory platform for large employers including Workday, Airbnb and Affirm. Before that, he was a partner at venture capital firm Red Swan, whose portfolio has included Coinbase, Guideline and Warby Parker. He has also worked as an adviser and investor to technology executives and startups outside the wealth management sector.
Cerity Partners' hire lands amid a broader scramble among wealth management firms to build out dedicated AI leadership benches, a trend that has accelerated over the past two years as advisers face pressure to modernize client service and back-office operations.
Last month, Raymond James hired former Vanguard executive Seth Ford as senior vice president and chief architect. Ford, who spent three years leading agentic digital products at Vanguard and 23 years before that at Fidelity Investments, will oversee enterprise architecture across Raymond James' technology platforms and cloud infrastructure as part of an expanding AI mandate.
"Seth has demonstrated strong leadership and success across enterprise architecture, agentic product management, sophisticated database design, modern cloud computing architecture and resilient distributed systems throughout his career," Raymond James chief information officer Andy Zolper said of the hire.
Ford's appointment builds on a leadership structure the firm began assembling last year, when it promoted longtime executive Stuart Feld to the newly created role of chief artificial intelligence officer and later added David Solganik as head of AI strategy. Vin Campagnoli, the firm's executive vice president of technology and operations, said the buildout reflects a broader push to "deliver tools that empower financial professionals, enhance efficiency and create meaningful value for clients."
LPL took a comparable step in 2025, hiring former JPMorgan Chase executive Vaughn Harvey as its first chief data and artificial intelligence officer. Harvey, who previously held senior analytics roles at Morgan Stanley and PwC, was charged with advancing LPL Financial's data strategy and AI tools for advisers as the firm scaled up its AI Advisor Solutions platform.
The pattern across these hires points to a shift in how large advisory firms and RIAs are structuring their technology leadership: rather than folding AI initiatives into existing IT departments, firms are increasingly creating standalone C-suite roles with direct authority over firmwide innovation strategy. Vanguard's own move in this direction came earlier this year with the rollout of Vanguard's recently launched AI portfolio assessment tool for advisers, a project Ford helped lead before departing for Raymond James.
For Cerity Partners, which has beein expanding aggressively through mergers with regional wealth management practices, the innovation officer role comes with a demanding mandate of helping knit together a single technology and service standard as the firm scales.
Peng's background outside traditional wealth management – spanning startup leadership, venture investing and enterprise fintech – sets him apart from peers such as Ford and Harvey, who arrived from within large financial institutions.
Whether firms benefit more from recruiting AI leaders steeped in enterprise financial services or from entrepreneurs with outside fintech experience remains an open question the industry is testing in real time, one hire at a time.
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