Hightower Advisors has selected Dispatch, a data infrastructure company serving the wealth management industry, to manage client data workflows across its fast-growing Hightower Signature Wealth national advisory practice.
The partnership puts Dispatch at the center of Hightower Signature Wealth's operational backbone, responsible for moving, validating, and synchronizing client records across custodial platforms and advisory technology systems.
The arrangement covers Hightower's existing relationships with both Fidelity and Schwab and is designed to scale as the firm continues bringing independent advisory practices under the Signature Wealth brand.
"Ultimately, this is about making it easier for our advisors to deliver a great experience to their clients," said Larry Restieri, chief executive officer of Hightower. "Dispatch provides the data infrastructure that keeps client information accurate and synchronized across the systems that support the relationship, reducing operational friction for advisors and creating a more seamless experience for clients over time."
Launched in late 2025, Hightower Signature Wealth has attracted more than 100 advisors managing a combined $35 billion in assets across more than 30 locations nationwide, with additional practices expected to join in the second half of 2026.
The deal reflects a structural challenge that has quietly accumulated across the registered investment advisor industry as consolidation accelerated over the past decade. Large aggregators that spent years acquiring independent practices now face the harder problem of actually running them as a single, coherent enterprise.
Madalyn Armijo, co-founder and chief operating officer of Dispatch, draws a sharp distinction between those two phases.
"Bringing firms together is fundamentally a transaction: the practices share an owner, but may continue operating with different custodians, technology, data conventions and processes," she told InvestmentNews. "Unifying them takes this much further and means making those practices function as one enterprise while preserving the flexibility advisors need."
Armijo said the industry's delayed focus on true unification was not accidental.
"The first phase of aggregation was optimized for acquiring firms and preserving their autonomy. That allowed aggregators to grow quickly and minimized disruption for advisors, but it also created increasingly fragmented operating environments." Historically, she said, integrating those environments meant "a costly, risky, multiyear rip-and-replace" - a deterrent that kept many firms from attempting it at all.
Armijo said that the firms that spent years aggregating have reached a scale at which fragmentation actively limits operating leverage, growth, and client experience. At the same time, the infrastructure to unify data and workflows without forcing every practice onto an identical technology stack now exists in a way it previously did not.
Hightower Signature Wealth is already running client data workflows across its Fidelity and Schwab custodial relationships through Dispatch. As aggregators expand to additional custodians, a near-certainty as national platforms grow, the orchestration challenge multiplies.
"The complexity compounds quickly and exponentially," Armijo said. "Every custodian has its own APIs, data models, account types, forms, validation rules and status conventions. Adding a custodian is not simply adding another connection; it introduces another set of rules and exceptions that must be translated into a common operating model."
Without dedicated infrastructure to manage that translation layer, Armijo said the failure mode is predictable.
"Firms end up stitching together point-to-point integrations, while also relying on spreadsheets and manual processes. Data gets rekeyed, updates do not reach every system, teams cannot see where an account is stalled, and custodian-specific requirements are often discovered only after paperwork is rejected," she said.
The result is slower account funding, greater operational risk, and an inconsistent client experience across offices, which has direct revenue consequences. Every day assets remain outside the firm is a day the firm cannot earn on them.
The shift toward unified branding and centralized infrastructure represents one of the defining trends in the RIA industry heading into the second half of the decade, but the day-to-day stakes become most visible during an advisor transition; the moment when an entire book of business moves at once.
"An advisor transition can be ground zero: high-stakes, time-sensitive and inherently chaotic," Armijo said. "An advisor's entire business and hundreds of client relationships may be moving at once. Teams are working quickly to piece together client data from spreadsheets, PDFs, emails and legacy systems, determine what is missing, prepare paperwork and reach every client. One incorrect field or mismatched record can mean another phone call, another signature and another delay in moving the client's assets."
Dispatch changes that experience by front-loading the data work. Before a transition begins, the platform collects, reconciles, and validates client data, prepares paperwork, and surfaces exceptions so teams know exactly where attention is required before anything is submitted.
Once a transition is underway, everyone involved has a clear view of what is complete, what is outstanding, and what needs action.
"Operations teams feel prepared, advisors are more relaxed and can focus on guiding their clients, and clients experience an organized, responsive transition," Armijo said. "All of that leads to a more efficient process that gets client assets transitioned and earning."
Hightower has publicly targeted $50 billion in assets for the Signature Wealth platform as the model matures. The platform has drawn in practices ranging from a $275 million Pennsylvania advisory firm to multi-billion dollar ensembles, with each transition representing the kind of high-stakes data orchestration challenge Dispatch is designed to manage.
Rob Nance, co-founder and chief executive officer of Dispatch, framed the broader industry shift in structural terms.
"The first phase of RIA aggregation was about bringing firms together. The next is about actually unifying them," he said. "As aggregators move from collections of independent practices to integrated national practices, they need infrastructure that can standardize client data and workflows across custodians, CRMs, and the rest of the tech stack. That is the layer Dispatch provides."
Armijo goes further in identifying where RIA leaders most commonly misjudge the challenge, with the biggest misconception that integration happens when firms adopt a common brand, organizational structure, or set of applications.
"You can put every practice on the same CRM and still lack common data definitions, synchronized records and consistent workflows. That might feel integrated on paper, but in practice, it's anything but," she said.
The revenue risk from that gap surfaces at precisely the moments that matter most: advisor transitions, account openings, transfers, and funding.
"Incomplete or inconsistent data leads to rejected paperwork, repeated client outreach and accounts that take longer to open or fund," Armijo said. "Advisors also spend time fixing operational issues instead of serving clients or driving growth. Data infrastructure is not simply a back-office efficiency; it is what allows an integrated practice to convert its scale into revenue."
Dispatch's platform achieves flexibility across different technology environments through what Armijo describes as a translation layer built specifically for wealth management, encompassing a financial-services-specific data model, a firm entity graph, an agentic action layer, and an audit and control pane.
Practices can use different CRMs, configurations, and operating processes while the underlying client and account data follows consistent definitions and standards across the platform.
Hightower Advisors, headquartered in Chicago, is an SEC-registered investment adviser. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities, LLC, a member of FINRA and SIPC. Dispatch is based in New York.
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