Devon Klumb has seen the advisory business from multiple angles. Having started his career as a commodities trader before joining Northwestern Mutual as a financial advisor, he co-founded and scaled Commas, a Cincinnati RIA built on an automated custodial platform, before selling it to Truepoint Wealth Counsel.
Now Director of Sales for Betterment Advisor Solutions in Cincinnati, Ohio, Klumb spoke with InvestmentNews to share his unique insights on how advisory firms are changing their technology, operations, and custodial relationships.
Addressing the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the advisor-client relationship, he believes advisors should expect clients to have asked basic financial questions to a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Claude ahead of meetings.
"That's not a threat, it's a gift. It means the meeting can skip some of the explaining and go straight to the decisions the client actually needs help making: the trade-offs, the behavioral gaps, the 'what does this mean for me' that a model can't own," he said.
That framing runs through the 2026 Betterment Advisor Solutions survey - the firm's third annual study of U.S. investors who work with a financial advisor - and it shapes how Klumb advises the firms he works with today.
The survey, fielded in June 2026 from 1,001 U.S. investors, found that 75 percent use AI at least occasionally for financial tasks as InvestmentNews has reported, but just three percent would consider replacing their advisor with an AI-powered alternative.
The generational loyalty question raised by the survey – Gen Zs are most likely to use AI for financial research but also the most engaged with their advisors - is where Klumb's RIA experience becomes most relevant. He understands that what younger clients are navigating is the kind of problem an advisor is positioned to solve.
"The technology part is fairly simple," he said. "A firm needs to mirror the experience younger clients have everywhere else in their lives. Information should be easy to get to, and they shouldn't have to pick up the phone every time they need something. Operationally, that means adopting technology that gives clients what they need and the firm more capacity for personalized, face-to-face work."
But he said technology alone is not enough. "Younger clients have more information at their fingertips than any generation before them. They're also at the life stage with the most open questions, and it can be harder to act on long-term decisions or make the small daily ones that add up."
That is where Klumb sees the clearest opportunity for advisors. "The best thing an advisor can do for a client at any stage is help them get very clear about what they want to accomplish and why it matters to them. That includes why it matters more than what they'll give up to get there. Then hold them accountable to it. Older clients have generally had more time in the markets to learn why staying the course matters. Trust is the currency those relationships trade on, and with a younger client, the firm is still earning it."
Klumb's years running an RIA give him a specific view on the moment a firm's service model breaks down. In his experience, it rarely happens all at once.
"What I tend to see is that it takes a few years for any firm to figure out exactly what it does and how it does it," he said. "In the beginning, the door is wide open, and a firm will do whatever clients ask for because it needs clients and revenue. A few years in, the firm knows who it serves well, where its specialties are and how to explain its value. At that point, a lot of firms look at their book and realize some of their existing clients no longer fit the service model they want to build. Most never decided on a service model deliberately. They grew into it by working more hours, hiring more people and buying more software."
His own firm took a different approach. "Building infrastructure for scale from the beginning helped us avoid that pressure. The portfolio management and administrative work was automated, so adding households didn't add the same amount of operational work, and our time could go to clients."
For firms approaching that inflection point today, Klumb's advice is precise. "Decide which work actually needs a person before deciding how to tier your clients. Then segment your book based on complexity and how much service each household needs, not only on assets, and set a meeting cadence and deliverables by tier from there. Automate the investment and administrative work across every tier, so the difference between tiers is the depth and frequency of personalized advice each household needs, while every household's money is managed with the same rigor."
The custodian decision is one Klumb has made himself and now advises others on daily. His view is that advisors are asking the right questions more often but not always in the right order.
"In my conversations with firms, the decision usually comes down to how much work the custodian takes off the firm's plate, and how well the custodian supports the firm when it moves assets over," he said. "The relationship gets tested most during the transition, because moving clients is the part every firm worries about, and that's where we've put a lot of our effort."
He is equally clear on what advisors should be doing during the evaluation process. "Walk through the firm's most common workflows from start to finish on every custodian under consideration and count how many times someone on the team has to touch each one," he said. "On our platform, a client deposit is allocated according to the model the advisor assigned, withdrawals work the same way in reverse, and rebalancing can be fully automated based on drift thresholds the advisor sets."
For advisors thinking through where human judgment remains irreplaceable, Klumb points back to the same place he always does - the client relationship itself. "Clients are asking for more tools and information, but for the advisor to always stay in the loop."
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