Apr 18, 2025
Transforming Wealth Management Through Vertical AI: FastTrackr AI on gAI Ventures Podcast
“He’s been spending time on the beaches of Miami... meeting wealth advisors, diving into AI, and maybe working a little bit too,” joked Amit, co-founder at gAI Ventures, as he introduced Vineet Mohan on their Build AI podcast.Vineet has spoken to dozens of advisors, firms, and technologists about the massive transformation quietly underway.
The U.S. wealth industry is on the cusp of a reckoning. Between an impending generational wealth transfer, an aging advisor population, intensifying margin pressure, and an increasingly fragmented technology landscape, cracks are forming in a market that manages over $47 trillion or more in assets.
Generational $ Transfer, Talent Crunch, Fee Compression, Industry Consolidation and a Market That’s Fragmented & Aging
Let’s start with the numbers.
The U.S. wealth management industry manages more than $47 trillion in assets. It employs over 300,000 advisors across roughly 30,000 firms, ranging from Wall Street giants like Morgan Stanley to solo registered investment advisors (RIAs) operating out of modest offices in suburban strip malls.
It’s massive. It’s complex. And it’s tired.
The average advisor is in their mid-50s. Many are planning retirement. Meanwhile, over the next decade, $60 to 80 trillion is expected to move from Baby Boomers to Gen X and Millennials. This transfer of wealth is not just a financial story – it’s a shift in expectations, behaviors, and values. The new generation wants better digital experiences, access to private markets, and financial planning that speaks their language.
Oh, and there’s a talent crisis: the industry is staring down a 100,000 advisor shortfall by 2035. That’s not a typo. It’s a structural crack.
Tech Everywhere, and Yet Nowhere
You’d think technology would’ve already solved this. It hasn’t.
Instead, it’s complicated things.
The now-infamous Kitces Map, which tracks wealth management fintech tools, had about 180 logos in 2018. As of last year? Over 500. That’s not innovation. That’s fragmentation.
Advisors today typically juggle between 3 to 7 software platforms: CRMs, financial planning tools, portfolio managers, custodian interfaces, compliance systems, and document automation platforms. None of them talk to each other seamlessly.
It’s not unusual for a $25 million AUM RIA to feel like they need a part-time CTO.
“I’ve worked in identity and compliance tech in the U.S.,” one of the founders at gAI Ventures mentioned on the podcast. “And even there, we used 75 SaaS tools. It’s no surprise wealth advisors are drowning in tech that was supposed to help them.”
Then AI Walked In, Quietly at First
If you think AI in wealth management is all about robo-advisors, you’re still in 2016. The new AI moment isn’t about replacing advisors. It’s about giving them leverage.
Morgan Stanley, for instance, rolled out “Debrief” - an AI-powered meeting note system developed in partnership with OpenAI - to 16,000 advisors last year. That wasn’t a trial balloon. That was a signal.
Suddenly, advisors had a tool that could listen in, take notes, surface client insights, and help with follow-ups. Not sexy. Just incredibly useful.
And now, smaller firms - without Morgan Stanley’s war chest are following suit. They’re using models like ChatGPT or Gemini to write newsletters, extract data from PDFs, even prep for annual reviews. Adoption is highest in the SMB segment - the overlooked workhorses of the industry.
Here’s why:
SMBs have fewer decision-makers. You’re talking to the founder, not an IT committee.
Manual labor is expensive in the U.S., and AI offers real ROI.
They face less internal red tape around compliance or security, making them faster to adopt.
One RIA managing $25 million in AUM told gAI Ventures they already use AI in client communications and admin workflows. That would’ve been unthinkable a year ago.
What is FastTrackr AI
FastTrackr AI, led by Vineet Mohan, who spent over a decade in banking is now building alongside real advisors to fix what they deal with every day.
The goal? Automate the “grunt work” advisors hate:
Prepping for client meetings
Taking notes and tracking action items
Turn client financial docs (PDFs, scans) into structured data and proposals - eliminating manual extraction & aggregation
Filling out repetitive forms
Consolidating fragmented software data
It’s not glamorous. It’s just essential.
Think of FastTrackr AI as the intelligent glue between the systems advisors already use. It doesn’t replace CRMs or custodians. It connects them. And with generative AI, it can pre-fill forms, surface insights, and remove the need for back-and-forth workflows.
“Honestly, a lot of this wasn’t even automatable with RPA or traditional logic,” says Mohan. “But with AI, we can now handle the ambiguity and fragmentation that’s baked into the industry.”
The Real Moat: Expertise and Empathy
In a world where anyone can spin up an AI tool in a weekend using drag-and-drop platforms and public LLMs, what actually creates defensibility?
Here’s the answer:
Relationships with actual industry players—not just sales leads, but deep design partnerships.
A real understanding of the workflows. Where the friction is. What actually matters.
Technical excellence, sure—but used in service of solving well-scoped problems, not chasing trends.
This is especially important in wealth management. Advisors are not eager to try flashy experiments. They want reliability, clarity, and time-saving outcomes.
With FastTrackr AI, what’s being built is not just a tool - but a partner that gets it.
Vertical AI Isn’t Slower. It’s Deeper.
Vertical AI isn’t about speed – it’s about depth.
While horizontal platforms like ChatGPT or Claude can do many things reasonably well, they struggle with precision in complex, regulated domains. Vertical AI—built with context, tuned on real-world workflows, and integrated into the industry’s tech stack—is where the real transformation happens.
And here’s the kicker: because it's not mass-market B2C, it grows quietly. Organically. The way real B2B adoption works.
The Future Looks Like This
Advisors don’t have to chase data across five systems to prep for a meeting.
Compliance processes are embedded and automated in every workflow.
New client onboarding isn’t a multi-day exercise—it’s a guided flow assisted by AI.
And support staff, instead of being stuck with admin tasks, spend time on meaningful client interactions.
We’re not talking about replacing humans. We’re talking about finally making good on the tech industry's long-standing promise: to help people do their jobs better.
Final Thought: It’s Not About the Tools, It’s About the Timing
Technology changes fast. Industry behavior doesn’t.
But this time, the stars are aligning. You have:
An aging industry with unsolved pain points
A talent shortage that makes automation essential
A shift in client expectations, demanding digital sophistication
And an AI wave that, for the first time, can thread the needle between intelligence and execution
FastTrackr AI isn’t promising to reinvent wealth management. They’re doing something more radical: fixing it from within.
The wave is here. And this time, the real revolution will be built with empathy, code and industry first solutions.
