Hey everyone — Happy Memorial Day weekend. I hope you get a chance to shift gears, grab some time away, and ease into summer mode a little bit.

This week, I spent a couple of days in Phoenix at the Envestnet Summit, meeting with advisors, partners, and some of the custodians we work deeply with before heading home for my daughter's eighth-grade graduation and all the good stuff that comes with this time of year.

On the Milemarker side, things are moving fast. We just sent out our May release notes — our team shipped seven releases in the month of May alone. It's been extraordinary to watch how much we're able to deliver for advisors right now.

A couple of things coming up I want you to know about:

But this week on the newsletter side, I've been thinking about airports. Specifically sinkholes. And the opportunity they create for us. LaGuardia, I'm looking at you.

I'm sitting on Delta 1663 headed to Charleston. Three days on the road feel like a week on their own.

While boarding this flight, one of my buddies calls me talking about getting stuck at LaGuardia due to a sinkhole that opened up on the tarmac today.

In a very Jurassic Park sort of way, LGA finds a way.

Things happen. We get stuck, and we have choices.

In our industry today, sinkholes sometimes appear. For every industry, the cheese seems to be on the move.

I was chatting with my friend Julie Littlechild earlier this week on the topic of client experience. Someone had made an outlandish post on LinkedIn about how technology is making way for you to now serve up to 500 clients as an advisor.

I couldn’t help but think, making way to serve 500 clients even more poorly. There will never be a time when comprehensive wealth management can be delivered to 500 clients. If you think your firm has a comprehensive offer and you’re serving astronomical numbers of people, I’d suggest looking deeply at what the word comprehensive means.

I'm sure your PE company would appreciate the aforementioned scale, but what they won't appreciate is how poor this will impact your NPS, brand, or the families that might gain a negative experience with financial advice.

The saying goes that for every crisis (or sinkhole), there’s an opportunity. The shortcomings in our industry are a massive opportunity for firms that value doing better for their clients and beyond. With a third of advisors ready to move to the beach and trade their desk for a golf bag full time, this era is teeming with opportunity to do better.

So where are the opportunities? Let's break it down.

Today, if you serve wealth management clients, you have no reason not to know:

What their full financial picture looks like. Not just the assets you manage. Their held-away accounts. Their 401(k) at work. Their spouse's old IRA sitting at a custodian they forgot about. The mortgage rate they locked in 2021. Their tax situation. Their insurance gaps. The data is available. The integrations exist. The excuses don't.

What's actually happening in their lives. Not from a once-a-year check-in call where you ask how the kids are doing. From systems that track life events, surface trigger moments, and prompt you to reach out before the client has to call you. A kid turning 16. A parent entering assisted living. A business hitting a revenue milestone. The signals are everywhere if you're paying attention — and the tools to pay attention have never been better.

How they actually feel about working with you. Not your gut sense. Real feedback. Structured, consistent, honest feedback. Julie has been beating this drum for years and she's right. Most firms have no idea whether their clients would recommend them or warn a friend away. They just assume the silence means satisfaction. It doesn't.

What they're worried about that they haven't told you yet. Estate planning gaps. Long-term care concerns. Whether their kid is going to blow through an inheritance. Tax exposure from a concentrated stock position. The best advisors aren't waiting for the client to bring it up. They're bringing it to the client with a plan already sketched out.

Here's the thing — none of this is theoretical. None of it requires some magical future state of technology. Every single one of these capabilities is available right now, today, to any firm willing to do the work of connecting the dots.

And if you're a firm that serves advisors? The opportunity is even wider.

Most advisor platforms are still shipping features nobody asked for while ignoring the stuff that actually makes an advisor's day better. Advisors don't need another dashboard. They need fewer tabs. They need data that flows without someone re-keying it. They need workflows that don't require a PhD in Zapier. They need to open their CRM on Monday morning and know exactly who to call, why, and what to say — without spending 45 minutes figuring it out.

The firms that build excellent foundations — whether you're an RIA, a broker-dealer, a TAMP, or a platform builder — are going to eat market share from the ones who don't. Not because they had better marketing. Not because they had a bigger PE check behind them. Because they actually made the experience better. For the advisor. For the client. For the family sitting across the table wondering if this person actually knows them.

The sinkhole at LGA will get patched. The flights will resume. Everyone will forget it happened by next week.

But the sinkholes in our work lives — the gaps in how we serve people, the data we ignore, the experiences we phone in — those don't patch themselves. Someone has to decide to do better.

The firms that make that decision right now are going to look back at 2026 the way the best RIAs look back at 2008. Not as the year everything was hard. As the year they pulled ahead for good.

Episode 145: On this week’s episode, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Aaron Wormus, Chief Technology Officer at SMArtX Advisory Solutions. Aaron has spent years building technology infrastructure for the financial services industry, from hedge fund platforms to enterprise-grade advisory systems.

Kyle and Aaron explore the growing shift from fragmented advisory technology toward unified enterprise infrastructure. Aaron breaks down how UMA architecture changes the advisor experience, why portfolio accounting engines power real-time innovation, and how firms can build modern “advisor-built enterprise platforms” using best-of-breed technology. They also discuss AI, data orchestration, operational toil, and why the firms most open to technology and experimentation will have a major advantage in the years ahead.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(01:13) - Aaron’s money moment and the early days of SMArtX

(03:15) - Is SMArtX a TAMP, a fintech platform, or something else entirely?

(04:37) - What actually makes technology “enterprise-grade”

(06:24) - Why UMA architecture changes everything

(09:26) - The hidden infrastructure powering modern advisory platforms

(12:20) - The rise of the advisor-built enterprise platform

(15:15) - Why portfolio accounting engines matter so much

(19:05) - How SMArtX and Milemarker fit together

(21:00) - Why the entire industry is moving toward unified infrastructure

(22:24) - AI, orchestration layers, and the future of connected systems

(25:51) - Turning hand-drawn ideas into live AI-powered workflows

(27:31) - AI guardrails, security, and enterprise data protection

(28:34) - Aaron’s predictions for the next three years of wealth tech

(30:27) - Eliminating “toil” inside advisory firms

(32:13) - Aaron’s Milemarker Minute

Five tools. A ticketing system. Half your ops team's week.

That's what it costs most firms to get an answer from their own data.

We just deleted all of it.

Milemarker MCP is live — and in this webinar, Kailash Duraiswami and I will show you what it looks like when querying data, deploying dashboards, managing users, and running platform projects all happen in a single conversation.

No boring slides. No theory. A live demo of the future of wealth platform operations.

Beers, shop talk, and zero slide decks.

At Holy City Brewing—one of Charleston’s best breweries—we’re bringing ~20 advisors together for an easy, no-agenda meetup.

First round’s on us!

Just real conversations about AI tools, broken data, hiring trends, and what’s actually changing in wealth management.

Show up. Say hi. Stay as long as you want.

Register here:

May has been a big month at Milemarker. New chart types, MCP in production, and smarter workflows across the platform — here’s what shipped.

We’ve been focused on making data more flexible, more connected, and easier to act on. This release brings stronger visualization, deeper automation, and better control across the system.

Combination Charts & Scorecard Tiles
Multi-metric storytelling is here. Combination charts now support column + line configurations with synced or unsynced axes. Datatable metrics can also render as KPI scorecards in 1x1 and 2x2 layouts — including progress bars, percentage badges, and flexible metric mapping.

Line & Area Charts
More ways to see your data. Line and area charts are now available alongside bar and column visualizations, making it easier to track trends and performance over time.

MCP API Routes
The platform is now programmable. New MCP routes expose Pages, Menus, Metrics, Forms, Workflows, and Reference Data — enabling automation and agent-driven platform management.

Global Search Access Control
Search is now permission-aware. Results are filtered by user role, email-based access rules, and admin overrides to ensure secure, consistent visibility across the platform.

Public Page CAPTCHA & Springboard SSO

Public forms now include reCAPTCHA v3 protection against spam and bots. Springboard login now supports SAML SSO, starting with Orion.

Workflow Upgrades
Workflows are now more connected and responsive:

Platform & Admin Improvements

Under the Hood
Performance and infrastructure upgrades across the platform:

What’s next:

We’re continuing to expand visualization, automation, and workflow intelligence across Milemarker — more powerful updates are on the way.

If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.

Jud Mackrill