Advice Should See Your Whole Financial Life, Not Just the Part That’s Custodied

When most wealth managers start a conversation, it sounds familiar:

“Move your money to our platform so we can advise you.”

That line isn’t just friction, it reveals what the product is optimizing for. Traditional wealth firms grew up valuing Assets Under Management (AUM) because that number maps directly to revenue. The more you custodied, the more fees you earned.

But in the world we live in today, financial lives are too fragmented for that old logic to make sense.

What “Assets Under Advice” really captures

In “Why We Believe Assets Under Advice Matters More Than Assets Under Management,” Alphanso reframes how we think about the advisor-client relationship. Instead of measuring influence by what you control, it proposes a metric based on what you truly see and advise on. (Alphanso)

Modern financial lives stretch across:

• Multiple 401(k)s accumulated across jobs
• Taxable accounts you’ve built yourself
• Career equity like RSUs or ESPPs
• Startup equity, private positions, and cash in banks

These aren’t edge cases. They are the lived reality of experienced professionals who have spent years assembling and managing their own balance sheets.

Traditional AUM treats anything outside the advisory custody boundary as “outside context.” But that approach undercounts the true financial picture. In contrast, Assets Under Advice (AUA) counts every part of the net worth you can meaningfully influence, even when you don’t retake custody. (Alphanso)

From a product standpoint, this shift matters because it aligns incentives with what clients actually value:

• Visibility instead of control
• Influence instead of custody
• Understanding instead of consolidation

That’s why at Alphanso we intentionally built a wealth stack that doesn’t require moving all your money just to get meaningful guidance.

Seeing the full picture instead of partial views

In “The Future of Wealth,” Alphanso digs deeper into why custody-centric advice produces partial answers in a world where people’s financial lives are intentionally distributed across places and instruments. (Alphanso)

Imagine a professional who has:

• A 401(k) from a past employer
• A taxable account started years ago
• RSUs vesting over time
• Startup equity not held inside a broker
• Cash in multiple banks

Pulling only the custodied pieces into one place does not give a complete picture of risk, tax planning opportunities, or where flexibility and constraint live in that person’s long-term plan.

One simple but powerful insight from that piece is this: visibility is the constraint, not intent. Advisors want to help, but they can only act on what they can see. (Alphanso)

This is a core product challenge we embraced early on. If insight depends on custody, then advice will always be reactive and incomplete. If insight depends on data, even read-only data, then we can help users make better decisions while they keep control over their own life.

So at Alphanso, you can securely link accounts, watch patterns and exposures across everything you own, and let that inform the advice you and your advisor use. That approach preserves control while enhancing clarity.

Why this matters for real users

When we talk to intelligent, thoughtful investors, people with 10+ years of financial history, the pushback is never against advice itself. It’s against starting over.

These users have intentionally curated portfolios. They know why a particular tax lot matters. They chose a broker because of specific tools or integrations. They don’t want to disrupt their existing ecosystem just to get advice.

The product insight we kept hearing was simple:
Advice should extend over your life, not require replacing it.

This directly connects to the vision in the AUA essay. It isn’t that custody doesn’t matter, it’s that custody shouldn’t be the precondition to advising well. (Alphanso)

Users want:

• To preserve their chosen brokerages
• To maintain specific asset allocations they’ve tuned
• A coordinated view across all holdings
• Strategic guidance that reflects their real, whole financial life

This is what Assets Under Advice actually measures, not the size of a custodial bucket, but the scope of influence and understanding.

From control to context: how advice evolves

Traditional advisory models implicitly say:

“Move your assets here so we can give you a plan.”

The future looks different. It says:

“Let us understand your reality so the advice we give actually matters.”

This subtle change in wording reflects a much deeper product philosophy.

Custody-centric advice forces clients into a binary choice: move everything or accept limited visibility. But modern investment lives are rarely binary. They are multidimensional. They intersect with tax planning, liquidity needs, career equity compensation, private investments, cash timing, and future goals.

The way Alphanso thinks about this is not just pro-technology. It’s pro-clarity. The product team sees every account, every asset type, every vesting schedule, and every obligation as data points that shape real decisions, not as things to be stitched into a new custody silo.

That’s why advice built on Assets Under Advice is inherently more anticipatory. It doesn’t wait for events to unfold. It reveals patterns early, concentration risk, tax timing interactions, cash needs, before they become problems.

What this means for the future of wealth

Shifting to an AUA mindset isn’t about rejecting modern custodial systems. It’s about evolving how advice works in a world where complexity is the norm and visibility is the first step toward better outcomes.

At Alphanso, this philosophy informs everything we build:

• Secure, read-only account linking
• A consolidated view of risk and opportunity
• Subscription pricing aligned with value, not asset capture
• Advisory that follows your assets wherever they live rather than trying to confine them

That vision lets you organize your financial life around your flexibility, not around a firm’s custody model. It lets advice be anticipatory instead of reactive. It lets visibility be the starting point, not the finish line.

For people juggling RSUs, legacy accounts, private positions, and real estate, that makes all the difference.

If you’d like to explore these ideas in more depth, both essays are worth reading:

• Why We Believe Assets Under Advice Matters More Than Assets Under Management - https://alphanso.ai/blogs/why-we-believe-assets-under-advice-matters-more-than-assets-under-management (Alphanso)
• The Future of Wealth: Advice on All Your Assets, Not Just the Ones We Hold - https://alphanso.ai/blogs/the-future-of-wealth-advice-on-all-your-assets-not-just-the-ones-we-hold (Alphanso)

If you want help incorporating this product philosophy into your own design thinking or marketing, just let me know at https://alphanso.ai/request-a-callback