As the advisor fintech universe has grown, financial advisors are debating about what kind of technology they should be building. Should they adopt an all-in-one technology platform that does everything? Or should they piece together a tech stack built of their favorite, disparate software offerings that they can then blend into what they are already doing?

A new slate of firms has arrived to help, now that it seems the latter approach is winning out.

“Advisors did warm to the all-in-one approach because of the ease of adoption, because advisors were tired of having to deal with five or six systems,” says Damon Deru, CEO of AdvisorPeak, a portfolio rebalancing fintech. “But there’s been a transition: Advisors don’t want to be limited to technology provided by a broker-dealer, custodian, or all-in-one platform. They want to combine the platform with best-of-breed plug-in-play software to better serve their niche.”

That transition hasn’t stopped a seemingly never-ending stream of mergers and acquisitions among technology providers—especially as large technology platforms like Orion and Envestnet have endeavored to create “end-to-end” platforms on which an advisor can manage the entirety of their practice—but it has created new problems for RIAs and broker-dealers, large and small.

Perhaps the most persistent of these problems is how to make all of a business’s myriad technologies work together—from old platforms originally developed by enterprise firms, maybe as far back as two decades ago, to newfangled AI-driven software that promises to drastically cut down on back-office expenses and menial tasks common to every advisor.

“We try to look at where we need to be best in class to help advisors serve clients,” says Ann Senne, head of U.S. advice and solutions for RBC Wealth Management. “There are so many new tools that can be brought to bear, but a new tool that isn’t integrated into the way you deploy services becomes technology that just sits on the shelf.”

Yet legacy technology and purported all-in-one platforms often fail to play nice with the latest and greatest fintech. These platforms usually lack the ability to create deep integrations to share data and functionality across different pieces of software, says Deru.

He says there are three layers of integration. The most shallow is basic data-sharing between software, which is “pretty common.” If you go one layer deeper, you can allow advisors to have a single sign-on that launches multiple applications.

The deepest integrations, however, involve directly building and embedding capabilities across different systems, he says.

Until now, both enterprises and small advisors often haven’t had the information technology manpower to custom-build all of their integrations in depth. Their resources might have been better spent just creating their own solutions.

“When I first started in the industry, everything was independent and unbundled,” Deru says, “but over the last decade, we’ve seen a bundling of software and a rise of the all-in-ones, and they’ve been successful.

“We’ve also seen custodians and broker-dealers continue to build out their own technology to offer to advisors for free. That doesn’t kill innovation, but it does make it hard for independent fintech to compete. Everyone needs to continue to have open architecture and updated integrations.”

That doesn’t quite solve the problem of integrating the new software with pre-existing platforms, but there are solutions to address this problem for firms of all sizes, many of which use cutting-edge technology.

One such solution is Benjamin, a business support system for financial firms that is, at heart, an AI-driven automation assistant handling advisor tasks like scheduling, meeting preparation and onboarding follow-up. Benjamin has also become an integration hub, says Matt Reiner, the firm’s CEO and co-founder.

“We have integrations with custodians, CRMs, portfolio management systems and document management systems, unifying everything in a holistic manner,” Reiner says. “We’re not trying to be the platform. We’re trying to make everything else more effective and efficient. But we’re part of the full stack of the entire office.”

Another solution, INVENT, specifically targets enterprise firms struggling to integrate third-party technologies with their older platforms.

Backed by a cloud-based development platform that allows firms to create their own integrations without coding experience or a lot of technological know-how, INVENT creates a single-view operating environment to allow large bank or broker-dealer advisors to more easily move between disparate pieces of software.

“Having operated broker-dealers and RIAs for my entire career, one of the biggest issues we’ve had in our operating environment is that we have legacy everything,” says Larry Roth, a strategic advisor to INVENT who in the past led two giant broker-dealers, Cetera and Advisor Group, as chief executive officer. “If you were buying firms and bringing advisors together, attempting to bring the technology together—everything from CRM to account opening to trading to ongoing service—it’s a major undertaking. INVENT speaks to putting all of these processes in a single pane of glass for the advisors and the operating and executive teams.”

An earlier entrant among the firms trying to solve the integration question, CircleBlack, was created to help firms of all sizes, and it has relentlessly pursued new integrations on behalf of its users.

CEO Alex Sauickie describes CircleBlack as a “bundler” of unbundled advisor software.

“I think about television, and I’m a big user of Roku,” Sauickie says. “Roku is the connective tissue that brings together a lot of different streaming channels, and we’re kind of the Roku of wealth management platforms. Traditional advisor technology was like closed containers, and for a lot of companies remains that way. They want to take this more modern approach, but their technology debt is now measured in years and decades.”

Other companies, like Riskalyze, support advisors trying to build their own technology in house. In March, the company rolled out a “Build Your Own Tech Stack” tool with a list of different software providers that integrated with its risk analytics and management software and offered step-by-step instructions on how to best piece the technology together into a coherent whole.

Riskalyze does not, however, want to become an all-in-one technology company, like an Orion or Envestnet, or an integration hub, says Dan Bolton, the firm’s managing director of customer marketing.

“We’re still focused on risk, portfolio analytics and trading right now, but advisors using best-of-breed solutions is the future of our industry,” he says. “That can only happen if integration [gets] to the next level.”

At AdvisorPeak, Deru sees the future as one where enterprise firm and custodian platforms are distilled down to one central component, a CRM, that then integrates into each practice’s—or practitioner’s—customized, personalized tech stack, allowing every individual in the industry to build precisely the technology they need for the practice and clientele they want.

“If a custodian, broker-dealer or large RIA is building out technology, it can still give everyone complete flexibility,” Deru says. “In the future, fintech isn’t going to be separate pieces of software or big platforms; it’s going to be all data and whatever the advisor is using as their central hub.”