Insights
The Abacus Blog
Thought leadership in the CEO's voice on wealth tech, AI, and the structured data layer underneath every wealth management platform.
A Family Is an Institution Now. Treat Its Data Like One.
A hundred and twenty-four trillion dollars is about to change hands. Most of it will move through financial records that would not survive a single institutional audit. The standard for a family's data should be the standard we hold any institution to — owned, continuous, auditable. Right now it isn't close.
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Finance Doesn't Have a Software Problem. It Has a Labor Problem.
For every dollar a wealth firm spends on software, it spends roughly six more on the humans who keep that software true. The industry keeps trying to automate the six away. It can't — and the firms that understand why will own the next decade.
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What We're Asking of the Wealth Industry
A direct ask to peers, partners, and clients. Four commitments: do the hard work, the client owns their data, render anywhere, and the database wins when there's a discrepancy. The hard work is the moat.
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The Financial OS: What Payments, Taxes, and Estates Look Like in 5 Years
The data layer is the system of record. The financial OS is the system of execution — payments, taxes, estate funding, all flowing from a single source of truth. Whoever builds the data lake well enough to be trusted with the workflow on top of it becomes the rails.
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What the $84 Trillion Wealth Transfer Looks Like If We Don't Fix the Data
Eighty-four trillion dollars is moving. Right now it moves as chaos — boxes of paper, login lists nobody understands, a spreadsheet that is always out of date. Here is what it looks like when it moves as structured data instead.
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Permission Your Financial Life: The Rendering-Anywhere Thesis
Imagine the principal of a $300M family office in 2030 — her financial data sits in a structured, permissioned layer she controls. Same data, many renderings, all permissioned by her. The walled-garden model produced fifteen years of decent businesses. The render-anywhere model produces the next thirty.
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White Glove × AI: The Only Combination That Actually Works in Wealth
Humans alone are too expensive and don't scale. AI alone is too sloppy and not defensible. The combination — engineered, with real domain experts, with a logged handoff, producing a structured data layer rather than a report — is what works.
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The Real Economics of the Family Office Back Office
A full-service single-family office can run over $1M a year, with 6–14 bps of assets going every year, in perpetuity, just to know what they own. Why "hire another analyst" stopped working, where AI changes the math, and where it doesn't.
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Public vs. Private Markets: Why No Aggregator Does Both Well
Publics live in one world. Alts live in another. Reality lives in the gap — and that gap is where 90% of an UHNW family's actual balance sheet sits. A field guide to the wealth-data divide and why the convergence is finally inevitable.
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Your Dashboard Isn't the Product. The Data Underneath It Is.
Every wealth-tech dashboard fight is a fight over the wrong layer. The Snowflake lesson — separate the data from the rendering — is about to land on our category, and the firms that win the next decade will be the ones that own the structured database underneath, not the chart on top.
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The Hidden Labor Underneath Every Wealth Management Platform
The structured database of a family's financial life exists today — built by $100K analysts, $500/hr CPAs, and principals logging into GP portals at 11pm. The supply of qualified humans isn't keeping up with the complexity of weird assets.
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Why Wealth Tech Is Crowded — And Why None of It Solves the Real Problem
Every product in our category is a rendering on top of data somebody else assembled by hand. The data layer underneath is mostly empty, mostly manual, mostly held together by very expensive humans.
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