WealthTech, in plain English.

Automated Customer Account Transfer — the standard pipe for moving an account between custodians.

Run by NSCC, ACATS automates the transfer of brokerage account assets from one firm to another. Most NIGO pain in wealth ops shows up at ACAT submission.

LLM pipelines that plan, call tools, and check their own work — not just chat.

Composed of nodes: retriever → LLM → validator → human-in-loop. The hard part isn't the model — it's the guardrails and the rollback.

Anti-Money-Laundering — monitoring for suspicious activity and filing SARs when needed.

Governed by the BSA + FinCEN. Wealth firms tune transaction-monitoring thresholds and run periodic look-backs; false-positive triage is the daily reality.

A single large order executed and allocated across many accounts.

Saves transaction cost and ensures fair price, but the post-trade allocation is where wash-sales, tax-lot logic, and ineligible-account checks all collide.

The eternal question: build it in-house, license a vendor, or both.

Total-cost-of-ownership, time-to-market, regulatory burden, and team capability are the four big inputs. Most firms underestimate the TCO of build.

The firm that legally holds client assets — e.g. Pershing, Schwab, Fidelity.

Custodians clear trades, hold securities, and produce statements. Most RIAs use 1–3 custodians; multi-custody adds operational complexity but is normal for large firms.

The SEC disclosure every RIA files annually — describes business, fees, conflicts, AUM.

Parts 1 and 2 are public; the brochure (Part 2A) is required reading for clients. A great data source for industry analysis — much of the wealth-tech vendor map starts here.

High-Net-Worth (~$1M+ investable) / Ultra-HNW ($30M+). Drives most wealth-tech feature priorities.

Multi-currency, complex structures (trusts, LLCs), alternatives, and concentrated stock — UHNW workflows are why the platforms are as complex as they are.

Know Your Customer — identity, suitability, and source-of-funds checks at onboarding.

Often paired with AML monitoring. Bad KYC = NIGO at the front door + regulatory fines downstream.

“Not In Good Order” — a missing or wrong field that blocks an account opening or trade.

A custodian's catch-all reject code for an account, transfer, or trade ticket that can't be processed because something is missing, mismatched, or out of policy. Wealth ops teams live and die by their NIGO rate.

Order Management System — where trades are constructed, routed, and tracked.

Sits between PMS (portfolio mgmt) and the broker/custodian. Handles block orders, allocations, compliance pre-checks, and tax-lot routing.

Portfolio Management System — models, rebalances, performance, and billing.

The advisor's command center. Orion, Tamarac, and Black Diamond are the three you'll see most often in US wealth.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation — feeding an LLM curated documents so it cites instead of hallucinates.

For wealth: indexing 10-Ks, ADV filings, and compliance manuals so the model answers with grounded citations. Citation quality is the whole game.

Bringing a portfolio back to its target weights — household-level, tax-aware, drift-triggered.

Modern rebalancers think across the whole household, respect lot-relief preferences, and back off when drift is below the tolerance. Where Orion and Tamarac earn their seats.

Regulation Best Interest — SEC rule requiring broker-dealers to act in clients' best interest.

Tightens the standard above old suitability rules but stops short of full fiduciary. Shapes product disclosures, compensation structures, and rollover advice.

Registered Investment Adviser — a fiduciary firm regulated by the SEC or state.

RIAs charge a fee (often AUM-based), owe a fiduciary duty, and file Form ADV. They're the fastest-growing wealth channel and the primary buyer of WealthTech platforms.

Salesforce's wealth-specific CRM — households, financial accounts, action plans, rollups.

Heavily customized at every firm. Household rollups, custodian connectors, and action-plan templates are the high-value bits — and the source of most implementation pain.

A specific purchase of a security with its own cost basis and holding period.

Lot relief methods (FIFO, HIFO, specific-ID) decide which lot you sell, which decides the gain. Holistiplan and Orion automate most of this — but the edge cases bite.

Unified Managed Account — a single account holding multiple strategies (SMAs, models, mutual funds, ETFs) under one wrapper.

UMA platforms (Envestnet, Orion, FNZ) coordinate sleeves so the household-level tax, rebalancing, and reporting stays clean. Backbone of modern wealth platforms.

IRS rule: a loss is disallowed if you buy the same/substantially identical security within 30 days.

Easy to trigger across accounts inside the same household. Modern rebalancers detect and block these automatically — but spouse accounts and IRAs are classic gotchas.