The electronification of trading and digitization of the back office has revolutionized every corner of financial services since the turn of the century. While the benefits have long been recognized on dealer trading desks and among buy-side firms, today nowhere are the fruits of cutting-edge financial technology being enjoyed more than in the once-staid world of wealth management.

The business of providing wealth advice to high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), running a family office, or operating as a registered investment advisor (RIA) once held a somewhat unfair reputation for being rather fusty and old-fashioned. But no longer.

Today, wealth managers are embracing new financial technologies with a degree of enthusiasm comparable to how alternatives managers were swept along by the advent of algorithmic and high-frequency trading in the 2000s. The evidence of this shift is readily apparent in surveys of wealth advisors:

ICE Wealth Management has spent the past six months meeting with wealth advisors and hearing about the tech functionality that they are finding most useful in managing portfolios. In this article, we share on-the-ground feedback from advisors about the three technology enhancements they’re finding most transformative in servicing clients in 2025.

Corporate actions data

One of the data elements that most bedevils wealth managers is the sheer number of corporate actions that need to be reflected and updated in client portfolios.

From quarterly dividends and special dividends, stock splits and reverse splits, to rights issues, award exchanges and M&A activity, accurately capturing and implementing client instructions concerning different types of corporate actions each month represents a serious operational challenge to wealth advisors.

The scale of the monitoring challenge is not widely appreciated: the ICE database tracks corporate actions for approximately 80,000 companies operating in more than 100 countries around the world.

Even for the largest and best resourced wealth management firms, the universe of applicable actions that needs to be captured can be difficult to comprehend. This is just as true for family offices investing personal wealth as it is for alternatives managers pursuing strategies built around trading models that rely on precise regression analysis of historical market data.

Corporate action discovery is just one element of the challenge, however. The data itself has to be delivered in a format that enables it to be seamlessly integrated into wealth management systems and applications in an entirely automated fashion (such as XML or the ISO 15022 standard).

Wealth managers are increasingly seeking web-based and API solutions to provide them with timely notification of corporate actions, not least those necessitating the selection of some elective action on behalf of clients.

The ability to automate the resultant elements of corporate actions - from harvesting tax losses to selectively realizing capital gains in the execution of a tax-advantaged strategy - is all contingent on the timeliness and accuracy of data and is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor for wealth managers.

Continuous evaluated pricing

HNWIs - and ultra-HNWIs in particular - have grown increasingly demanding of their wealth advisor in the information age. Long gone are the days of a weekly check-in to update them on their performance or provide a temperature check of the market. And the concept of a monthly, or even quarterly portfolio statement seems positively antiquated.

Accustomed to logging into an electronic portal for live updates on stocks and exchange-traded funds, clients paying to have their wealth professionally managed now expect to get immediate answers on where the market is trading, and receive real-time visibility into where all of their holdings are being marked, including illiquid assets.

Since fixed income instruments like bonds and asset-backed securities are not marked-to-market, providing clients with a current valuation requires wealth managers to have access to technology that can provide continuous evaluated pricing (CEP).

CEP tools work using a combination of human pricing expertise and automated valuation inputs. Explained simply, human evaluators map out the characteristics of the securities and data sources in a given market sector. Automation tools are then applied that evaluate price changes continuously as market data is processed. If outliers are detected in the data, human evaluators review the exceptions and apply their market knowledge, industry contacts and other expertise to resolve the outliers.

Through this process of using continuously updated evaluations for fixed income securities, CEP allows wealth managers to calculate the net asset value of a client’s portfolio at any time during the trading day, not only providing clients with an up-to-the-minute view of their holdings but facilitating the potential monetization of less-liquid parts of their portfolio at prices close to where the market is currently trading.

In addition to providing enhanced transparency to clients and price discovery for the front office, CEP also provides benefits for wealth management middle and back offices. These include supporting position monitoring, best execution analysis, compliance and transaction cost analysis, as well as real-time risk and credit utilization monitoring.

The benefits that CEP can provide in portfolio transparency for clients and analytical enhancements for operations teams are making access to such capabilities an absolute necessity for wealth advisors.

Ability to validate transactions

For the wealth management middle office, greater efficiency in the business of trade validation remains a technological priority. While the front office is interfacing with clients and executing trades on their behalf, responsibility resides with middle-office operations teams to reconcile transactions to ensure that all details correspond.

Verifying trade details requires access to a wide swathe of third-party market and reference data, which sometimes must be cross-referenced with information sourced from custodians, executing brokers and other external parties. This means operations teams need a market data terminal.

Since such terminals are usually subject to hefty subscriptions - often equivalent of many thousands of U.S. dollars a month - the middle office routinely finds itself working with a single shared terminal. Operations team members are often forced to wait their turn to access the machine, creating recurring and cascading delays to the essential process of validating trades, and introducing operational and other risks.

Recent years have seen a wider range of market data providers active in global capital markets, providing greater consumer choice and price competitiveness. Wealth advisors today enjoy greater access to market and reference data at a lower price point. Better pricing is enabling middle and back-office teams to obtain additional data terminals, making trade validation more efficient and potentially lowering risk for both wealth managers and their clients.

Simultaneous with the greater availability of market data terminals, the sophistication and number of the functions that can be undertaken on these interfaces is also advancing.

While some terminals currently only facilitate the input of one CUSIP at a time - making it extremely time-consuming to work through dozens of CUSIPs to validate trade exceptions - the ICE Connect terminal allows the uploading of multiple CUSIPs simultaneously. A single screen displaying evaluated automated pricing and reference data saves users potentially hours of work as part of their day-to-day responsibilities.

The combination of access to multiple market data terminals, continuous evaluated pricing and a comprehensive corporate actions database, empowers wealth managers to accomplish more for clients, with greater efficiency, and at significantly less expense.