Since taking over wealth technology firm Orion Advisor Solutions about eight months ago, CEO Natalie Wolfsen has been hyper focused on two big integrations: Combining Orion's wealth and technology capabilities onto one open architecture platform. And integrating roughly 1,400 employees back into Orion's offices on a hybrid basis.
"The future of Orion is to have this holistic platform that's highly integrated, that flexes into where advisors are," Wolfsen said during a sit-down interview with Financial Planning in New York. "Spending more time together so that we have a common purpose and an apprenticeship culture, I think is very important. The plan is to announce something later this month in terms of that office remote structure."
Wolfsen, who's a believer in open data, talked about her ongoing plans to take the Omaha, Nebraska-based firm through a more holistic integration powered by AI tools, and about breaking down silos both on the platform and with employees.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Financial Planning: What led you to
Natalie Wolfsen: I long admired Orion, and I continue to feel that Orion has all the pieces to bring together an incredible offering for financial advisors. We have all of the technology solutions that are core to a day in the life of the financial advisor, and all of the wealth solutions that they need to fulfill their clients' portfolios. So I wanted to work with the team — lead the team — to bring that together to be an industry-changing or a compelling offering.
I'm really committed to making sure that we're open architecture. So if financial advisors want to use different software solutions, then our technology can flex to meet their needs. We want to be very open with our data so that the client owns the information and has free and open access to it so that they can gather insights about their clients.
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If you can build this integrated offering in a way that can integrate with not just what you own, but other parts of the market — and liberate the information so that the clients, the financial advisors or the enterprises have access to their information — they can use that so they can grow. I believe that's a winning offering.
FP: When you're talking about open data and open architecture, how do you embed cybersecurity around that to make sure the clients know their data is secure?
NW: We follow industry best practices as it relates to security, the certifications we have and the protocols we use. And then we also leverage partners like Amazon Redshift to make sure that the information is in a scalable and protected environment.
Clients care more about that than they've ever cared before. They
FP: You recently said Orion was going back to a hybrid office model rather than being fully remote. What was the reason for that decision?
NW: There's so many benefits to working remote in terms of flexibility, work-life harmony and being able to access a nation or global talent pool. And then there are also drawbacks.
There was a recent study that said [managers believed] learning is compressed by about 30% when you're fully remote. You just don't learn as much when teams aren't in an environment together.
And you see this in two ways. One, there is not as much horizontal career development, so there's not as much cross-functional learning [being remote]. And then you also see it in that teams become much more siloed.
So you have a CRM expert and they work in a CRM team. They talk to CRM clients and become an expert in just CRM. Well, the future of Orion is to have this holistic platform that's highly integrated, that flexes into where advisors are. And spending more time together so that we have a common purpose and an apprenticeship culture, I think is very important.
So I've been talking to the team for the last seven months about what is best for Orion. And the plan is to announce something later this month in terms of that office remote structure.
FP: Considering you're nearing your first year as CEO at Orion, where do you want to go next? What's the next biggest challenge?
NW: So our next challenge at Orion is to make sure that advisors and those enterprises that we serve are positioned for growth. So we're going to continue to integrate more behavioral finance tools into our technology.
I want our technology and our wealth offering to be able to deliver personalization at scale on behalf of financial advisors. And in order to do that, we need to be integrated. We need to have one client ID, one set of data reconciled across all of our systems. And so you should expect to hear more about that from us in the future.
FP: What is Orion working on
NW: There's the solutions that we deliver through Redtail CRM [technology] which is external. That's already in the market.
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We're testing knowledge management systems and using large language models to power more informed answers to questions that come into our service desk. That's going to take a lot more testing. We want to make sure we get it right.
It's helpful to test the technology and then to test it alongside your most tenured service folks, to make sure that what they would change about the first-draft answers is making its way back into the learning system or the model. We're doing testing in our coding and in our QA to make us more efficient.
And then hopefully, what we learn we'll be able to apply to our advisors and their interactions with their clients, too.
