Datalign Advisory, the Cambridge, Mass.-based lead generation and growth support platform, is opening its agentic AI platform to advisory firms, enabling shops of any size to build and deploy client-facing, custom, branded AI agents grounded in their investment philosophy, proprietary content and client data within a compliance-by-design framework.
To date, the SEC-registered business, which counts quite a few MIT-educated engineers and developers, several of whom have Silicon Valley experience (including years at Amazon, Google, and well-known video game developers), claims $80 billion in referred assets since its founding in 2022.
The agentic AI platform, Halo, enables firms to deploy AI agents that support advisor-client relationships and deliver the firm’s expertise, methodology and branded experience in every interaction, while operating within a compliance framework built for SEC-registered industries in finance and insurance. That compliance framework has been in development for a couple of years, according to Datalign Advisory CEO Satayan Mahajan.
“A year and a half ago, it simply wouldn’t have been as secure as firms should expect,” Mahajan said.
When asked to elaborate about that “should” in his statement, Mahajan said that too many firms—third-party providers of AI and RIAs alike—are racing to roll out agentic technology without the necessary attention to compliance ramifications.
“Some people are just not thinking it through, while others don’t realize just how much work it can be for them to connect all these parts of their tech stack to attain the level of personalization they would want, as well as all the backend systems,” he said.
The announcement comes as financial services firms face pressure to modernize following last month’s market disruption when Altruist launched an AI-powered tax planning tool that contributed to notable declines across Schwab and LPL, as well as other financial services firms.
Unlike off-the-shelf large language models, Datalign’s dozens of agents are built on Halo, an agentic AI framework designed for regulated financial services. Each agent draws on a firm’s knowledge base, retrieving and reasoning over materials at query time with full source attribution and confidence scoring.
“The agents are just reproducing the work you would have someone doing in the office,” said Mahajan, though they can autonomously draw on a firm’s data for personalization when necessary.
Those agents range widely in their jobs and often are limited to specific or specialized tasks, from firm profile builder agents to tax calculation agents, a growth projection agent, and quite a few different types of helper agents, or subagents.
These are all centrally coordinated and managed by Halo, and every agent response passes through Datalign’s multi-layered compliance architecture before reaching a client or advisor, designed to meet or exceed current SEC requirements for the use of AI in financial products.
“These aren’t back-office tools the AI uses on the client’s behalf—they’re the same tools the client interacts with directly,” said Lucas Seibert, technical lead at Datalign Advisory, in a statement announcing the launch.
Something to keep in mind about Datalign’s platform and services is that while a firm of any size could use them, larger advisory or enterprise firms are likely to gain the most from adopting the platform.
“Usually, in the range of a few billion dollars in AUM up to $30 billion or $50 billion-plus are the most excited about what we have built, and we do all the setup for them,” said Mahajan.
“Most of the firms we work with do not have the technical staff to implement these types of frameworks entirely on their own; some do, but most don’t, and they have the largest budget with which to implement and get the most out of it or add any necessary customizations to meet their specific firm needs,” he said.
Mahajan reiterated that it is open to smaller advisors and that Datalign has had thousands of consumers come in through many different lead-generation and limited-planning-analysis partnerships, for example, through Forbes, U.S. News & World Report and many others.
“We’re continuing to have great discussions with them [end consumers] with the caveat that ‘you should talk to your advisor’,” said Mahajan.
While Mahajan said many large RIAs are already using the platform, most do so on a white-label basis, and Datalign cannot name them.
Accelerated Wealth Partners, founded by Eric Amar, its CEO, is one exception. Amar is the former chief growth officer of Focus Financial. In today’s statement, he said that Datalign’s ability to build custom AI agents grounded in an advisory firm’s investment thesis, institutional knowledge and product integrations is “a game changer.”
Datalign does not publish its pricing, as is the case with many providers that often work with large advisory firms and enterprise companies, as the cost varies greatly based on how much custom development is wanted by the client firm.
