Focus Financial, which has worked to unify its national footprint of advisors, is rolling out a new advisor and client wealth portal for its $95.9 billion Focus Partners Wealth division.
Some Focus Partners Wealth advisors are using the new financial planning-focused portal, which the firm refers to as an Advisor Hub, with clients being given access to a Wealth Management Client Portal. The initial program is being tested by advisors formerly with Buckingham Strategic Partners, which was rebranded along with The Colony Group and other firms that joined the entity earlier this year. Focus will work to make the portal available to all partners’ advisors by 2026, according to Aaron Grey, chief experience officer at Focus Partners Wealth.
The platform is “a newly imagined interface designed to bring together information about our clients from various systems and allow advisors to apply a common framework for how we approach planning across the organization,” Grey said. “The key objective is to enable advisors to more efficiently and effectively distill insights, take action and engage with clients in a more personalized way.”
The move is a further sign of Focus’s efforts to transform the firm from a holding company model to an integrated business, following its 2023 acquisition by private equity owners Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Stone Point Capital. The Partners Wealth division of Focus currently manages about $95.9 billion in assets across financial, tax and legacy planning, with its other four hub firms and network RIAs overseeing over $400 billion.
While the new portal was designed primarily to create a better experience for advisors and their clients, the RIA is also seeing it as a “remarkable asset” in unification efforts, according to Grey.
“This common platform can serve as a gravitational pull for our advisory teams across the country, empowering them with our best practices and enabling opportunities for them to do their best work for clients,” he said.
The new portals were launched this summer, with the rollout going to all clients with legacy Buckingham advisors first, and efforts shifting “in 2026 to making the platform available to all FPW advisors and clients,” Grey said.
Jeffrey Levine, Focus’s chief planning officer, said in an interview at WealthManagement.com’s offices in New York City that his team helped develop the financial planning overlay for the new portal. Rather than showing clients the usual investment portfolio upfront, the portal surfaces broader financial plan, goals or action items that were most recently discussed with the advisor.
“When you think about what RIAs have done for the last, let’s call it 20 years, they’ve said, ‘Investments are becoming table stakes and our planning is most important,’” Levine said. “Then the first thing we do when a client logs in is show them the daily performance, or what happened six minutes ago—it’s so micro.”
Levine added that the new portal keeps portfolio tracking a button-click away, but emphasizes broader financial planning. Advisors are equipped with about 50 different potential areas of client interest and then select the relevant ones.
Levine, who oversees a team of about seven specialists, said his group has been making its financial planning education and resources available for the full Focus ecosystem, including webinars and updates on areas such as changes to tax policy. He said his group acts like “internal consultants” and monitors the advisor questions coming in. If they notice a trend, they’ll issue a broader notice to advisors, and sometimes host client informational sessions.
The new portal will augment that work in a way that can be systematized across the advisor base, according to Levine.
“How do we get everybody to be on a more level setting?” Levine said. “It’s through the wealth planning conversations and viewing planning through that lens.”
Grey said the platform was created by Focus, with partnership from its wealth technology partners and vendors.
“Historically, most digital experiences for advisors and clients were an afterthought—an add-on feature from one of the other core components of the tech stack,” he said. “Instead, we started with the client and advisor digital experiences first. Then solved for the back-end integrations with the rest of our tech stack to support the key functionality we needed for our purpose-built digital experiences.”
Grey said creating a portal for Focus’s network firms is under consideration, but it is not currently on the development roadmap.
Other large RIAs with a history of aggregation are moving toward more centralized operating models.
Earlier this year, $326 billion-RIA Hightower launched a new division called Signature Wealth, which the firm said will integrate both Hightower network RIAs and external firms onto a centralized onboarding system and investment management platform.
Others, such as Mariner Wealth Advisors and Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, are working with 1099-affiliated advisors to join their W-2 employee model RIA divisions.
