Mercer Global Advisors Launches AI-Native Apsen 2.0 Platform
Mercer Global Advisors, the Denver-headquartered registered investment advisor with $110 billion in assets under management, has released Aspen 2.0, the second generation of its proprietary, unified operating system, which the firm has been working on for the last year and a half.
The new version is artificial intelligence-native, meaning it was built with the explicit intent of allowing AI agents to work alongside human advisors in a controlled manner. Aspen connects data, workflows and communications into a single shared platform, enabling local teams to collaborate with specialists across the firm. It maps the relationships between the firm’s clients, team members and services being provided.
Mercer worked with Avantos, an AI-native operating system in which the RIA has invested, to build the horizontal operating layer of the Aspen system. It powers the contextual layer for the data that supports the AI engines within Aspen, according to Rabih Ramadi and Bassam Chaptini, Avantos co-founders and co-CEOs.
Avantos, which is also backed by Vanguard, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, and SEI, uses a combination of large language models, the most common being those from Anthropic.
The Aspen platform is currently being used by Mercer’s 450 lead advisors and about 1,200 financial professionals on advisory teams, Mercer President Daniel Gourvitch said.
Gourvitch said the firm started thinking about the platform about four years ago, hoping to solve an industry problem; as advisors continue to do more for clients, they are adding software to the tech stack that they need to learn to use and move data between and across.
“What we found was that our teams were spending a lot of time bringing data and workflows together across different systems, each of which had its own underlying data architecture and its own workflows,” he said.
Aspen has allowed the RIA to create an integrated, common understanding of how they work and collaborate across the firm. That’s helped, given Mercer’s interdisciplinary approach.
To do so, the firm first had to build a “knowledge graph architecture,” which forms the reasoning foundation for AI. This was a necessary piece of the puzzle, Gourvitch said, so that the different disciplines within the firm could relate to one another.
“At the heart of Aspen is a unique knowledge graph—built AI-native from the ground up—that fully contextualizes client data and powers the agents working on advisors’ behalf,” said Avantos’ Ramadi. “That’s what makes it a transformative platform for client management, with advisors and their entire team operating from a single, unified view.”
Secondly, the firm built a “canonical data model” of the workflows, which aims to present data entities and relationships in the simplest possible form to integrate processes across systems.
Lastly, Mercer built a “data ontology,” a way to link data in various formats based on concepts. This helps the RIA bring real-world concepts to people who can understand them.
“There’s a very big difference from having an integrated platform that is simply a bunch of disparate pieces of software that are connected to one another and actually having a common understanding that is reflected in a knowledge graph, canonical workflows, a proprietary ontology that really is the reflection of how we’ve all agreed to collaborate together,” Gourvitch said.
Gourvitch said the firm has invested tens of millions of dollars a year in the platform across people, technology and process.
“At its core, Aspen orchestrates the collective intelligence and capabilities of our planning, investing, tax and estate professionals in delivering a cohesive family office experience,” Mercer CEO Dave Welling said in a statement.
Aspen 2.0 has tight integrations with Mercer’s technology providers, including Orion, Box, eMoney, Estately by FreeWill, Pontera, Salentica, Salesforce, Zoom and Microsoft. It’s also integrated with its custodial partners, including Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Raymond James Financial, Goldman Sachs and others.
For example, the “deeper” integration means Orion’s capabilities and data flow natively into Aspen’s unified environment in real time, said Trent Mumma, Orion’s chief product officer. “So advisors act on them without leaving the platform, and the data stays in sync in both directions.”
Aspen 2.0 has several AI agents embedded, powered by various integration partners depending on the task or workflow the advisor is in. Gourvitch said to think of Aspen as the framework for allowing AI agents of all types.
But he stressed that Mercer does not have AI working autonomously without human supervision. “This is all to support our advisory teams,” he said.
“Aspen is helping to set the pace for what agentic AI looks like in the real world, bringing intelligence directly into the day-to-day work of advisors in a secure, compliant way,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, in a statement.
