Wealthtech Industry Scrambles As Orion Introduces Data Access Fee

A week ago, I heard from the first third-party advisor technology vendor about Orion Advisor Solutions’ introduction of a monthly Connected Ecosystem Support Fee intended to “help fund continued investment in the security, reliability, and scale” of Orion’s artificial intelligence and related data efforts.

Messages and calls from other vendors about their fees and the concerns of other interested parties followed. I, in turn, reached out to various sources and contacts as well.

Orion, which works with thousands of RIA firms, has $6.6 trillion in assets under administration across 8.6 million technology accounts it supports, including $211 billion in wealth management assets.

Included in each vendor partner letter was the amount of their flat monthly fee from Orion, which the company said was based on the amount of data each consumed from Orion’s systems (though neither the amount of data nor a formula for calculating the total was included). The first fee payments would be invoiced later in October and due in November. Orion also noted that it would shift in the first quarter of 2027 to a support fee and usage-based pricing model reflecting each partner’s data accessibility and expected usage, and they would hear from Orion with additional insights into their current usage before the end of 2026.

A New Reality

Reactions to the letters were mixed, with fees varying significantly, from as little as $2,000 per month to as high as $20,000, among those received by Wealth Management. None of the vendors I spoke with or heard from wanted to go on the record with the size of their fees.

For some, the fee is viewed simply as a new reality and part of the cost of bringing AI and the data that powers it to the advisors and end clients that Orion and the firms in question support.

Madalyn Armijo, chief operations officer and co-founder at Dispatch, a data orchestration platform for wealth management firms, said she understood why Orion was implementing the fee.

“A secure, robust data infrastructure is a requirement in an AI world, and their investment reflects the reality of building and maintaining enterprise infrastructure,” Armijo said, noting that she had received advanced warning from her company’s contact at Orion.

Others said on background that they viewed the way the letters were handled—some said they had received no advanced warning about them or the impending fees ahead of time—showed poor planning and a lack of transparency as to how the initial costs had been calculated on the part of Orion (no indication of the amount of data consumed by the billed firms was included, for example).

Wealth Management received an emailed response from Reed Colley, president of Orion Advisor Technology, regarding the letters.

“Usage of the Orion platform keeps growing, and we’re increasing our investment in modern, scalable infrastructure that performs reliably as demand grows,” he wrote, noting that while AI and increased demand for data access are changing and improving the quality and expansiveness of what advisors can deliver to clients, AI is only as good as the data behind it.

“That data needs to stay synchronized across every tool a firm uses, and these changes are shaping the evolution of Orion’s flexible ecosystem, which expands provider access and is built on advisors having the freedom to choose the technology that best serves their clients,” wrote Colley.

In addition, Colley reiterated and elaborated on key areas of technology support and expansion Orion planned on its roadmap, including broader access for partners across Orion, which includes Redtail CRM and the Orion Connect APIs, as well as MCP access for integration providers so AI-enabled tools can connect to Orion securely, among several other areas.

Who Owns the Data

I contacted or spoke to many other industry insiders and technologists during both the XYPN Live event held the last week of September in San Diego and the custodian Altruist’s Build to Grow conference in New York two days ago. I received far more feedback than I have room for in this column.

“What used to be an integration layer is quickly becoming strategic infrastructure, and Orion is now putting an explicit economic model around it,” said Haik Sahakyan, CEO and co-founder of ARQA, an end-to-end AI-native wealth management platform (ARQA has won three Wealth Management Industry Awards across 2025 and 2026).

Secure APIs, authentication, monitoring, infrastructure, support and increasingly, the MCP access that Orion references building or expanding, all have real costs to build and maintain, he said.

“The harder question is how you price it in a way that is transparent, proportional to actual usage, and sustainable for the companies building on top of the ecosystem,” said Sahakyan.

Putting it in simple terms that will now be obvious to many readers, the commercialization of AI has opened an enormous can of worms across pretty much every industry that relies on technology, and the resulting debate about who owns the data and knowledge on which AI feeds. Focusing on how this relates to the broader advisor technology ecosystem beyond Orion and other large providers raises other questions that, right now, lack easy answers.

While, for years in the past decade, I wrestled with the concept and philosophy of open architecture during the buildout of the cloud infrastructure that powers pretty much everything today, Sahakyan reminded me that wealthtech platforms have also been competing on how open their own ecosystems are. However, now, in the age of AI, the industry must come to terms with what “open” actually costs, and as platform owners increasingly build their own AI capabilities, the economics of third-party access become even more important.

“An ecosystem can technically remain open while becoming economically difficult for independent innovators to participate in—that’s something I think the industry should pay very close attention to,” said Sahakyan.
He added that his broader concern was that AI is dramatically lowering the cost and time required to build new technology. My own awareness of this latter concept came into focus when I met the three founders of FINNY for the first time more than two years ago. This more rapid pace of innovation with smaller teams, in turn, puts pressure on incumbents.

Who Pays

The risk is that, rather than competing solely through better products, some platforms may increasingly use control of the data layer as part of their moat, Sahakyan contends.

“Put differently: if the castle owns the drawbridge, it can still call the kingdom open while charging everyone who wants to cross it,” he said.

I had also recently spoken with Michael Roth and fellow serial entrepreneur and advisory technology expert Oleg Tishkevich about the endeavor they had quietly co-founded and launched together earlier in the year, called Singularity Financial Partners.

The two describe Singularity as an operating company for RIAs, one that, in addition to its ability to focus on most any operational need a larger RIA firm might encounter (billing, compliance, etc.), is intended to have an affinity for tackling many of the issues discussed in this column. It’s very organization, based not on the traditional software consultancy model but rather through equity stakes Singularity will receive in the RIA firms they work with, has evolved out of longer-term needs now being experienced by potential clients.

“AI is pushing far more traffic through these connections and the security bar keeps rising,” said Roth, referring to the new Orion ecosystem support fee, noting nonetheless that billing the vendor doesn’t mean it is ultimately the vendor who pays.

“Large vendors will likely fold it into renewals [for advisory firm clients] and smaller ones may drop the integration [with firms like Orion]; RIAs, however, should be asking from here on who covers it,” he said.

It is clear to me that this is just the first example of such fees I’ll be hearing about, with many more to come, along with much consternation and hand-wringing across industry participants yet to come.