Wealth Management Giants Mercer and Osaic Accelerate AI Adoption to Drive Operational Efficiency

Two of the most prominent players in the American wealth management landscape, Mercer Advisors and Osaic, have announced significant new partnerships with specialized artificial intelligence vendors. These strategic moves represent a broader industry shift toward outsourcing manual, back-office processes to sophisticated AI-driven platforms. By offloading complex operational tasks to specialized technology providers, these firms aim to expand their internal capacity, reduce overhead costs, and allow their advisors to focus more exclusively on high-value client relationships.

The announcements highlight two distinct approaches to digital transformation. Mercer Advisors, a Denver-based mega-RIA overseeing $114 billion in client assets, is tackling the notoriously difficult challenge of private market operations through a partnership with Arch. Meanwhile, Osaic, one of the nation’s largest networks of independent financial professionals, is empowering its nearly 10,000 advisors with a broad suite of AI-integrated tools from Auburn, California-based Nitrogen.

Arch Streamlines Mercer’s Complex Private Markets Operations

For many wealth management firms, the move toward private investments has created a significant administrative bottleneck. Unlike public securities, which trade through standardized exchanges and offer transparent, real-time data, private investments are characterized by a deluge of fragmented paperwork. Investors are often tasked with managing capital calls, distribution notices, K-1 tax forms, and general partner updates, all of which typically reside across a multitude of disconnected fund administrator portals.

Mercer Advisors has identified this friction as a primary barrier to scaling its private investment offerings. By signing a multiyear partnership with Arch, a firm that specializes in building AI-powered infrastructure specifically for private markets, Mercer intends to digitize and automate the lifecycle of these alternative assets.

The impact of this integration has been substantial. According to the firm, the Arch platform has already reduced the cost of managing Mercer’s client alternative investments by 40%. Beyond the direct financial savings, the automation has reclaimed more than 7,000 hours of labor annually, effectively freeing up human capital to focus on investment strategy rather than data entry and reconciliation.

The mechanics of the partnership revolve around Arch’s ability to act as a digital bridge. The software collects disparate documents from various sources, utilizes AI to convert the unstructured data within those documents into a structured format, and then routes that information directly into the systems that require it. For instance, K-1 tax forms are automatically directed to a client’s accountant, while capital call data flows seamlessly into Mercer’s internal reporting tools.

Furthermore, the system provides advisors and clients with proactive alerts regarding distributions, general partner commentary, and critical news concerning underlying portfolio companies. This level of transparency is transformative for private market investors, who have historically had to wait weeks or months for clarity on their holdings.

Don Calcagni, the chief investment officer at Mercer Advisors, emphasized the strategic importance of this development. "Arch has become a key component of our private investments platform and operations, bringing critical investment data into our central advisory platform and giving advisors and clients real-time visibility into private investments, much like they already have with public markets," Calcagni stated.

The partnership also serves a vital role in Mercer’s ongoing acquisition strategy. As a firm that grows significantly through the acquisition of smaller wealth management practices, Mercer frequently inherits a diverse and inconsistent mix of private holdings and legacy management styles. Some of these acquired firms bring complex family-office portfolios that would be cumbersome to manage under standard processes. Arch allows Mercer to consolidate these disparate assets into a unified operating and reporting model. This capability is integrated with the firm’s proprietary Aspen Investing platform, which includes in-house direct indexing. Mercer reports that the ability to offer such robust private investment management has become a significant selling point, with both prospective partner firms and new clients citing the firm’s sophisticated operations as a primary reason for joining the Mercer ecosystem.

Nitrogen’s Tech Suite Empowers Osaic’s Advisor Network

While Mercer is focusing on the specific operational challenges of private markets, Osaic is taking a broader approach to advisor enablement. The firm has officially approved the full suite of Nitrogen’s advisor products for use by its nearly 10,000 financial professionals. This approval gives advisors access to a wide array of specialized modules, including the Risk Center, Research Center, Income Center, Tax Center, Legacy Center, and Insurance Center.

The flexibility of the arrangement is key to its adoption; advisors can select the specific tools that best align with their unique practice models and have the ability to scale their usage by adding additional modules as their business needs evolve.

The central nervous system of this integration is Nucleus, Nitrogen’s "agentic" AI engine. Unveiled earlier this year, Nucleus represents a shift away from simple, passive chatbots that merely answer questions. Instead, it functions as an autonomous agent capable of executing complex, multistep workflows. Crucially, the system is designed with a "human-in-the-loop" philosophy: it performs the heavy lifting of data synthesis and task execution, but only finalizes those actions once the advisor has reviewed and provided their formal sign-off.

Advisors are currently utilizing Nucleus for a variety of high-touch activities, such as converting complex client statements into organized portfolios, generating detailed retirement income illustrations, and distilling dense tax returns into visual insights that can be used during client meetings. By automating these time-consuming preparatory tasks, Osaic is attempting to solve a chronic industry problem: the dilution of advisor time on non-client-facing work.

"Every hour an advisor spends on manual work is an hour they can’t spend with a client or prospect," noted Dan Zitting, chief executive of Nitrogen.

For a massive organization like Osaic, the deployment of AI is not merely a technical challenge but a regulatory and governance one. The firm’s decision to approve the Nitrogen suite was heavily influenced by the vendor’s commitment to security and AI ethics. Nitrogen has distinguished itself in the marketplace by becoming the first known wealthtech firm to achieve ISO/IEC 42001 certification, an international standard that provides a framework for managing AI systems responsibly and securely.

This focus on governance is a prerequisite for large firms that must balance the promise of innovation with the stringent fiduciary requirements of the financial services industry. Sayee Bellamkonda, Osaic’s chief AI and technology officer, underscored the necessity of this balance. "Our financial professionals want AI they can put to work right away, and our job is to make sure it meets the standards their clients expect," Bellamkonda said.

The partnerships between Mercer and Arch, and Osaic and Nitrogen, underscore a definitive trend in wealth management. As the industry faces increasing pressure to lower costs while simultaneously providing more sophisticated financial planning services, the reliance on manual workflows is becoming unsustainable. By integrating agentic AI and specialized data infrastructure, these firms are not just improving their margins; they are fundamentally redefining the advisor’s role, shifting it from that of a manual processor to that of a high-level strategic consultant. As these technologies continue to mature and integrate, the divide between firms that leverage AI-driven efficiency and those that rely on legacy processes is expected to widen, setting a new benchmark for operational excellence in the wealth management sector.