Focus hires AI startup Nevis to rebuild data flows across its 90 RIAs

Focus Financial Partners announced on Oct. 15 that it is hiring Nevis, the 2024 startup led by 27-year-old Mark Swan. Nevis will rebuild workflows and data sharing among the RIAs Focus owns, RIABiz reported.

Focus CEO Adam Biernbaum characterized the contract as buying a process rather than a product, according to RIABiz. Focus passed over IBM, McKinsey, Accenture and Booz Allen in favor of Nevis, the report said.

Focus, which RIABiz describes as a New York City manager of $500 billion, has moved 40 of its 90 rolled-up firms under the Focus Partners brand and claims a three-year effort to clean up and unify its data. RIABiz reports that Focus is taking its lead from rival roll-up ALTi Global and from United Capital.

Tim Welsh, founder and CEO of Nexus Strategy in Larkspur, Calif., told RIABiz: "A roll-up is a data integration problem disguised as a wealth firm. Every acquisition adds systems, and headcount can't keep up." He described the work as onboarding, account opening and reconciliation.

Welsh added that Nevis "sits on top of that mess instead of forcing a migration," meaning the acquired firms keep their current systems. He argued the tool alone cannot fix long-term fragmentation: "AI doesn't integrate a roll-up. You still need that foundation data-layer."

In two deployments covered by this publication, Schwab's Claude integration is priced at $240 a seat, and Mariner's $175 million bot program worked out to $250,000 per bot over five years, with the deployment work deciding the outcome.

Nevis layers on top of the systems each acquired firm already runs. The first targets are the tasks that move data between firms, not the portfolio management or planning software an advisor touches with clients.

If Welsh is right, the value of Focus's contract rests on the underlying data layer the firm says it spent three years building; the advisors who feel the difference first will be those whose books sit in the 40 firms already folded into Focus Partners.