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Written by: Jack Martin | Amplify
A firm I talked to recently described their ops process the same way you'd describe a fire drill: every Monday, find out what broke over the weekend, then spend the week fixing it before it breaks again. Multiply that by however many custodians a firm runs, and you get the real cost of custody today. It isn't the fee. It's the tax nobody puts on an invoice.
Three numbers from recent industry research capture it:
● Custodial satisfaction: 3.4 out of 5 in 2025, down from 3.6 in 2023—the wrong direction, even as the platforms get more sophisticated.1
● Multi-custodian firms: roughly two in three RIAs today, each relationship adding its own schema, its own quirks, its own reconciliation cycle.1
● Onboarding friction: the top complaint for 72% of firms, usually because a new account still means multiple handoffs and no real-time view of where it stands.2
None of that reflects poorly on the firms carrying it. These are firms growing AUM, winning clients, hiring well. The tax shows up anyway, quietly, in the hours advisors and ops teams spend reconciling between systems instead of serving clients—because the infrastructure they’re running on wasn’t built for where they’re headed.
The market smells opportunity
Wells Fargo,3 State Street,4 Altruist,5 Robinhood,6 Goldman7—they’re all building or rebuilding custody platforms or partnerships aimed at the friction RIAs are feeling. Capital doesn't move like that unless people believe the incumbents can be beaten.
But here's something to ponder before picking a side in that fight: a new custodian, however modern, is still one more custodian. If you're multi-custodian today, adding a shinier platform doesn't collapse the number of feeds you're reconciling—it adds a fifth one to the four you already have. The industry's obsession with “which custodian is best” skips the actual question a growing firm should be asking: what sits underneath all of them?
Fix the plumbing, not the fixtures
Think of it less like choosing a better vendor and more like choosing better plumbing. You can install the newest fixtures in every room, but if the pipes underneath still don't connect, you haven't fixed the leak—you've just made it look nicer while it drips. The firms that come out on top in the next decade won't be the ones with the prettiest custodians. They'll be the ones whose data model doesn't care how many custodians they run, because everything already resolves to one record.
That's the conviction behind how Amplify built the Custody Command Layer—the operating layer that unifies custody, data, and workflows into a single advisor experience. Unlike traditional custody integrations, custody is embedded into Amplify’s AI-native platform, not bolted on.
Our CTO, David Hatfield, made that possible years ago: before writing a single line of application code, he established a single governed definition for every core data entity—accounts, households, permissions, advisor workflows. Because every system works from that one definition, there's nothing to stitch back together after the fact.
One of our clients—the president of a $5B RIA—described “before and after Amplify” better than any pitch deck could:
“Before finding Amplify, Monday mornings were stressful. We didn't know what was going to break that week or how long it would take to fix it.”
Their words after making the switch: “We come into the office with no stress. We show up and it works. And we've attracted bigger advisors and shown up for larger institutional opportunities because of it.”
That last line is the part I'd underline. This isn't only an operations story. A firm that isn't spending Monday morning firefighting has more room to compete for the advisors and the institutional relationships that actually move a valuation. Efficiency is nice. Enterprise value is the real prize.
What happens when you point AI at a fragmented mess
And this groundwork matters even more with AI entering the picture. Every custodian is racing to bolt AI onto their platform, and most of those tools are genuinely useful—for the slice of the business the custodian can actually see. The moment a firm's data lives across five disconnected feeds, any AI layered on top inherits that fragmentation.
It'll answer confidently. It just won't answer correctly, because it's reasoning from multiple versions of the truth. Give that same AI one unified record instead, and it stops guessing—onboarding gets faster, reviews get cleaner, and clients stop feeling the seams.
So, before the next custody pitch lands in your inbox, the better question isn't “is this custodian better than the one I have.” It's “does this fix the plumbing, or just repaint the fixtures.”
Related: How CEO Pay Incentives Can Destroy Shareholder Value
SOURCES
1. F2 Strategy, Q3 2025 Trend Report (custodial satisfaction score, multi-custodian percentage)
2. F2 Strategy, Q1 2026 Trend Report (onboarding cited as top friction point)
3. WealthManagement.com, coverage of Wells Fargo's RIA custody platform plans
4. WealthTech Strategy, coverage of State Street's re-entry into RIA custody
5. Altruist, company overview (T3 survey ranking)
6. WealthTech Today, coverage of Robinhood/TradePMR custody build
7. RIABiz, coverage of Goldman Sachs's investment in GeoWealth and RIA custody strategy