AUM — Assets Under Management
The total market value of investments that a financial adviser or firm manages on behalf of clients at a given point in time. AUM is the primary metric used to size advisory firms, calculate fee revenue, and benchmark competitive standing. For a $1 billion RIA charging 75 basis points, AUM directly drives roughly $7.5 million in annual revenue. AUM figures are reported to the SEC on Form ADV and change daily with market movements and client flows.
AI Agent
An autonomous software program that perceives its environment, reasons over available information, and takes sequences of actions to achieve a defined goal — with minimal human intervention per step. In wealth management, AI agents are deployed for tasks such as portfolio drift monitoring, compliance screening, document review, and client communication drafting. Unlike a chatbot that responds to single prompts, an agent can chain tools, query databases, and execute workflows. The effectiveness of any AI agent in advisory operations depends entirely on the quality and completeness of the underlying data it can access.
API — Application Programming Interface
A set of defined protocols, endpoints, and data formats that allows two software systems to communicate and exchange data programmatically. APIs are the connective tissue of the modern WealthTech stack — enabling CRMs, portfolio systems, custodians, and planning tools to share data without manual export and re-import. REST and GraphQL are the dominant API styles in financial services today. The availability and quality of a vendor's API is a critical evaluation criterion when selecting WealthTech platforms, as it directly determines integration feasibility and maintenance burden.
Alternative Assets
Investment categories outside traditional publicly traded stocks, bonds, and cash equivalents. The category includes private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, commodities, collectibles, and digital assets. Alternative assets present unique data challenges for advisory firms because they lack standardized pricing feeds, trade infrequently, and are held at specialized custodians or directly on the firm's books. Aggregating held-away alternative asset data into a unified portfolio view requires specific integration and valuation capabilities.
Audit Trail
A chronological, immutable record of all system activities, data changes, and user actions that enables reconstruction of events for compliance verification, investigations, and system debugging. In wealth management, audit trails are a regulatory requirement — the SEC and FINRA require firms to maintain records of trading decisions, client communications, and compliance reviews. A well-structured audit trail captures who accessed what data, when, from where, and what changes were made. Modern data platforms generate audit trails automatically and make them queryable for compliance reporting.
Basis Points
A unit of measurement equal to one one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%), universally used in finance to express changes in interest rates, fee schedules, investment returns, and yield spreads. One hundred basis points equals one percent. Advisory fees are almost always quoted in basis points — "50 bps on AUM" means a 0.50% annual management fee. Using basis points eliminates ambiguity when discussing small percentage changes and is the standard language across investment management, compliance, and technology discussions.
Benchmarking
The practice of comparing portfolio performance, fee structures, operational metrics, or technology adoption against a defined standard index or peer group. Investment benchmarking compares returns against relevant indices (S&P 500, Bloomberg Aggregate, custom blended benchmarks) to evaluate manager skill. Operational benchmarking compares firm efficiency metrics — revenue per advisor, cost per account, AUM growth rate — against industry peers. GIPS-compliant firms follow standardized rules for how benchmarks are selected, applied, and disclosed to clients.
Book of Business
The complete set of client relationships, accounts, and associated assets managed by an individual adviser or advisory firm. An adviser's book of business is their primary professional asset — it determines their income, their value in an acquisition, and their capacity constraints. Data about the book of business lives across CRM, portfolio management, and billing systems. Unified data platforms enable real-time book-of-business analytics: total AUM by adviser, household demographics, revenue concentration, and growth trajectory without manual compilation.
Broker-Dealer
A financial firm or individual registered with FINRA and the SEC that buys and sells securities on behalf of clients (acting as broker) and for its own account (acting as dealer). Broker-dealers are subject to Regulation Best Interest rather than the fiduciary standard that applies to RIAs, though many hybrid firms operate under both regulatory frameworks. Broker-dealers often serve as the trading and clearing infrastructure layer for advisory firms, particularly independent broker-dealers that support affiliated RIAs.
CCO — Chief Compliance Officer
The senior executive responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing a financial firm's compliance program — including regulatory filings, employee supervision, policy development, and risk management. The CCO is a required position for registered investment advisers under SEC rules and must have sufficient authority, seniority, and resources to implement an effective compliance program. In technology terms, the CCO is a primary stakeholder for audit trail capabilities, automated surveillance tools, and data governance policies within the firm's WealthTech stack.
CRM — Customer Relationship Management
Software that centralizes client relationship data — contact information, interaction history, tasks, pipeline stages, service requests, and household relationships. In wealth management, dominant CRM platforms include Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Redtail, Wealthbox, and Practifi. The CRM is typically the firmwide system of record for client relationships, but it does not natively hold portfolio performance, account balances, or compliance data. Integrating CRM data with portfolio and custodian data through a unified platform unlocks cross-system analytics that neither system can produce independently.
CUSIP
A nine-character alphanumeric identifier assigned to financial securities traded in the United States and Canada by the Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures. The first six characters identify the issuer, the next two identify the specific issue, and the final character is a check digit. CUSIPs are the primary security identifier used by custodians, portfolio systems, and clearinghouses for trade settlement and position reporting. Matching securities across data sources requires CUSIP mapping — a core function of any wealth management data integration layer.
Custodian
A regulated financial institution that holds client assets in safekeeping, executes trades, processes cash movements, and provides account statements and reporting data to advisers. The major RIA custodians are Schwab Advisor Services, Fidelity Institutional, and Pershing (BNY Mellon). Custodians provide data feeds — typically via file-based delivery or APIs — that serve as the authoritative source of positions, transactions, and cash balances. The quality, frequency, and format of custodian data feeds is a critical factor in the reliability of any portfolio reporting or analytics system.
Compliance Automation
The application of software to automatically monitor, document, enforce, and report on regulatory requirements — replacing or augmenting manual compliance processes. In wealth management, compliance automation covers areas including trade surveillance, investment policy statement drift monitoring, suitability screening, Form ADV updates, code of ethics monitoring, and annual review documentation. Effective compliance automation requires access to complete, timely data from trading, portfolio, and client systems — making the quality of underlying data integration foundational to any automation initiative.
Data Lake
A centralized storage repository that holds large volumes of raw, unprocessed data in its native format — structured, semi-structured, and unstructured — until it is needed for analysis. Data lakes enable flexible exploration and experimentation, but raw data without transformation or governance produces unreliable analytics. In wealth management, data lakes are typically an intermediate stage in a modern data architecture: raw custodian files, API responses, and system exports land in a data lake before being transformed and loaded into a structured data warehouse for reporting and AI use cases.
Data Model
A structured representation that defines how data elements are organized, related to each other, and constrained — serving as the blueprint for how a database or application stores and queries information. In wealth management, data models define how clients, households, accounts, positions, transactions, and securities relate to each other across systems. A well-designed financial data model enables cross-system joins: connecting a household's CRM record to its custodian positions to its financial plan scenarios without manual reconciliation. The sophistication of a platform's data model is a primary determinant of its analytics capabilities.
Data Platform
An integrated software system that consolidates, normalizes, governs, and makes accessible data from multiple source systems — enabling analytics, reporting, compliance, and AI applications across the firm. A wealth management data platform connects CRMs, portfolio systems, custodians, planning tools, and operational systems into a unified repository. Unlike individual point solutions, a data platform is designed to serve as the analytical layer beneath an entire technology stack, providing a single source of truth that all systems and users can query. Milemarker's platform connects 130+ integrations into a Snowflake-native data warehouse purpose-built for advisory operations.
Data Warehouse
A structured, centralized repository optimized for querying and analytical reporting, storing cleansed and transformed data from multiple operational systems. Unlike transactional databases optimized for writes, data warehouses are optimized for reads — supporting complex aggregations, historical trend analysis, and cross-system joins at scale. Modern cloud-native data warehouses such as Snowflake separate storage from compute, enabling virtually unlimited scalability. For wealth management firms, the data warehouse is where portfolio performance, client demographics, billing data, and compliance records converge for enterprise-level reporting.
Due Diligence
The systematic process of investigating, verifying, and evaluating information about an investment manager, third-party vendor, technology platform, or business relationship before making a commitment. Investment due diligence examines track record, process, team, and risk controls. Operational due diligence evaluates a firm's systems, controls, and business continuity. Technology due diligence for WealthTech vendors covers security certifications, integration capabilities, data portability, financial stability, and client references. Structured data from a unified platform significantly accelerates ongoing manager due diligence by enabling programmatic screening against investment policy criteria.
ETL — Extract, Transform, Load
A foundational data integration pattern in which data is extracted from source systems, transformed into a consistent and clean format in a staging area, and then loaded into a destination database or data warehouse. ETL has been the dominant approach in enterprise data integration for decades. In wealth management, ETL pipelines pull data from custodian feeds, portfolio systems, and CRMs, normalize it to a common schema (transforming proprietary security identifiers, date formats, and account codes), and load it into a central warehouse for reporting. ETL becomes a maintenance challenge as the number of source systems grows.
ELT — Extract, Load, Transform
A modern data integration pattern where raw data is extracted from source systems and loaded directly into a cloud data warehouse first, with transformation happening inside the warehouse using its native processing power. ELT became viable with the rise of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery that can process large volumes cheaply. ELT is typically faster to implement and more flexible than traditional ETL because the raw data is preserved and transformations can be modified without re-running the entire pipeline. Modern WealthTech data platforms predominantly use ELT architectures for scalability and maintainability.
Entity Resolution
The computational process of determining whether records across different data sources refer to the same real-world entity — a client, account, security, or institution. Entity resolution is one of the most consequential challenges in wealth management data integration: a client named "Robert Smith" in the CRM may appear as "Bob Smith" in the portfolio system and "R. Smith" at the custodian. Without entity resolution, cross-system analytics produce fragmented, inaccurate pictures of client relationships. Sophisticated entity resolution uses probabilistic matching, reference data, and machine learning to achieve high accuracy across imperfect source data.
Fee-Based
A compensation model in which an adviser charges fees for advisory services while also having the ability to earn commissions on the sale of financial products such as insurance, annuities, or loaded mutual funds. Fee-based advisers must disclose potential conflicts of interest created by commission-eligible products. The term is often confused with "fee-only" — the distinction matters significantly for conflict-of-interest analysis. Billing systems and CRM platforms need to accurately track and attribute fee-based revenue across both fee and commission components for profitability reporting and disclosure compliance.
Fee-Only
A compensation model in which an adviser is paid exclusively by the client — through asset-based fees, flat retainer fees, hourly rates, or project fees — with no commissions, referral fees, or other third-party compensation. Fee-only advisers are required to disclose this compensation structure in Form ADV Part 2 and are generally held to a stricter conflict-of-interest standard. NAPFA membership requires fee-only compensation. From a data perspective, fee-only firms typically run simpler billing models that are easier to automate and reconcile within a unified platform.
Fiduciary
A legal and ethical standard requiring an adviser to act solely in the best interests of the client when providing investment advice, subordinating the adviser's own interests when they conflict with the client's. Registered investment advisers are fiduciaries under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. The fiduciary duty encompasses both a duty of loyalty (avoiding conflicts of interest) and a duty of care (providing advice consistent with the client's objectives and financial situation). Technology implications include requirements to document suitability analysis, track potential conflicts, and maintain records supporting that recommendations were in the client's best interest.
Financial Planning
The comprehensive, client-centered process of evaluating a client's complete financial situation and developing integrated strategies to achieve their goals across retirement income, tax optimization, estate transfer, insurance coverage, and investment management. Financial planning software such as eMoney Advisor, MoneyGuidePro, and RightCapital generates detailed scenario models and cash flow projections. Integrating financial planning data into a unified wealth management data platform enables advisers to connect plan assumptions to actual portfolio performance — surfacing gaps between the plan and reality before they become problems for clients.
Form ADV
The uniform registration document required by the SEC for investment advisers, comprising two parts: Part 1 captures structured data about the firm's business, ownership, clients, and disciplinary history; Part 2 (the "brochure") is a narrative disclosure document describing services, fees, conflicts of interest, and adviser qualifications that must be delivered to clients. Form ADV is filed through the IARD system and must be updated annually. AUM reported on Form ADV is used to determine whether a firm is SEC-registered (generally $100 million or more) or state-registered.
GIPS — Global Investment Performance Standards
A set of voluntary, standardized, ethical principles governing the calculation and presentation of investment performance results, developed by the CFA Institute and recognized globally. GIPS compliance requires firms to include all actual, fee-paying, discretionary portfolios in composites, present performance using specific calculation methodologies, and have performance records verified by an independent third party. GIPS compliance signals rigorous data governance — firms must maintain complete, auditable performance history. Portfolio management systems and data warehouses must support GIPS-compliant composite construction and return calculation to enable verification.
Held-Away Assets
Client assets that are held at institutions other than the adviser's primary custodian and are therefore not directly custodied or managed by the advisory firm. Common examples include employer 401(k) plans, defined benefit pension benefits, real estate holdings, private business interests, and brokerage accounts at other institutions. Held-away assets present a significant data aggregation challenge — they typically require client-permissioned access through account aggregation services or manual data entry. Including held-away assets in the total household picture is essential for accurate financial planning and holistic wealth management.
Household
A grouping of related client accounts, individuals, and entities under a single advisory relationship, used as the primary unit for fee billing, aggregated performance reporting, and relationship management. A household might include individual taxable accounts, joint accounts, IRAs, trusts, and entity accounts belonging to a married couple or family. Households are the core data structure for understanding total client value, service tier assignment, and relationship profitability. Maintaining accurate household structures across CRM, portfolio, and billing systems — and keeping them synchronized — is a persistent data quality challenge in advisory operations.
HNW — High Net Worth
A designation for individuals or families with investable liquid assets typically exceeding $1 million, representing a primary target market segment for fee-based and fee-only advisory firms. The wealth management industry further segments HNW clients into mass affluent ($250K–$1M), HNW ($1M–$10M), and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW, $10M+) tiers. Segmentation drives service model design, staffing ratios, technology investment, and minimum account thresholds. Data platforms enable precise client segmentation based on total household assets across all custodians and account types — including held-away assets — rather than just AUM at the primary custodian.
IAR — Investment Adviser Representative
An individual who provides personalized investment advice to clients on behalf of a registered investment adviser, subject to supervision by the RIA. IARs must pass qualifying examinations (Series 65 or Series 66), meet state registration requirements, and are supervised under the RIA's compliance program. From a data governance standpoint, IAR data — including licensing status, client assignments, production metrics, and supervision records — must be accurately maintained across CRM, compliance, and HR systems. Tracking IAR-level performance and compliance activity requires cross-system data joins.
IPS — Investment Policy Statement
A written agreement between an adviser and client that documents the client's investment objectives, risk tolerance, time horizon, liquidity needs, tax considerations, and specific investment constraints or guidelines that govern how the portfolio will be managed. The IPS serves as the governing document for portfolio management decisions and is a critical compliance artifact. Monitoring portfolios against IPS guidelines — checking drift from target allocations, screening for prohibited securities, and flagging constraint violations — is a core compliance automation use case that requires portfolio data integrated with IPS parameters.
Integration
A technical connection between two or more software systems that enables automated, bidirectional or unidirectional data exchange — eliminating manual data entry, reducing reconciliation errors, and enabling cross-system workflows. In wealth management, "integrations" typically refers to pre-built connectors between WealthTech applications: a CRM integration with a portfolio system, a custodian data feed into a reporting platform, or an API connection between a planning tool and a data warehouse. The number, quality, and maintenance burden of integrations is a primary differentiator among WealthTech data platforms. Milemarker maintains 130+ production integrations across custodians, CRMs, portfolio systems, and operational tools.
JSON-LD — JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data
A lightweight data interchange format for encoding structured semantic data using JSON syntax, widely used for embedding schema.org markup in web pages to help search engines and AI systems understand page content and context. JSON-LD allows metadata — the type of content, authorship, publication dates, defined terms, FAQs, and organizational identity — to be embedded in a machine-readable format without disrupting the visual HTML. This glossary itself uses JSON-LD with the DefinedTermSet schema to ensure that AI engines like Google's AI Overviews and large language models can accurately parse and cite these definitions.
KYC — Know Your Customer
The mandatory regulatory process of verifying a client's identity, understanding their financial profile and investment objectives, and assessing the risk they present before establishing or continuing a financial relationship. KYC requirements originate from anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and apply to broker-dealers, RIAs, and other financial institutions. The process includes identity verification, beneficial ownership determination, and ongoing monitoring for changes in risk profile. Digital KYC automation integrates identity verification, document collection, and CRM updating into a streamlined onboarding workflow that reduces manual processing time while maintaining regulatory compliance.
LLM — Large Language Model
An artificial intelligence model trained on vast corpora of text data to understand, generate, and reason over natural language — the technology underlying systems like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini. In wealth management, LLMs power applications including client communication drafting, meeting summary generation, research synthesis, regulatory document analysis, and natural language querying of portfolio data. The quality of an LLM's outputs in advisory contexts is constrained by the quality of the data and context it receives — an LLM querying a fragmented, unnormalized data environment will produce less reliable insights than one with access to a unified, well-structured data warehouse.
MCP — Model Context Protocol
An open standard developed by Anthropic that defines a standardized interface for how AI models receive context, call tools, and interact with external data sources and services. MCP enables AI agents to connect to databases, APIs, and business applications through a consistent protocol rather than requiring custom integrations for each tool. In wealth management, MCP-compatible AI systems can query custodian data, look up client records, run portfolio calculations, and surface compliance flags through a single structured interface — making AI agents significantly more reliable and auditable in production advisory environments.
Managed Account
An investment account directly owned by an individual investor and professionally managed by an adviser or portfolio manager who has discretionary authority to make investment decisions within the guidelines of the client's investment policy statement. Unlike mutual funds or ETFs, managed accounts offer direct security ownership, enabling tax-loss harvesting, personalized restrictions (ESG screens, sector exclusions), and transparent holding-level reporting. Managed accounts are the dominant structure for advisory relationships with HNW and UHNW clients and generate the richest portfolio data for analytics purposes.
Model Portfolio
A pre-constructed target allocation template — defining specific securities or asset classes and their target weights — used as the basis for managing client accounts consistently at scale across an advisory firm. Model portfolios enable centralized investment management: the investment team maintains and updates models, and the portfolio management system propagates changes to all accounts assigned to each model through a rebalancing process. Model management, drift monitoring, and trade execution are core functions of portfolio management systems and trading platforms such as iRebal, Orion, and Tamarac.
Normalization
The process of transforming data from disparate source systems into a consistent, standardized structure and format so that it can be reliably compared, joined, and analyzed. In wealth management, normalization resolves the reality that every system uses different conventions: custodians use CUSIPs while some systems use tickers; dates are formatted differently; account type codes vary by vendor; and the same client may have different names or IDs across systems. Normalization is a foundational step in any data integration pipeline and is a primary source of differentiation among data platforms — firms that normalize data well produce reliable analytics; those that don't generate reconciliation headaches.
OAuth
An open authorization framework (formally OAuth 2.0) that enables third-party applications to access user data on a service without requiring the user to share their credentials. Instead, the user grants permission through the service's authorization server, which issues time-limited access tokens. OAuth is the standard mechanism for secure API integrations across WealthTech — enabling a data platform to pull data from a CRM or planning tool on behalf of the firm without storing the firm's login credentials. The shift from credential-based to token-based authentication significantly reduces security risk in multi-system integrations.
Omnibus Account
A single account held at a custodian or clearinghouse that aggregates transactions and positions for multiple underlying client accounts, with the intermediary maintaining the individual sub-account records. Broker-dealers and TAMPs commonly use omnibus structures with custodians to simplify transaction processing, netting, and settlement. The trade-off is reduced transparency at the custodian level — the custodian sees only the omnibus total, not individual client activity. This creates data reconciliation complexity when advisers need to reconcile custody records with individual account-level records maintained in the portfolio management system.
Portfolio Management System (PMS)
Software used by advisory firms to track investment portfolios, generate performance reports, manage trading, and maintain account-level records. Leading PMS platforms in the RIA market include Orion Portfolio Solutions, Black Diamond (SS&C), Tamarac (Envestnet), Addepar, and Axos Advisor Services. The PMS is the primary system of record for portfolio positions, transactions, and performance calculations. PMS data is among the richest and most critical in the WealthTech stack — integrating it into a unified data platform enables cross-system analytics connecting portfolio performance to client relationship data, financial planning projections, and operational metrics.
Position
A holding in a specific security within an investment account, characterized by the security identifier (CUSIP, ticker), quantity of shares or units held, cost basis, and current market value. Position data is the most granular level of portfolio information and serves as the foundation for performance calculation, risk analysis, compliance screening, and tax optimization. Accurate, timely position data requires reliable custodian data feeds, correct security master data, and proper corporate action processing (handling stock splits, mergers, and dividends). Position data quality directly determines the reliability of all downstream portfolio analytics.
RIA — Registered Investment Adviser
A firm or individual registered with the SEC (if managing $100 million or more in AUM) or state securities regulators (below the federal threshold) to provide investment advice for compensation, subject to fiduciary duty under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. The RIA model has been the fastest-growing segment of the wealth management industry, with over 15,000 SEC-registered RIAs collectively managing approximately $125 trillion in assets. RIAs are the primary market for independent WealthTech platforms — their independence from broker-dealer product shelves creates stronger demand for best-of-breed technology integrations.
Rebalancing
The process of realigning a portfolio's current asset allocation back to its target allocation by selling overweight positions and purchasing underweight positions. Rebalancing can be triggered by calendar schedules (quarterly, annually), threshold-based drift (when an asset class deviates more than X% from target), or cash flow events (deposits, withdrawals, required distributions). Tax-aware rebalancing coordinates trades across accounts to minimize realized gains and harvest losses. In practice, rebalancing requires integration between the portfolio management system (for current positions and targets), trading platform (for order generation), and custodian (for execution).
Reg BI — Regulation Best Interest
An SEC rule that became effective in June 2020 requiring broker-dealers to act in the best interest of retail customers at the time a securities recommendation is made. Reg BI establishes four component obligations: disclosure, care, conflict of interest mitigation, and compliance. While less stringent than the RIA fiduciary standard, Reg BI significantly raised the conduct standard for broker-dealers from the prior suitability rule. Technology implications include requirements for documenting the basis for recommendations, tracking conflict disclosures, and generating the Customer Relationship Summary (Form CRS) required for retail customers.
Risk Tolerance
A client's documented capacity and willingness to absorb investment losses in pursuit of potential gains, assessed through a combination of qualitative questionnaires and quantitative analysis of the client's financial situation, time horizon, income stability, and behavioral responses to market volatility. Risk tolerance assessment is a required element of the IPS and forms the foundation for portfolio construction decisions. Risk tolerance data typically lives in the financial planning system and CRM but must be connected to portfolio data to monitor whether actual portfolio risk metrics (volatility, drawdown, equity exposure) remain aligned with the client's documented tolerance.
SEC — Securities and Exchange Commission
The U.S. federal agency established by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, responsible for enforcing federal securities laws, regulating securities markets, and overseeing investment advisers, broker-dealers, exchanges, mutual funds, and public companies. The SEC registers investment advisers managing $100 million or more, conducts examinations of RIA compliance programs, and enforces rules under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. The SEC's examination priorities each year signal which compliance areas, data governance practices, and technology risks are receiving heightened regulatory scrutiny — making them essential reading for CCOs and CIOs.
SMA — Separately Managed Account
A professionally managed portfolio of individual securities directly owned by the investor, typically managed by a third-party investment manager on a sub-advisory basis and held at the investor's custodian. Unlike mutual funds, SMA investors directly own each security, enabling customized restrictions, tax-loss harvesting, and full transparency into holdings. SMAs are commonly used within TAMP and UMA structures for access to institutional investment strategies. From a data perspective, SMA accounts require full position and transaction-level data from the custodian and coordination between the RIA, the SMA manager, and the overlay manager in a UMA structure.
SOC 2
A voluntary auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that evaluates a service organization's controls across five Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. SOC 2 Type I assesses whether controls are suitably designed; SOC 2 Type II assesses whether they operated effectively over a review period (typically six to twelve months). For WealthTech vendors handling client financial data, SOC 2 Type II certification is a baseline security requirement in most enterprise procurement processes — its absence is a significant risk signal.
Snowflake
A cloud-native data warehouse platform that separates storage from compute, enabling organizations to scale analytical processing independently of data storage cost. Snowflake runs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and supports SQL querying, data sharing, and real-time streaming alongside traditional batch analytics. Its Data Sharing feature allows organizations to share live data with partners without copying or moving it. Milemarker is built natively on Snowflake — client data is stored in a Snowflake instance that clients can access directly with their own data engineering and analytics teams, ensuring full data portability and eliminating vendor lock-in.
Structured Data
Data that is organized according to a predefined schema — rows, columns, fields, and defined data types — that machines can reliably query, filter, and aggregate. Relational databases, spreadsheets, and most financial data feeds produce structured data. In contrast to unstructured data (documents, emails, audio recordings) and semi-structured data (JSON, XML), structured data is the most immediately queryable. The movement toward structured data markup on web pages (using JSON-LD and schema.org) mirrors the broader principle in data engineering: when data has explicit, machine-readable structure, it becomes vastly more useful for AI systems and analytical engines.
TAMP — Turnkey Asset Management Platform
An outsourced investment management platform that provides advisory firms with access to a curated investment marketplace, portfolio construction and trading capabilities, back-office reporting, billing, and compliance support under a single platform contract. TAMPs such as Envestnet, SEI, AssetMark, and Orion allow advisory firms to outsource investment management operations while maintaining client relationships. TAMPs simplify technology and operations for smaller firms but can create data silos when TAMP-managed assets are not integrated with the firm's independent AUM in a unified reporting environment.
Ticker
A unique abbreviation assigned to a publicly traded security on a stock exchange, used as the primary identifier for real-time trading and market data (e.g., AAPL for Apple, BRK.B for Berkshire Hathaway Class B). While tickers are familiar and human-readable, they are less reliable than CUSIPs or ISINs for data integration — tickers can be reassigned when companies merge or rebrand, differ across exchanges for cross-listed securities, and do not exist for fixed-income instruments, private funds, or alternative assets. Robust WealthTech data platforms map between tickers, CUSIPs, ISINs, and internal security identifiers to maintain accurate cross-system security master data.
Trade Surveillance
Automated monitoring of trading activity — across advisers, accounts, and time periods — to detect patterns indicative of market manipulation, insider trading, front-running, excessive trading, or other regulatory violations. Trade surveillance is a core compliance requirement for broker-dealers under FINRA rules and is increasingly expected of RIAs under SEC examination scrutiny. Effective surveillance requires complete, timely, and accurately attributed trade data from all custodians — making data integration quality a prerequisite for reliable compliance monitoring. Surveillance systems generate alerts that must be reviewed, documented, and escalated through defined workflows.
UHNW — Ultra High Net Worth
Individuals or families with investable liquid assets typically exceeding $30 million — though some definitions set the threshold at $10 million or higher. UHNW clients typically require family office-level services: consolidated reporting across complex multi-entity structures, alternative asset management, tax and estate planning coordination, philanthropic advisory, and private banking relationships. The data complexity of UHNW relationships is significantly higher than standard HNW clients — assets span multiple custodians, asset managers, and directly held investments across legal entities, requiring sophisticated aggregation and entity relationship mapping to produce an accurate consolidated picture.
Unified Data Model
A standardized, comprehensive schema that maps data from all source systems in the WealthTech stack — CRMs, custodians, portfolio systems, planning tools, billing platforms — into consistent, interoperable definitions with well-defined relationships between clients, households, accounts, positions, transactions, advisers, and securities. A unified data model is the foundation that makes cross-system analytics reliable without requiring custom per-report data wrangling. Milemarker's unified data model is purpose-built for wealth management — encoding the relationships and business logic of advisory operations rather than requiring clients to build that logic themselves on top of raw data exports.
UMA — Unified Managed Account
An investment account structure that consolidates multiple investment strategies, asset classes, and SMA sleeves within a single account held at the custodian, typically under an overlay manager's supervision. The overlay manager optimizes the aggregate account for tax efficiency, rebalancing, and cash management across all sleeves simultaneously. UMAs reduce operational complexity versus maintaining multiple separate accounts and enable more sophisticated tax-loss harvesting across the full account. The data complexity of UMA structures is high — each sleeve may be managed by a different sub-adviser with its own reporting, requiring sophisticated aggregation in the portfolio management system.
Wealth Management
A comprehensive financial advisory discipline that integrates investment management, financial planning, tax strategy, estate planning, risk management, and often banking services to serve the complete financial needs of affluent individuals and families. Wealth management is distinguished from narrower investment advisory or financial planning services by its holistic, coordinated approach across all dimensions of a client's financial life. The delivery of true wealth management requires comprehensive data — connecting investment performance to financial plan progress, tax liability, estate structure, and insurance coverage — making data integration a foundational capability for any firm claiming to offer holistic wealth management.
WealthTech
The broad category of financial technology specifically focused on wealth management — encompassing software platforms, data infrastructure, AI tools, and digital services designed to improve the efficiency, compliance, and client outcomes of advisory firms. The WealthTech landscape spans CRM and practice management software, portfolio management and trading systems, financial planning tools, data platforms and analytics, compliance technology, client-facing digital portals, and AI-powered intelligence layers. The term distinguishes wealth-specific technology from broader fintech categories (payments, lending, insurance) and from institutional investment management technology (Bloomberg, FactSet, Charles River).
Workflow Automation
The use of software to automatically execute sequences of business process steps — triggered by events, data conditions, or schedules — that would otherwise require manual human action. In wealth management, workflow automation covers client onboarding (account opening, KYC, document collection), service requests (distribution processing, address changes, beneficiary updates), compliance tasks (review triggers, approval routing, documentation), and operational processes (billing runs, performance reporting, rebalancing approvals). Milemarker's workflow capabilities — branded as Milemarker Workflow — connect operational triggers from the data layer to actionable process automation, reducing manual overhead across advisory operations.
Zero-Trust Architecture
A security framework and design philosophy that eliminates implicit trust from any network, user, device, or application — requiring continuous, explicit verification of every access request regardless of whether it originates inside or outside the organizational perimeter. The core principle is "never trust, always verify." Zero-trust implementations enforce least-privilege access controls, require multi-factor authentication, segment network access by role and resource, and maintain detailed logs of all access events. For WealthTech platforms handling sensitive client financial data, zero-trust architecture is increasingly required in enterprise security assessments and is a component of SOC 2 Type II compliance programs.