If you sell software into the RIA stack you've probably wished there was a tidy public file of what each firm uses. There isn't. CRM, planning software, and custodian choices aren't disclosed in regulatory filings. But there are enough indirect signals that you can build a usable map of who uses what, with caveats.
Here's how the tech-stack data world really works.
The Three Stack Layers That Matter
For most vendors, three layers cover 80% of the question.
- CRM (Redtail, Wealthbox, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Practifi, Junxure)
- Financial planning software (eMoney, MoneyGuide, RightCapital, Asset-Map)
- Custodian (Schwab Advisor Services, Fidelity Wealthscape, Pershing, LPL, smaller custodians)
Additional layers (performance reporting, billing, portfolio management, document management, client portal) matter for specific vendors but aren't usually the lead segmentation field. Most teams start with the three above.
Source 1: Survey Data
The T3 Inside Information Survey is the largest published annual survey of advisor technology adoption. It tracks share by category and reports who's growing and shrinking. Useful for category-level market sizing. Less useful for firm-level targeting because the data is aggregated.
Kitces.com Research also publishes annual technology surveys with strong category breakdowns. Free or low-cost. Again, aggregate not firm-level.
Source 2: Firmographic Inference
You can infer parts of the stack from firm characteristics on Form ADV.
- Custodian: Schedule D Item 9 (custody) names the qualified custodian. This is the most reliable single inference. If a firm reports Charles Schwab as the qualified custodian, they use Schwab Advisor Services.
- Firm size and channel often predict CRM choice. Solo RIAs skew heavily Wealthbox or Redtail. Mid-tier firms skew Redtail, Wealthbox, or Junxure. Enterprise RIAs lean Salesforce FSC or Practifi.
- Planning software is hardest to infer. eMoney dominates enterprise. MoneyGuide is broad. RightCapital is growing in fee-only emerging RIAs.
Source 3: Web and Tech-Fingerprint Signals
The most reliable firm-level signal comes from the advisor's own digital footprint.
- Client portal subdomains: a firm with portal.wealthbox.com behind their client login uses Wealthbox. A firm using emoneyadvisor.com confirms eMoney.
- Scheduling integrations on their website often expose their CRM (Calendly with Wealthbox sync, ScheduleOnce with Redtail).
- Job postings on LinkedIn or Indeed often name the firm's CRM and planning software explicitly. A "Redtail experience required" posting is a perfect signal.
- Press releases and case studies on vendor websites name the firm directly. eMoney, Orion, Black Diamond, and Envestnet all publish customer lists.
This is the same fingerprinting approach BuiltWith uses for general web tech, applied to advisor-specific stacks. We crawl these signals as part of our firm-intelligence builds.
Source 4: Custodian Data
The custodian relationship is published on Form ADV Item 9 and Schedule D Item 9. It's high-confidence. If you're segmenting by custodian (and many wealthtech vendors do because integrations are custodian-specific), use this as your primary source. We compared the main custodians in a separate piece.
Source 5: Vendor Customer Lists
Several CRM and planning vendors publish or share their customer rosters either publicly or through partner relationships. If you have a partnership with Redtail, Wealthbox, or eMoney, you can sometimes get a customer list as a co-marketing artifact. This is the highest-quality firm-level data when accessible.
What's Real and What's Inferred
Honest accounting of confidence levels:
- Custodian: 95%+ confidence from ADV Item 9.
- CRM: 60% to 75% confidence from web fingerprinting and job postings. 90%+ from vendor partnerships.
- Planning software: 50% to 65% confidence from web signals. 85%+ from vendor partnerships.
- Performance reporting: hardest. Usually inferred from custodian relationships (Schwab + Black Diamond is common, Fidelity + Tamarac is common).
If a vendor sells you "verified RIA tech stack data" at 99% confidence, ask how it was sourced. There's no public registry. Confidence above 90% comes from vendor partnerships, not from inference.
How to Use Tech-Stack Data in Outreach
Three practical patterns.
Negative signal as a filter. If your product replaces Redtail, target firms that don't use Redtail (or that have recently posted jobs looking for Redtail experience, which often means they're frustrated). If your product integrates only with Salesforce FSC, exclude firms that don't use Salesforce.
Migration signals. A firm that posts a job requiring eMoney plus a "considering RightCapital" mention in an LinkedIn case study is in the middle of a migration. Migration windows are the highest-conversion outreach windows.
Integration partnerships. If you integrate natively with Wealthbox, the highest-value segment is firms using Wealthbox plus a complementary tool you replace or extend. Targeting Wealthbox + Redtail dual-system firms with a unification pitch usually outperforms generic Wealthbox-only outreach.
The Realistic Build
If we were starting a tech-stack data project today: start with custodian (high confidence, free, public). Add CRM inference from web fingerprinting and recent job postings. Layer planning-software signals from the same sources. Validate the top 10% of your target list manually before campaign launch. Don't promise 99% accuracy on inferred fields; promise high-confidence custodian data plus indicative CRM/planning data.
For wealthtech vendors selling integrations, this stack data is the difference between cold outreach and warm outreach. We build it as part of our firm-intelligence service.
Each Tech Layer in Depth
CRM Market Snapshot
Three CRMs dominate the independent RIA market. Wealthbox has the most modern UX and the strongest growth in emerging RIAs. Redtail (now Orion Connect) has the largest installed base and deep integration history. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has the enterprise segment. Beyond the big three, Practifi is competitive in the $500M to $2B band, Junxure persists at firms that adopted it years ago, and a few vertical-specific CRMs (Tamarac CRM, the AdvisorEngine stack) compete in specific niches.
Migration patterns: emerging RIAs typically pick Wealthbox first because of price and ease. Firms scaling past $500M often re-evaluate and either upgrade to Redtail (for integration breadth) or to Salesforce FSC (for customization). Migrations downward (out of Salesforce) are rare but happen when firms find the customization burden too heavy.
Planning Software Market Snapshot
eMoney is the enterprise standard. MoneyGuidePro is the broadest-installed across all RIA sizes. RightCapital is the fastest-growing in fee-only fiduciary firms. Asset-Map is popular for client-facing visual planning. NaviPlan and Advicent serve niche segments.
Planning software changes less often than CRM. A typical firm runs the same planning tool for 5 to 10 years. The trigger for migration is usually a planning-philosophy change (cash-flow-based to goals-based planning, for example) or a major hire who has experience with a different tool.
Performance Reporting and Portfolio Management
This category sits below the surface but drives a lot of vendor choice. The leaders: Orion (broad market), Black Diamond (mid and upper market), Tamarac/Envestnet (enterprise), Addepar (ultra-high-net-worth and complex assets), and Advyzon (emerging market). Each has a distinct integration footprint with custodians and CRMs.
Reporting-platform data is harder to pull from public signals than CRM data, because the platforms are less visible to end clients. The best signals are vendor case studies, conference sponsorships, and job postings.
How to Stack-Profile a Firm
If you want to manually profile a specific firm's stack, a 30-minute process gets you to 80% confidence:
- Pull Form ADV for the firm. Note custodian from Item 9.
- Visit the firm's website. Look at the client portal login URL pattern (Wealthbox uses portal.wealthbox.com; eMoney uses emoneyadvisor.com; etc.).
- Check the firm's career page or LinkedIn job postings for software mentions.
- Search vendor case studies for the firm name (eMoney, Orion, Black Diamond, Envestnet publish customer lists or testimonials).
- Look at the firm's LinkedIn page for staff profiles. Operations and IT staff often list their CRM and planning tool in their job experience.
At scale, the same logic runs as a crawler-plus-fingerprinter against thousands of firms simultaneously. That's how we build stack-segmented lists for clients. Tell us what stack you want to find.
Confidence Tiers for Stack Data
When we deliver stack-segmented lists, we tag each record with a confidence tier so the buyer knows what they're working with.
Verified. Confirmed through vendor partnership, public case study, or direct firm disclosure. Confidence above 95%. Roughly 15% to 25% of records typically reach this tier.
High-confidence inferred. Confirmed through multiple independent signals (custodian + client portal pattern + recent job posting, for example). Confidence around 80% to 90%. Most records in this tier.
Indicative. Single-signal inference (firm size band suggests Wealthbox, for example) without supporting evidence. Confidence around 50% to 65%. Useful for filtering, not for high-confidence outreach.
Unknown. Insufficient signal to infer. Flagged as such rather than guessed.
This tiering matters because most tech-stack vendors quote a single confidence number that hides the underlying variance. A "92% accurate" CRM dataset is usually 95%+ on the easy 60% of firms and 80% on the harder 40%. Tiering lets the buyer use the easy data with confidence and treat the harder data as directional.
If you want a stack-segmented list with confidence tiers visible, that's our standard delivery. We'll tell you exactly what we know and what we're inferring.