Many advisors today are looking to achieve personalization at scale for their clients. But achieving that goal isn’t simple, according to experts at financial AI specialist Communify, investment firm Ethic and RIA Savvy Wealth.
Many firms are layering together different tools and models to meet client expectations, but there is a hidden cost: operational drag that could slow growth and strain teams, which means the benefits of scale are hindered or even not happening. Advisors must find a way to make personalization repeatable and scalable without interfering with operations or compliance.
WSR spoke with Alex Laipple, Chief Growth Officer at Ethic; Yaela Shamberg, Chief Product Officer at Communify; and Ritik Malhotra, Founder and CEO at Savvy Wealth, asking each of them: How can advisors make personalization repeatable and scalable without causing problems for operations or compliance?
Their responses follow.
Alex Laipple, Chief Growth Officer, Ethic
Advisors can make personalization scalable by being more intentional about how it’s built into their operating model. Personalization becomes tenuous when it relies on one-off accommodations that sit outside a firm’s core workflows. Over time, those exceptions accumulate, increasing operational drag, introducing risk and pushing compliance into a reactive role.
A more resilient approach is to design personalization into the infrastructure itself. When client preferences across risk, taxes and other priorities are captured as consistent inputs, advisors can deliver differentiated portfolios through repeatable, well-governed processes. Personalization becomes something the platform enables by default rather than something teams must manually reconstruct for each client.
Integration is equally important. Disparate platforms force teams to reconcile decisions across systems, increasing the likelihood of error as firms grow. By consolidating prospecting, portfolio construction, tax management and reporting within a single unified experience, firms can deliver custom portfolios without introducing hidden complexity.
With the right structure in place, personalization becomes easier to sustain over time. Advisors can focus on judgment and client relationships, operations remain stable as needs grow more nuanced, and compliance stays embedded in the workflow. Clients experience portfolios that feel truly personal, delivered through infrastructure designed to evolve alongside their needs.
Yaela Shamberg, Chief Product Officer, Communify
For personalization to truly scale, it must start with a trusted, intelligent foundation. Without it, personalization becomes manual, inconsistent and difficult for operations and compliance teams to govern.
The goal is simple: Give advisors the right information so they can focus on empathetic, high-value conversations. A centralized knowledge base unifying client, market and portfolio data creates a single source of truth. From that foundation, deterministic AI transforms raw data into actionable information — surfacing relevant insights and next best actions for each client. Because deterministic systems are consistent, auditable and compliant, they provide the reliability required to scale personalization across teams and time.
This shifts the advisor’s role from gathering information to interpreting it. Advisors move from assembling data to telling a coherent client story — connecting portfolio performance, market context and personal goals in clear, human language clients can understand and trust.
Generative AI can then translate these insights into natural communication, while deterministic systems ensure every output remains accurate, consistent and compliant.
The result is truly personalized client engagement at scale: Operations stay efficient, compliance remains confident, and advisors gain the time and clarity to focus on what matters most — the conversations that build trust and deepen relationships.
Ritik Malhotra, Founder And CEO, Savvy Wealth
The old way of thinking treats personalization as a manual effort: advisors stitching together client context from a dozen systems just to craft a communication or recommendation that feels tailored. When personalization works that way, ops and compliance problems are inevitable.
AI changes the equation entirely. A good AI layer doesn’t just automate tasks; it makes personalization the path of least resistance. It surfaces the right client context before a meeting, drafts a communication that actually reflects that client’s situation, and does it all within compliance guardrails. The advisor isn’t going off script anymore. The personalized response is the default response. That’s how you get scale without the operational mess.
At Savvy, we think about this through the lens of one of our design principles: “Optimize for the service, not the surface.” It means designing the full end-to-end experience — not just what the advisor sees, but how everything flows downstream through ops and compliance. When you build it that way, personalization and operational integrity stop being in tension. They become the same thing.
Jeff Berman, Contributing Editor and Reporter at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at jeff.berman@wealthsolutionsreport.com.
