Hey WealthTech’ers 👋

📰 PloutosX WealthTech Stories – October 20th, 2025 has landed. Your Monday reset, just in time to sharpen your week ahead.

With innovation accelerating across WealthTech, AI, and alternative investments, take five to catch up on the platforms, strategies, and people shaping the future of wealth management.

This week: Clove raises a record $14 million pre-seed to build an AI-powered financial advice app, a new Goldman Sachs report shows demand for alternative investments is surging, F2 Strategy expands into private markets through its acquisition of HBMJ Consulting, CAIS launches an AI assistant to streamline alternative investing for advisors, and Blackstone warns that Wall Street is underestimating the scale of AI’s disruption.

Whether you are building, investing, or leading in this space, grab your coffee, scroll on, and start the week informed and ahead. ☕

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Delving into the leading 5 wealthtech stories of the week:

🗞️ Story 1: “WealthTech Clove emerges from stealth with $14M in funding” 💼🌱

🗞️ Story 2: “Goldman report shows interest in alternative investments on the rise” 📊💰

🗞️ Story 3: “F2 Strategy acquires HBMJ Consulting to expand into alternative investments” 🤝📈

🗞️ Story 4: “CAIS unveils CAISey, an AI solution to streamline the alternative investment experience” 🤖💼

🗞️ Story 5: “Blackstone warns Wall Street is complacent about AI disruption” ⚠️🧠

🗞 Story #1

UK-based startup Clove, co-founded by Paddle SaaS’s Christian Owens and Alex Loizou, has emerged from stealth with $14 million in pre-seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Kindred Capital VC, Air Street Capital, and notable fintech angels. The company is developing an AI-driven hybrid advice app that blends financial planners with artificial intelligence to deliver personalised, affordable financial guidance at scale. Clove plans a full launch in 2026, pending FCA approval, and aims to make financial planning more accessible for young professionals, entrepreneurs, and families.

💡 Why It Matters: A $14 million pre-seed raise is extraordinary, underscoring investor confidence in both Clove’s founders and its market potential. The funding size signals how quickly AI-assisted personal finance is becoming a focal point for venture capital. Clove’s hybrid model, combining AI efficiency with human empathy, targets a massive underserved audience priced out of traditional advice. If successful, it could redefine how financial planning is delivered, bridging the gap between robo-advisors’ automation and the trust of human advisors while setting a new benchmark for early-stage WealthTech ambition.

📰 Read full story here

🗞 Story #2

A new report from Goldman Sachs Asset Management(GSAM) highlights growing appetite for alternative investments across both institutional and wealthy individual investors. The data shows ultra-high-net-worth portfolios now allocate around 25% to alternatives, while high-net-worth investors average closer to 15%. The surge is driven by persistent inflation, muted equity returns, and the search for uncorrelated performance through private equity, private credit, and infrastructure. GSAM notes that greater product innovation and improved access platforms are accelerating this trend, bringing private markets closer to the mainstream investment mix.

💡 Why It Matters: This shift marks a fundamental rebalancing of global portfolios toward illiquid assets. As public markets stagnate, investors are embracing alternatives as engines of diversification and long-term alpha. For wealth managers, this represents both an opportunity and a challenge: integrating complex, less transparent assets into portfolios built for liquidity. Platforms that simplify discovery, compliance, and onboarding for alternatives will be pivotal. The report also underscores how institutional-grade strategies are trickling down to affluent investors, reinforcing the convergence of private and public market investing under the WealthTech umbrella.

📰 Read full story here

🗞 Story #3

US-based F2 Strategy, a consulting and technology services firm for the wealth and asset management industry, has acquired HBMJ Consulting, LLC to accelerate its entry into the alternative investments sector. The acquisition expands F2’s capabilities across data, digital transformation, and operations for asset managers, fund administrators, and alternative product providers. HBMJ brings deep expertise in alternatives and private markets technology, strengthening F2’s position as a full-stack transformation partner. The firm plans to leverage its combined resources to modernise how alternative investment firms manage distribution, operations, and client experience.

💡 Why It Matters: As alternatives move from niche to mainstream, wealth managers face mounting pressure to upgrade infrastructure that was never built for private assets. F2’s acquisition of HBMJ signals a clear bet that operational modernization and technology integration will be the next frontier of growth in alternatives. The deal highlights how consulting firms are evolving beyond strategy into implementation, data, and digital platforms to meet institutional and wealth client demands. This move underscores a growing convergence between traditional wealth management consulting and technology enablement in the alternative investment ecosystem.

📰 Read full story here

Story #4

Alternative investment platform CAIS has launched CAISey, an AI-powered digital assistant designed to simplify how financial advisors access, evaluate, and allocate to alternative assets. CAISey integrates natural language processing and data analytics to surface relevant fund opportunities, automate workflows, and enhance due diligence. The launch builds on CAIS’s mission to make institutional-quality private market products accessible to independent financial advisors. By embedding AI into the platform, CAIS aims to reduce friction in onboarding, documentation, and client suitability checks, areas that traditionally slow adoption of alternative investments in the advisor segment.

💡 Why It Matters: The alternative investments space has long been defined by manual processes and opaque information flows. CAISey’s arrival marks a shift toward intelligent automation in wealth distribution. For advisors, this technology could level the playing field by providing tools once reserved for institutional allocators, improving both efficiency and client experience. For the broader market, it reflects how AI is being woven into the operational core of private wealth platforms, not just for analytics but as an embedded co-pilot in decision-making. If successful, CAISey could redefine how advisors discover, diligence, and deliver alternative products at scale.

📰 Read full story here

🗞 Story #5

Jon Gray, President of Blackstone, has cautioned that many on Wall Street underestimate the scale of change artificial intelligence will bring to finance. Speaking at a recent investor conference, Gray said AI will transform every layer of the financial ecosystem, from credit analysis and valuations to portfolio construction and risk management. He noted that the firms poised to win are those already integrating AI into workflows and investment strategies. Gray also emphasised that private capital will play a defining role in funding the infrastructure and models underpinning this next phase of technological disruption.

💡 Why It Matters: When the world’s largest alternative asset manager raises concern, the industry listens. Gray’s comments signal a growing recognition that AI will reshape how capital is allocated, risks are assessed, and productivity is measured in financial markets. This shift is not only technological but strategic, pushing asset managers to rethink their operating models. For private equity and alternative funds, the message is clear: value creation will increasingly depend on data fluency and automation. As AI moves from buzzword to backbone, firms that ignore its implications risk losing both performance and talent to faster-adapting competitors.

📰 Read full story here

And that's a wrap WealthTech’ers, till next week. 🎬👋

Thanks for tuning in to PloutosX WealthTech Stories, your weekly snapshot of the trends, people, and innovations shaping the future of wealth technology.

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Disclaimers:

(1) The opinions shared here are my own and do not represent the views of any organization I am associated with.

(2) This newsletter is for educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as investment or financial advice.

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