Over the last decade, we have watched the wealth management industry cross a quiet but pivotal threshold. The way wealth is actually held, managed, and reported today no longer resembles the single-custodian models that many platforms and operating assumptions were built around.
Industry estimates suggest that roughly half of ultra-high-net-worth assets now sit outside a primary advisory relationship, amounting to more than $12 trillion in the U.S. alone. In practice, that means portfolios spread across banks, RIAs, private platforms, alternative investment managers, international institutions, and bespoke custodial relationships.
Yet many firms still operate as if a single custodian can provide a complete picture of client wealth. From my vantage point, the gap between reality and infrastructure has become one of the biggest strategic constraints facing the industry today.
The Reality of How Wealth Is Actually Held
For high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families, fragmentation is the norm. It’s common to see five, eight, or even a dozen custodians involved in a single family’s financial portfolio. Family offices often rely on niche providers with specialized reporting, like private equity or real estate. RIAs inherit portfolios that mix large custodians like Schwab or Fidelity with regional banks, private funds, crypto platforms, and manually reported assets.
This complexity isn’t accidental. It reflects asset specialization, client preference, global exposure, and the continued expansion of private markets. The problem isn’t that wealth is fragmented. The problem is that many firms still lack the infrastructure to see it clearly.
When assets held elsewhere remain invisible, advisors don’t see the full picture and therefore can’t make the best suggestions. That limits holistic planning and weakens risk management.
On the surface, consolidating multi-custodial data into a single view may seem easy. However, I can assure you it is not. It’s not so much the scale that makes it challenging, but the inconsistency.
Every custodian captures and reports on data differently. Transaction codes vary. Security identifiers don’t align. Income is classified inconsistently.. Corporate actions follow different logic. Even pricing conventions can vary.
Timing adds another layer of complexity. Large custodians tend to deliver predictable daily feeds. Mid-tier banks may report intermittently. International platforms introduce settlement delays. Alternative investments often report monthly or quarterly with limited standardization. These discrepancies cascade into performance reporting, accounting, billing, compliance, and risk analytics.
From an operational standpoint, none of this is abstract. It shows up as reconciliation breaks, missing data, delayed reporting, and manual workarounds. And as portfolios grow more complex and data is wanted immediately, those issues compound.
The Hidden Operational Cost of “Total Wealth”
Behind every clean, consolidated wealth view lies significant operational effort. Institutional-quality data aggregation requires continuous validation of data completeness, reconciliation of positions and units, transaction mapping and remapping, pricing hierarchy enforcement, exception handling, and ongoing coordination with hundreds of counterparties.
Most of this work is invisible to advisors and clients. However, it consumes enormous internal resources. This is why many firms hesitate to build multi-custodial infrastructure. Not because they don’t believe in total wealth visibility, but because building and maintaining the required infrastructure is expensive and difficult to maintain.
Traditional aggregation approaches were never designed to meet these requirements. Credential-based access and screen scraping may work for consumer use cases, but they fall short in institutional settings where accuracy, completeness, and auditability matter. Breakages, missing data, and inconsistent normalization make it nearly impossible to rely on the output for decision-critical functions.
Reframing Multi-Custodial Data as Strategy, Not Burden
In my view, the firms that will lead the next decade of wealth management won’t be the ones that force consolidation or limit client choice. They’ll be the ones who accept fragmentation as reality and invest accordingly.
That means moving away from fragile aggregation models toward direct, authorized access to custodial data. It means standardizing positions, transactions, cash activity, pricing, tax lots, and income accruals across both traditional and alternative assets. And it means layering quality controls around reconciliations, exception workflows, and historical validations, on top of that foundation.
When those elements are in place, multi-custodial data stops being an operational headache.
Why We Built PCR the Way We Did
At PCR, we built our infrastructure specifically for firms operating in this reality. Through direct, LOA-based connectivity, we support authorized data feeds across more than 800 custodians without relying on credential-based access.
Each day, we capture positions, transactions, cash activity, pricing, tax lots, and income accruals across traditional and alternative assets. That data is normalized into a unified institutional schema, reconciled, validated, and governed through exception workflows so firms can trust what they’re seeing.
But more broadly, our goal has always been to help wealth firms treat multi-custodial complexity as a strategic capability, not a limitation.
Because the future of wealth management isn’t about forcing assets into a single place. It’s about having the infrastructure to understand them wherever they live.
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