Event Perspectives: Wrapping up 2025 at FUSE and Ascend Innovation Summit

The fourth quarter had some really valuable events that will help set the stage for where our industry goes in 2026. Here’s where we were in the final quarter of 2025 and what we think the conversations mean for the wealth management and asset servicing industry:

FUSE Forum‍

Asset Management‍

In attendance: Doug Fritz and Anish Mazumdar

Thanks to our acquisition of Aliter Investment Services, we’ve expanded our presence at industry events to asset management conferences. This was our first visit to FUSE and it was interesting to present an outside perspective to this audience. One benefit of bringing our point of view to this table is that we’ve long worked with the very advisors and firms that asset managers are selling into, so we can provide valuable insight into their customers.

What we see in this space right now is a lot of change in the types of investments that asset management firms are selling, and in the make-up of the firms that are buying from them. Aggregation has been big. Major players that are now $300 billion wealth firms didn't exist five years ago. What they ask for in terms of products and how you get the right information to them and out of them, that's all changing as well. With chaos comes opportunity and risk.

To summarize our perspective on the Fuse research session: the firms that pay attention, put in the work, and get really good guidance are going to absolutely win this next 10 years and those that do nothing and just expect things to continue to stay the same will suffer the consequences.

Apex Ascend Innovation Summit‍

Custody / Brokerage Services / Insurance / Crypto / AI

In attendance: Doug Fritz

It was also our first time at the Ascend Innovation Summit and they did a really good job of facilitating the meeting content. The panel that F2 ran focused on AI's impact into the wealth management space. We brought up the things that we're not talking about in regards to AI in this space.

First, so many AI tools (like ChatGPT) are probabilistic; their outcomes don’t always create the same output even when you ask the same exact question. So probabilistic outcomes versus deterministic outcomes is a problem for wealth management. There are classes of AI usefulness that we can’t plug into because of the predominant probabilistic GPT level outcomes. Most regulators will prohibit them because they are not repeatable. You can't guarantee that a client will see the same asset allocation or portfolio every time you run the analysis.

Second, AI will impact custody significantly in the future. Custodians sit on masses of information about the end investor — far more than the advisor themselves actually has access to — so they could enable almost infinite outcomes with AI by providing the data back to advisors.

Third, AI in wealth management is fragmented. Second generation AI tools will start to be created for specific types of use cases, especially around the agentic and the workflow advisor note taking. Other tools will try to be everything to everybody and sort of be like an all-in-one. The problem with both is that point solutions lead to proliferation of AI tools. Suddenly you have seven different AI tools in your organization that you can’t sustain. All-in-one solutions will lack specific features and functions that some point solutions have. So we'll see a similar evolution of AI tools as we've seen in other tools, which is the conflict between all-in-one versus point solutions.

Finally, regulation in our industry has fallen vastly behind the capabilities of the tools that we can use. And so what is the industry to do? We won't necessarily wait on regulators to decide on the rules. We're moving ahead based on what we know and what we've been told so far. The likely outcome is that we'll see more lawyers driving regulation than we will regulators driving regulation. In lieu of regulations we will get lawyers, and lawyers are often far worse than regulators.

Consulting Magazine Global Women Leaders in Consulting Summit

Leadership‍

In attendance: Liz Fritz

At the 2025 Global Women Leaders in Consulting Summit, Liz Fritz delivered a keynote presentation on The Leadership Challenge: Navigating Visibility, Influence & Trust. In a room full of industry pioneers, Liz shared her framework for building sustainable influence in complex environments, especially for women navigating legacy power dynamics. Her “Influence Triangle” model (Visibility, Trust, and Value) resonated deeply with the audience, offering practical, hard-earned strategies for leading with clarity, authenticity, and impact in consulting and financial services.

Liz was honored with the prestigious Global Women Leader in Consulting award where she was recognized for her contributions to the industry as a founder, strategist, and voice for inclusive leadership. This milestone not only celebrates Liz’s personal leadership journey, but also marks a major moment for F2 Strategy, as the firm continues to earn recognition on the global consulting stage. It underscores the firm's commitment to redefining what modern, values-aligned leadership looks like: scaling with integrity, clarity, and purpose.

Where To Next

F2 team members will hit the road in the middle of Q1. We’ll be at the Private Asset Management Awards, Trust Advisors Forum, iConnections Global Alts, Orion Ascent, and Future Proof Citywide.

Continue the conversation with us to learn how we help wealth management and asset servicing firms implement critical technology and marketing strategies to optimize growth.