A single source of truth
With each acquired firm operating its own systems and data quality standards, leaders lacked a reliable, consistent view of clients, assets, and advisor activity across the enterprise.
BBI built a unified data platform on Microsoft Azure and Snowflake for a fast-growing wealth management firm, turning every new acquisition from a custom project into a repeatable one.
01The challenge
Our client is a wealth management firm that partners with and acquires independent advisory firms, helping them grow while providing centralized support across operations, technology, and client services. Today, the firm partners with more than 90 advisory firms and oversees more than $600 billion in client assets.
Rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions created a highly fragmented technology and data environment. Each acquired firm operated with its own mix of CRM systems, portfolio management platforms, billing tools, external data providers, and operational processes, making it difficult to establish consistency across the organization.
Following a private equity acquisition, the firm shifted from a decentralized operating model toward a more centralized growth strategy across its partner ecosystem. To support that transition, they needed a scalable approach to integrating data, onboarding new firms, and improving visibility across the business.
Several challenges emerged:
With each acquired firm operating its own systems and data quality standards, leaders lacked a reliable, consistent view of clients, assets, and advisor activity across the enterprise.
Advisors and their support teams needed a single picture of client assets and performance across multiple custodians and portfolio management platforms.
The cost for an external data warehouse exceeded $400,000 annually, which they wanted to bring back under their own control.
Every acquisition required custom integration work, but the pace of growth made that approach unsustainable.
Before: every firm brings its own CRM, portfolio, and billing systems.
02The solution
BBI designed and implemented a unified, cloud-based data platform that centralized fragmented data environments and established a scalable foundation for integration, analytics, governance, and AI readiness across the client's expanding partner ecosystem. The solution combined modern architecture, standardized integration frameworks, operational controls, foundational components and reusable accelerators to support the company's shift toward a more centralized operating model.
We knew we needed a modern, standardized data foundation capable of supporting future growth. BBI was the right partner because they brought real financial services experience and a specific, repeatable approach to building things the right way. They showed us an actual architecture as well as what a project plan would look like early on, starting with an MVP, then scaling and growing from there.
BBI consolidated fragmented and redundant data environments into a centralized cloud-based platform designed to support growth across more than 90 partner firms. The architecture standardized data flows across operational and analytical systems while helping rationalize underlying technologies, platforms, and data structures into a more unified enterprise strategy.
BBI built reusable integration frameworks and automated ingestion pipelines to support a more scalable approach to integrating partner firms and enterprise systems. The solution standardized data mapping, transformation, and translation processes across disparate formats and platforms while improving interoperability across the advisor ecosystem.
BBI embedded its proprietary operational data quality framework throughout the data lifecycle to improve governance, visibility, and operational reliability. The framework introduced monitoring, auditability, traceability, and restartability across data pipelines while establishing stronger controls around data quality and pipeline performance.
The platform established a more consistent foundation for enterprise reporting, advisor analytics, and future AI-driven initiatives. BBI structured and standardized data to support accessibility, interoperability, and downstream AI consumption while enabling real-time access across the environment. Building on that foundation, an AI-assisted migration workbench ingests newly acquired firms' data, generates source-to-target mappings, and produces the code to integrate it into the platform.
Along the way, the partnership grew from five BBI resources on the foundational build to more than 30. The client's internal data engineers concentrate on review, approval, and direction, while BBI leads day-to-day development. This keeps the client's team focused on the bigger picture while the build keeps moving forward.
5 BBI engineers
03The outcome
The new platform has transformed how the firm manages and uses data, improving operational efficiency, and long-term scalability. Specifically, the business has experienced:
Reduced reliance on external platforms, driving more than $500K in annual cost savings
30–50% faster onboarding of new data feeds, including a three-month CRM consolidation that brought 20 newly acquired firms onto a single template
Stable processing of billions of records per day
Improved query performance through platform-aware modeling
Greater consistency across systems, improving reporting and decision-making
Scalable environment to support ongoing growth and new AI initiatives
Looking ahead, BBI continues to extend the data foundation across the functional domains that organize the client's business (client, firms, investments, security master, FinOps, and others), with each new domain expanding the analytics and AI capabilities available to the organization.
We view this as a strategic platform for our long-term analytics, integration, and AI. It allows us to onboard new firms without re-engineering everything in the middle. We see it as absolutely critical to almost everything we're doing. It's very foundational.
This engagement won BBI the Data Integration Solution of the Year award at the 7th annual Data Breakthrough Awards in April 2026. Winners are judged on innovation, performance, ease of use, functionality, and real-world impact.
By combining deep engineering expertise with modern platform architectures, BBI supports organizations seeking to build scalable, future-ready data ecosystems while improving governance and operational reliability.
From data strategy through go-live and into ongoing operations, BBI brings senior data and AI engineering to teams ready to scale.