Limited to an intimate group of peer institutions, this closed-door session moves beyond generic industry discussion. Conversations are grounded in proprietary benchmarking data on topics including compensation, pricing, and profitability, and shaped around the issues top executives are examining right now.

The Investment Management and Trust Leadership Forum is an invitation-only gathering for the senior-most leaders in bank wealth and independent trust management — EVPs of wealth, heads of trust, and other executive leadership shaping strategy, growth, talent, and technology at their firms.

Space is limited to preserve the caliber and candor of the room.

To request an invitation, please contact us at events@datos-insights.com.

Datos Insights opens the day with a research-driven scan of the forces reshaping wealth management in 2027, from the AI buildout and the managed account arms race to the wealth transfer and the growing competitive threat from non-traditional players. This keynote establishes the strategic context for every conversation that follows and previews the key questions the day’s panels and roundtables are designed to answer.

In this keynote, Jennifer Povlitz will explore the multi-trillion-dollar wave of women and wealth, tracing the shift from financial independence to generational influence. She’ll examine how top-earning women are reshaping wealth ownership, decision-making, and family leadership, and what firms need to understand about wealth creators, inheritors, and rising generations redefining legacy. Attendees will come away with actionable insight into the decision-making structures, service models, and competitive positioning required to win in women-led wealth.

Most wealth firms have a digital transformation story to tell, but the gap between the roadmap and operational reality remains wide. This panel moves past the vision to examine what genuine digitization looks like on the ground: how leading firms are sequencing technology investments, managing advisor adoption, and measuring the impact on client outcomes and firm economics. Practitioners share what surprised them, what vendors got wrong, and what they would do differently.

Estate planning is one of the stickiest parts of the advice relationship. In Datos Insights' 2026 HNW Consumer Survey, 58% of high-net-worth investors say they already use estate planning services from their primary firm, yet only 30% are comfortable getting complex planning recommendations digitally without first talking to their advisor. In this case study, Mariner and Hargrove MSO discuss how building attorney-led estate planning directly into the advisor workflow helps firms get to know the whole family, engage heirs early, and keep assets in place as wealth moves between generations, without adding friction for advisors or clients.

Banks and Wealth management firms are comfortable using generative AI (GenAI) for document research and message drafting. Agents that execute workflows across the front office, trust administration, and compliance draw more hesitation. Backbase panelists discuss what it takes to move an agentic AI assistant from pilot to production, following the firm's acquisition of Kasisto, a conversational banking and agentic wealth assistant. The conversation covers guardrails for agents that touch live workflows, token economics, model routing, and the role of small language models hosted on institutional infrastructure.

Every firm wants AI, but most are still reconciling positions across custodians, trust systems and advisory platforms. This discussion looks at why a unified, real-time investment book of record is becoming the prerequisite for everything else, from personalization to automation, and how firms can modernize it in phases instead of through a “rip and replace.”

As $124 trillion in wealth transfers reshape the industry, how are the largest platforms rethinking advice? This roundtable conversation between Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer of Robinhood, and Will Trout, Director of Datos Insights’ Wealth Management group, examines trends such as the rise of agentic trading, the convergence of advised and self-directed investing, and the migration of client assets into digital assets and alternatives. Attendees will confront the dynamics forcing traditional firms to evolve their tech stack and value propositions or cede younger, upwardly mobile clients to platforms built for this moment.

The managed account industry has spent two decades evolving from separately managed accounts to unified managed accounts to household-level coordination. However, the next frontier is a single unified portfolio that combines public and private securities under one advisory framework. This panel examines the architectural, operational, and regulatory challenges of building a true unified advisory platform, and what it means for how wealth firms construct, manage, and communicate investment strategies to clients.

HNW clients are prime targets for account takeover, impersonation, and increasingly convincing AI-enabled scams, and a single incident can end a relationship built over decades. This roundtable examines how firms are protecting clients without adding friction, including how they layer identity verification and behavioral analytics, secure digital channels and money movement, and prepare advisors and clients to recognize social engineering. Participants will share what's working, where the gaps remain, and how to balance security with the experience clients expect.

While nearly every wealth firm has an AI pilot, few have agents doing real work in production. This roundtable looks at what separates the two: where agentic AI is ready to take on end-to-end tasks in operations, servicing, and advisor support, how firms are setting up oversight, controls, and human checkpoints, and what the data and integration foundations need to look like first. Participants will compare notes on use cases, governance models, and the organizational changes needed to scale beyond the lab.

Data aggregation, household-level reporting, and real-time analytics are the foundation of competitive advice delivery. This panel examines how firms are rationalizing fragmented data environments, unlocking insights from client and portfolio data, and turning data infrastructure into a client-facing differentiator.

With AI tools proliferating across CRM, financial planning, portfolio management, and client communications, wealth firms are struggling to separate meaningful capability from vendor marketing. This panel examines where AI is actually delivering measurable advisor productivity gains, where it falls short, and what the firms getting it right have in common.

Datos Insights presents findings from its annual survey of high-net-worth investors, revealing a striking gap between what advisors assume their clients value and what clients themselves report. The data covers service expectations, digital engagement preferences, trust drivers, and the factors most likely to prompt an HNW client to move assets (or stay).