Orion and Goldman Sachs launch API-driven digital account opening

Orion's AI-built onboarding tool, co-developed with Goldman Sachs Custody, signals wealthtech's shift to real-time custodian integration.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 11 August 2026

A bright conference room features a long wooden conference table and grey chairs facing large windows that overlook a city skyline with skyscrapers, a river, and distant mountains under clear daylight.

Orion, the Omaha-based wealthtech platform overseeing $6.6 trillion in assets under administration, has launched a fully digital account-opening workflow for independent financial advisers, with Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions (GSCS) as the first custodian integrated into the live system. The product, called Dynamic New Account Opening, sits inside the Orion Advisor Portal and connects directly to custodians via API, removing the manual data re-entry that has historically slowed onboarding in the registered investment adviser (RIA) channel.

The workflow adapts dynamically to account type, household structure, and custodian configuration, and supports both DocuSign e-signature and a fully digital completion path. The launch follows two hackathons held jointly by Orion and GSCS during 2025, in which both teams used AI tooling to automate core elements of the account-opening process. Todd Bertucci, Executive Vice President at Orion Advisor Technology, said the collaboration was "a meaningful step toward modernising account onboarding and reducing friction where it matters most."

From paper-heavy friction to real-time infrastructure

Account opening in the RIA sector has long been a bottleneck. Despite the broader digitisation of financial services, custodian onboarding has relied heavily on PDF-based forms and manual reconciliation, creating multi-day delays between client commitment and active account status. Orion's direct API connection to GSCS compresses that timeline to near real-time, a structural shift that mirrors what open-banking standards achieved for retail banking in Europe over the past decade.

Jeremy Eisenstein, Managing Director and Head of Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions, described the integration as a demonstration of the custody platform's "open architecture and API-driven design," framing it explicitly as infrastructure that lets RIAs scale. The integration is currently live for Orion Advisor Technology clients custodying with GSCS, with Orion Portfolio Solutions clients to follow later in the summer and additional custodial partners expected before year-end.

Convergence angle: the industrialisation of independent wealth management

The move sits inside a broader structural shift in wealth management infrastructure. The RIA market in the United States has grown rapidly over the past decade as advisers break away from wirehouse models, and the technology stack serving them is now consolidating around a small number of integrated platform providers. Orion, which claims the number-one market-share position across all-in-one software, CRM, and portfolio management and reporting, is effectively building the operating system for the independent channel at significant scale: 8.6 million technology accounts and 17 of the top 20 Barron's-ranked RIA firms.

For Goldman Sachs, the GSCS partnership represents a deliberate move to embed its custody infrastructure deeper into the independent adviser ecosystem rather than ceding that channel entirely to competitors such as Schwab Advisor Services and Fidelity Institutional. By becoming the first custodian live on Orion's new API layer, GSCS gains a first-mover advantage in workflow integration that is operationally sticky: once an adviser's onboarding, portfolio management, and CRM tools are wired to a custodian's API, switching costs rise substantially.

The cross-sector read-across extends to AI infrastructure investment. The use of AI during the 2025 hackathons to automate workflow logic is a small but illustrative signal of how financial services platforms are now deploying AI not in customer-facing chatbots but in back-office process automation. As AI-driven workflow tooling matures, the competitive differentiation between wealth platforms will increasingly rest not on feature lists but on the depth and real-time reliability of custodian API connections. That dynamic accelerates consolidation pressure on smaller wealthtech vendors unable to fund the engineering overhead of multi-custodian direct integrations, and creates an opening for platforms with Orion's scale to widen the gap.