Orion’s Secret Sauce? Leadership, Reinvestment and Passion

That’s why the 2025 conference was built around a simple but appropriate theme: “All in.”

“As the industry faces economic policy and market uncertainties in 2025, advisors are fully committed to their clients’ success,” Wolfsen observed. “They are not just meeting the demands of their clients. They are going ‘all in’ by focusing on highly personalized service and solutions, investing in integrated technology, and optimizing their back office to free up time.”

As clients navigate the largest generational wealth transfer in history, it’s crucial for financial advisors to be proactive with clients who anticipate receiving a sizable inheritance, Wolfsen stressed. As such, 2025 is the time for advisors to increase communication, engage in comprehensive planning and build trust to better serve their clients during pivotal life moments.

Here are some additional highlights from our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: Can you reflect on what it is like to lead a conference that brings together nearly 2,000 financial advisors and service provider professionals?

NATALIE WOLFSEN: What I like to reflect on is the fact that the advisors and firms who are here represent about $1.1 trillion in terms of assets that are served on our platform.

So, if you think about it, what these advisors do either on our platform or outside our platform represents a really significant percentage of the total wealth management industry. So, it’s just a great and exciting thing to be able to get a group of people like that together to talk all about the current challenges of the industry, the opportunities of the industry and the future of the industry.

You and I have talked about this before. My perspective is that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity right now to better serve investors and to grow this industry. It's because of just how much money is going to be in motion with the great wealth transfer between the baby boomer generation and younger generations.

I believe we can triple the size of our industry in the next 15 years if we get everything right. For our part, that vision requires constant improvement and reinvestment in our platform and our people. In sum, it’s all very exciting.

As a casual poker player, I appreciate the “All in” theme. What’s the story behind this year’s theme?

Experienced poker players will know that going “all in” means you’re committing to an outcome, and that outcome is not recklessly throwing your chips away. It means that you’ve done the hard work and you’re making a decisive move to win.

We went with this theme because we are fully confident that we now have the cards in place to achieve the vision that I just described. We have the leadership team in place, the commitment to technology development and just a whole lot of momentum from everything we’ve accomplished so far.

What findings stood out to you the most in the two new surveys, one focused on advisors and one on end-investors?

To start, the wealthtech survey shows us that advisors, just like Orion, are really engaged in developing and updating their businesses and doing whatever they can to improve their clients’ experience.

One area where they really want help is in connecting disconnected technology and tools. It’s a huge time problem for advisors, having to work across disparate systems that can’t effectively and efficiently speak to each other. So we’re really working on solving that problem, and we have been for some time now.

Another clear takeaway is the more recent phenomena that is artificial intelligence. We see that, already, big percentages of advisors are using AI and testing new ways to use it. It’s just as much about internal use cases as it is about client-facing use cases, which is interesting to see.

Overall, I love to see the fact that they are investing in technology in order to gain back more time and resources to connect with clients and serve them more holistically. To that end, advisors have told us that they need support on non-brokerage tasks — tax management, trust accounting, trust document preparation, connections to certified public accountants and all the other stuff that it takes to make the most out of clients’ wealth.

There’s so much to say about the investors, as well, but I would just highlight the fact that, despite very high levels of satisfaction with their advisors, a sizable percentage of investors would still consider switching advisors when inheriting money and needing more advanced services. It’s 18% of people who say they are likely to switch advisors if they receive an inheritance between $500,000 and $1 million, and this likelihood increases to 24% for inheritances of $1 million or more.

We also uncovered a number of interesting generational differences that represent opportunities for advisors to tailor their approach accordingly. The bottom line there is that advisors really need a good plan to engage with and retain the next generation of clients as the wealth transfer accelerates in the years ahead.

Can you comment on the evolution of the Orion executive leadership team that has taken place over the last year or two? You’ve brought in a number of very experienced leaders both from within and without the wealth management industry.

Oh, yes, I’m really excited about the leadership team that we have been able to put in place to guide our 1,400 team members into the next phase of our journey.

Take Ron [Pruitt]’s appointment as president of Orion Wealth Management in May last year. Ron came to us from a background where he was serving a very large and technical customer base. He understands exactly how to increase scale, improve accuracy and make sure things are delivered timely — how to build financial services organizations that are very, very focused on reliability and client outcomes.

Fast forward to our acquisition of Summit Wealth Systems and bringing on Reed Colley to lead the broader Orion technology business. Like Ron, Reed is a real pioneer, and he’s helping us deliver in the critical high-net-worth client space.

And then we’ve got Mark Mayo as our new chief financial officer. He comes to us from outside the wealth management industry, but his background and expertise are already so useful to us as we enter this next phase of growth.

There are so many other people to shout out, but the bottom line is that we have a leadership culture in place to support this mission of going all in — from our chief marketing officer to our head of risk management to our general counsel.

Pictured: Natalie Wolfsen