Churni Bhattacharya Weighs In on RIA Client Experience in the Wealth Management 2026 Midyear Outlook

Churni Bhattacharya, Chief Product Officer at Amplify Platform, is featured in the Wealth Management 2026 Midyear Outlook, published August 14. Her article, “Experience Is the Why. Tech Is the What.” argues that the client experience RIAs want to deliver should determine technology decisions, not the other way around. Firms making those decisions in the right order are the ones separating themselves on differentiation, organic growth, and enterprise value, Bhattacharya says.

RIA client experience is the set of interactions a firm delivers across digital onboarding, investment management, and performance reporting. It can only become a firm’s signature experience when one unified household record informs all three, making each client experience configurable on a single data layer. Bhattacharya writes that the standard for that experience isn’t set by other advisory firms but by the consumer brands clients interact with daily.

Two forces are making the gap urgent. AI is disrupting the tech stack because firms are bolting it onto fragmented data, then blaming AI when it doesn’t work. At the same time, consolidation is eroding what separates one independent firm from the next.

According to Bhattacharya, the solution is architectural. Firms should first decide what the client experience should feel like, build the data layer that delivers it, then apply AI on top. This enables firms to deliver signature experiences, configured to each client’s needs. You can read the full article in the Wealth Management 2026 Midyear Outlook, page 23, and see how Amplify’s unified data architecture supports it here: What We Do.