Asset & Wealth Management

Washington – September 19, 2026 -- The Institute for Portfolio Alternatives (IPA) has named 21 leaders as recipients of its 2026 IPA Awards, recognizing executives from firms including Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Blackstone for their contributions to the alternative investments sector.

IPA honors 21 executives across five award categories at Atlanta conference

The awards were presented during IPAVision in Atlanta before more than 550 professionals representing asset management, wealth management and the broader alternatives ecosystem. Honorees were selected across five categories: Outstanding Service, Policy Leadership, Rising Voice, Emerging Champion and Lifetime Achievement.

Providence, R.I. – September 18, 2026 -- Wealthbox, a CRM software provider for financial advisors, has become a launch partner for Claude for Financial Advisors, a new offering from Anthropic that embeds the Claude AI model into advisor workflow tools.

Wealthbox connector brings client history directly into Claude

The new Wealthbox connector for Claude includes prebuilt skills that let advisors pull client history, notes, and activity stored in Wealthbox directly into Claude's reasoning environment. Advisors can use the tool to prepare meeting agendas, organize post-meeting follow-up that saves back into Wealthbox, summarize recent client activity, draft client communications, and identify outstanding tasks.

Chicago – September 18, 2026 -- CME Group's 100-Ounce Silver futures traded 2,387 contracts during the first weekend of round-the-clock trading, representing over $15 million in notional value.

Silver follows gold's weekend trading breakthrough

The launch builds on CME's 24/7 trading in 1-Ounce Gold futures, which began July 24 and has since drawn more than 140,000 contracts in weekend sessions, equal to over $600 million in notional value. CME Group describes this as the largest liquidity pool for weekend trading in Gold futures.

Tavares, Fla. – September 18, 2026 -- A signed 1952 Topps baseball card collection assembled by Destiny Family Office Founder and CEO Tom Ruggie has been named the 2026 PSA Baseball Set of the Year, selected from more than 157,000 registered sets on the PSA Set Registry.

Ruggie has secured PSA-authenticated signatures on 406 of the 407 cards in the original 1952 Topps set

The set includes signed cards of Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Yogi Berra. Card #342, featuring Al Benton, remains the sole missing signature after a pursuit Ruggie says has spanned five decades.

PSA presented Ruggie with a one-of-one canvas artwork embedding an authenticated Mickey Mantle cut autograph

The award was given at the 2026 PSA Set Registry Awards Dinner in Rosemont, Illinois, during the National Sports Collectors Convention. The piece was created by artist Murray Henderson.

Windsor, Conn. – September 18, 2026 -- Nearly six in ten pre-retirees (59%) rate themselves highly prepared for retirement, yet 76% have either no written plan or spent fewer than five hours in the past year developing, reviewing, or updating one, according to LIMRA's 2026 Retirement Income Readiness Report.

Confidence outpaces action among workers nearing retirement

The survey found 88% of pre-retirees — defined as workers age 45 and older planning to retire within 10 years — say they have thought about how they'll generate income after leaving the workforce. But half (50%) either lack a written retirement plan or have one they haven't updated recently, exposing a gap between stated confidence and actual planning behavior.

New York – September 17, 2026 -- Infrastructure Capital Advisors, LLC, which manages more than $4 billion in assets as of September 8, 2026, has made its lineup of six income-focused ETFs available to advisors through the SMArtX Advisory Solutions platform.

Six ETFs join a multi-custodian TAMP used by RIAs and broker-dealers

The strategies now accessible on SMArtX include the Virtus InfraCap U.S. Preferred Stock ETF (NYSE Arca: PFFA), InfraCap REIT Preferred ETF (NYSE Arca: PFFR), InfraCap MLP ETF (NYSE Arca: AMZA), Infrastructure Capital Equity Income ETF (NYSE Arca: ICAP), Infrastructure Capital Small Cap Income ETF (NYSE Arca: SCAP), and Infrastructure Capital Bond Income ETF (NYSE Arca: BNDS). SMArtX operates as a managed account technology and turnkey asset management platform serving RIAs, broker-dealers, asset managers, custodians and fintech firms.

NEW YORK – – September 17, 2026 -- Wealth Management crowned the winners of its 2026 Industry Awards before more than 600 executives at Cipriani 42nd Street, capping a program that drew a record 1,392 nominations from 508 unique companies.

Nominations climb nearly four-fold since program launch

The 2026 field represented a 15% jump from 1,210 nominations in 2025 and nearly four times the 350 submissions logged in the inaugural 2015 edition. Finalists numbered 315 unique companies competing across 107 categories, with almost 40% of entries recognizing entirely new initiatives.

Baltimore -- T. Rowe Price, which manages $1.87 trillion in client assets as of September 16, 2026, is rolling out Anthropic's Claude across its investment organization, giving portfolio managers, analysts and developers direct access to the AI system for research and tool-building.

Portfolio managers and analysts gain Claude Cowork for research synthesis

Investment professionals will use Claude Cowork to process large volumes of information and support multistep, knowledge-intensive workflows. The firm frames this as increasing capacity for research, analysis and debate rather than replacing analyst judgment.

Developers adopt Claude Code to build proprietary investment tools

T. Rowe Price's technology teams are deploying Claude Code to build and improve tools intended to enhance productivity across investment and operating workflows firmwide.

Cambridge, England – September 16, 2026 -- Risilience has been rated "market-leading" by independent analyst firm Verdantix in both asset-level risk analysis and integrated climate/non-climate risk analysis, the highest tier awarded in the newly published Verdantix Smart Innovators: Physical Climate Risk Solutions (2026) report.

The benchmark evaluated eleven physical climate risk solution providers as financial losses from natural hazards escalate globally. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) put the 2025 global damage cost from natural hazards at $224 billion, intensifying pressure on real asset owners, investors and financial institutions to forecast and price physical climate exposure.

Boston – September 16, 2026 -- FINTRX, a provider of private wealth intelligence, has launched an AI agent called Fin that pushes data and alerts directly into email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Google Calendar, extending its existing platform AI into the tools investment professionals already use daily.

Fin Monitors 850,000 Financial Firms and Contacts Without Being Asked

Unlike conversational AI tools that require a prompt, Fin continuously scans the private wealth industry and proactively delivers alerts, prospect lists and meeting-prep briefs. The rollout covers intelligence on more than 850,000 financial firms and contacts, including 45,000 registered investment advisor (RIA) and broker-dealer firms, 790,000 registered reps, over 4,600 family offices, and 1,900 banks and trust institutions.