With wealth management M&A accelerating in volume and complexity, AI is supercharging Evotra’s expert team to deliver faster, cleaner data migrations – giving clients a significant competitive edge.
Find out how from Depesh Pankhania, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Evotra.
If you’re in wealth management, you already know the pace of Mergers & Acquisitions activity is relentless and getting more competitive by the year. Firms aren’t doing two to three acquisitions a year anymore – more like ten.
And with every deal comes the same hurdle – data migration. That painstaking job of turning two incompatible systems into one.
This can take three to four months, so anyone can see the maths no longer adds up. With today’s acquisition pace, the industry needs a different way. And who better to take this challenge on than Evotra?
We exist to help wealth management firms get the best from their technology, have years of hands-on experience with data migrations, and understand what’s at stake here. Of course we wanted to solve a beast of a technology bottleneck like this. Here’s how we did it.
The spark: from gym playlists to data transformation
In my line of work you’d expect me to experiment with AI – both professionally and personally – but last year, after reading The AI Driven Leader by Geoff Woods, my thinking shifted. AI wasn’t just a tool for specific tasks; it could be a thought partner in almost every action.
At the gym, could AI find more tracks with the same energy as that banger on Spotify? Of course! Could it deliver the ultimate stag do ideas for my Formula 1 and Arsenal-loving brother-in-law?! Absolutely!
From that point on, my only remaining challenge was how to choose between the ultimate experience of the Champions League Final in Prague or the thrill of attending the iconic Le Mans in Paris.
And that’s when it hit me. If AI can understand my music preferences and predict perfect stag destinations, surely it can handle the complexities of data migration.
Could I take 15 years of CRM migration expertise and train an AI to master the patterns, nuances and business logic?
Was it capable of automatically discovering data structures, identifying quality issues and understanding that a ‘Contact’ in one system means something entirely different in another? Would it map disparate and often messy data, deriving missing values and catching the subtle errors that even experienced engineers sometimes miss? And if we combined this intelligence with automated testing and reconciliation workflows, could we compress months of manual work into weeks while also improving quality?
Only one way to find out…
But first to convince the humans. And our team had the full spectrum: cautiously optimistic, wildly enthusiastic and hugely sceptical. Different perspectives, all valid. But we’re Evotra, and collaborative, creative problem solving is in our DNA – so this is what we did.
Proof of concept
First, a simple experiment. We took data from a CRM that we knew inside out and meddled with it. We changed data structures, converted dates to text, blanked out values etc so it resembled real-world client data.
Then we asked the AI to derive missing values. Could it calculate retirement dates based on date of birth and retirement age? Could it make sense of the structural inconsistencies?
Indeed!
And that was the spark – we knew we could guide the AI to do this.
Hard lessons: why experience still matters
Our first full AI-assisted migration focused on CRM systems we knew deeply. This was deliberate. Even so, we learnt critical lessons.
Lesson 1: context is everything
Simply feeding the AI source and target schemas was a spectacular fail.
Why? Because a ‘Contact’ in Curo isn’t a ‘Contact’ in Xplan, an ‘Individual’ in IO could be treated as a ‘Household’ in Plannr, and an ‘Account’ in one system could be an ‘Asset’ in another.
These aren’t cosmetic differences. They reflect different data structures, relationships and logic. One system stores portfolio valuations as running totals, another calculates them on the fly, fees vary from percentages to flat rates, and adviser hierarchies range from simple to Byzantine.
The AI needed our 15 years of CRM knowledge for context. Once it had that, it began producing the kind of transformation logic an experienced engineer would take weeks to script.
Lesson 2: custom fields are the wild west
While AI vastly accelerated our core migration process, customisation remains the frontier challenge.
Here’s the reality: Client A has custom fields and hidden standard fields. Client B (being acquired) uses standard fields. Both have workflows depending on their specific setup. When these worlds collide, AI needs careful guidance, and industry expertise is critical.
Lesson 3: human oversight isn’t optional, it’s essential
By parallel testing the same migration using traditional methods, we discovered something fascinating – AI caught issues humans missed, and humans caught issues AI missed.
These real examples could have caused serious problems:
- Wrapper providers set up as active clients. Imagine the client reporting and compliance chaos.
- Children under 16 configured as clients, with broken links to their guardians. A regulatory nightmare waiting to happen.
If we’d trusted AI blindly, we’d have missed these – and it taught us a fundamental truth: AI won’t replace humans; it supercharges them.
We will run automated structural tests through AI, with results flagged for human review. It’s a partnership, not a replacement.
The transformation: from months to weeks
What’s happening?
The results of our AI-native approach are transforming how we work:
Time compression: what takes us 3-4 months now should take 3-4 weeks. Data discovery will be automated, and profiling and migration proposals generate in hours, not weeks.
Parallel capacity: the same team could then run dozens of migrations simultaneously, shifting from manual execution to oversight and validation.
Quality and consistency: automated testing, comprehensive reconciliation, and continuous monitoring through PowerBI will also deliver higher quality outcomes with full audit trails.
Building Trust: addressing the fear
Of course, clients have concerns. Data breaches and security are top-of-mind.
But the conversation we have is straightforward: our AI environment is ringfenced and, from a security standpoint, it’s no different from how Evotra handles data for migrations today.
When clients understand this, nervousness turns to enthusiasm.
Looking forward: what 2026 holds
Our clients aren’t just planning more acquisitions. They’re planning bigger ones – complex businesses, multi-system consolidations and legacy platform retirements.
Currently we allow 3-4 months for each migration, which often constrained M&A. In the future, they will have a capability that can transfer data from any CRM to any CRM in a fraction of the time.
This frees them to focus on what really drive successful acquisitions – business readiness, cultural integration, process alignment and change management. Click here to learn more about Successful Business Readiness.
The ripple effect: a team of AI pioneers
Faster data migrations aren’t the only exciting outcome – it’s what this success has unleashed across Evotra.
We now have a team of AI pioneers already planning the next wave of AI use cases:
- Smart project management assistants integrated with Teams
- Instant training content discovery with answers delivered as you type
- Document translation to determine the quality of suitability reports from the past 5 years (Dear CEO letter, anyone?)
- PI evidence surfaced through smart dashboards to help firms reduce premiums
The real story: it’s about people, not just technology
None of this is about replacing human expertise. It’s about amplifying it. And it’s not about eliminating jobs. Instead, it’s about eliminating the tedious, repetitive work that prevents talented people from applying their experience where it truly matters.
Our team members aren’t less valuable because AI can process data faster. They will be more valuable because they can focus on judgment, nuance, and solving complex problems rather than manually mapping fields and running scripts. And together, we’re creating capabilities that seemed impossible just a year ago.
Please do get in touch if you’d like to hear more about how Evotra can help you get the best from your CRM. You can call us on 020 3410 1966 or email hello@evotra.co.uk
Written by:
Depesh Pankhania, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Evotra