The Oasis Group Publishes New White Paper on Meeting Management as a Profitability Driver in Wealth Management

Research finds administrative burden around client meetings is a hidden labor cost and a growing factor in wealth management M&A valuations

FORT MILL, S.C., Sept. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Oasis Group, the leading research and consulting firm specializing in the wealth management and financial technology sectors, today announced the release of its new white paper, Why Meeting Management Is a Profitability Problem in Wealth Management, sponsored by GReminders. The paper examines how the administrative work surrounding client meetings — scheduling, preparation, note capture, and follow-up — has become a direct and measurable drag on advisor capacity and firm profitability, and offers a practical framework advisory firms can use to diagnose and close the gap.

The research challenges the industry's default framing of scalability as an advisor problem to be solved by extending advisor reach. Instead, the paper argues that firms are resource-centric, and that the true constraint on growth is whether the team around the advisor runs a designed process or simply reacts to whatever the advisor generates. Meeting management, treated as an end-to-end lifecycle rather than a collection of individual tasks, is identified as the surface where this dynamic plays out most visibly and most expensively.

“The firms that will scale over the next decade are not the ones with the most talented advisors,” said John O’Connell, Chief Executive Officer of The Oasis Group. “They are the ones whose meeting management and client engagement process would survive the departure of any single person in the building, including the founders or a key partner advisor.”

Key Findings

The white paper anchors its argument in three data points:

• Advisors lose more than a full business day a week to administrative work. Cerulli Associates reports that advisors spend 9 of 40 work-week hours on administrative tasks, with ineffective delegation to staff cited as a major productivity challenge for 60 percent of advisors.
• M&A buyers are pricing firms on process, not personality. Wealth management M&A activity hit a record 466 announced transactions in 2025, up 27.3 percent from 2024, with acquirers increasingly evaluating whether a practice runs consistently without any one person holding it together.
• Key-person dependency carries a steep, hidden price tag. Replacing a single team member who has been informally holding a process together can cost 50 to 200 percent of that person's annual salary once recruiting, training, and lost institutional knowledge are factored in.
  
  

A Three-Part Framework

Rather than prescribing a single tool or vendor, the paper offers advisory firms a diagnostic framework built around three steps:

• Measure what the process actually costs using a two-week time log across booking, rescheduling, capture, and follow-up to establish a factual baseline rather than a general impression.
• Ask the right questions before evaluating AI tools, including whether a solution writes to the firm's system of record, where a human reviews output before it becomes client-facing, and whether the firm's data and workflows remain portable if the vendor relationship ends.
• Sequence technology onto the process, not around it, fixing workflow ownership and escalation paths first so automation compounds a firm's strengths rather than its gaps.
  
  

The paper also addresses the compliance question directly, noting that firms carry record-keeping and supervisory obligations under FINRA Rule 3110 and SEC Rule 206(4)-7 regardless of whether meeting notes are handwritten or AI-generated, and that informal, undocumented processes — not systemized ones with proper consent and review — represent the greater unpriced risk.

“Meetings are the heartbeat of the advisor-client engagement experience,” O’Connell said. “Firms that treat meeting management as a designed, end-to-end process are positioned to grow without adding more expensive people to compensate for gaps a system could close instead.”

The white paper offers tailored implications for independent RIAs and solo practices, multi-advisor practices, and aggregators or enterprises, recognizing that the stakes and starting points for closing the meeting management gap differ by firm type and scale.

About The Oasis Group

The Oasis Group is a leading research and consulting firm specializing in the wealth management and financial technology sectors. The firm provides in-depth market analysis, strategic guidance, and implementation expertise to help organizations evaluate technology solutions and drive business growth.

For more information or to access the full white paper, visit https://theoasisgrp.com/

CONTACT: For The Oasis Group

Lisa Aldape
VOCATUS
laldape@vocatusllc.com