Walt Bettinger expects 'hundreds' of Charles Schwab Corp. staff tasked with wiring TD Ameritrade merger to soon soar to 'thousands' of Schwab and TD workers

So much is happening in our industry is hard to keep up. For reasons all too obvious, I am keenly interested to see what results of the Schwab vs TD tech stack wars. In a previous RIABiz article I was quoted questioning why Schwab dump VEO since its a more modern architecture. However, I misspoke. VEO is a decade old. Yes it's true, it's API-centric, but things have changed drastically over the past 5 years. While APIs are important to provide the communication pathway between platforms and services, the core architecture technologies far more advanced. As co-founder and former CTO at RedBlack Software there were things that I wanted to do as we entered into the hybrid cloud infrastructure in 2010. I could see what I wanted to do in vision but could not develop it because browsers and other aspects of cloud technology and architecture didn't exist at the level of sophistication needed. In 2011 just getting basic right-click functions in a browser was like asking for a miracle. Fast forward to today and we have cloud databases petabytes in size. Microservices architecture that enables limitless ondemand computing resources. Things I could only dream of doing are now a reality. There is a sea change coming to wealthtech that will leave many wondering "what just happened?" while those who realized and acted will reap the rewards of platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS will revolutionize the way how do much more efficiently and effectively we get things done. What was once only available to large institutions will be available to the small emerging advisor. PaaS is quickly becoming the foundation of the digital transformation we ask keep hearing about. In fact digital transformation initiatives will rely heavily on PaaS to scale and ultimately succeed for the long haul. As chief product officer at AdvisorPeak I can tell you that we are all about PaaS and so are many of our partners. Soon the term integration will become a dirty word and give way to subscription. The coming waves of change in wealthtech will be exciting, meaningful and with immediate positive impact to your business Pete Pete Giza | CPO | www.AdvisorPeak.com

I hope that the TD Ameritrade online platform will be similar because it is so user friendly for trading and training!

.maybe, after the Schwab/ TD merger, they will do away with selling Premium and offer free sounds investment advice to their customers.