Cerity Partners, a New York-based registered investment adviser focused on ultra-high-net-worth clients, has named Will Peng as its first chief innovation officer. The appointment, announced Wednesday, places Peng in charge of redesigning the firm's service model, integrating expertise across business lines, and deploying artificial intelligence to create scalable workflows for advisors and clients. The role is new to the firm, which has expanded rapidly through mergers and acquisitions.
"As Cerity Partners continues to grow and evolve, bringing someone of Will's caliber to lead our innovation agenda is a defining moment for the firm," said Kevin Hilden, president of Cerity Partners. "His rare combination of entrepreneurial experience, fintech expertise, and deep understanding of AI positions him perfectly to accelerate how we deliver the CP Way for our clients, advisors, and colleagues."
Peng joins Cerity Partners after founding Northstar, a fintech company that built an employee financial wellness and advisory platform for large employers including Workday, Airbnb, and Affirm. Before that, he was a partner at venture capital firm Red Swan, whose portfolio has included Coinbase, Guideline, and Warby Parker. He has also worked as an adviser and investor to technology executives and startups outside the wealth management sector.
The hire comes amid a broader scramble among wealth management firms to build out dedicated AI leadership benches, a trend that has accelerated over the past two years as advisers face pressure to modernize client service and back-office operations. Last month, Raymond James hired former Vanguard executive Seth Ford as senior vice president and chief architect. Ford, who spent three years leading agentic digital products at Vanguard and 23 years before that at Fidelity Investments, will oversee enterprise architecture across Raymond James' technology platforms and cloud infrastructure as part of an expanding AI mandate.
"Seth has demonstrated strong leadership and success across enterprise architecture, agentic product management, sophisticated database design, modern cloud computing architecture and resilient distributed systems throughout his career," Raymond James chief information officer Andy Zolper said of the hire. Ford's appointment builds on a leadership structure the firm began assembling last year, when it promoted longtime executive Stuart Feld to the newly created role of chief artificial intelligence officer and later added David Solganik as head of AI strategy.
The pattern across these hires points to a shift in how large advisory firms and RIAs are structuring their technology leadership: rather than folding AI initiatives into existing IT departments, firms are increasingly creating standalone C-suite roles with direct authority over firmwide innovation strategy. Vanguard's own move in this direction came earlier this year with the rollout of its AI portfolio assessment tool for advisers, a project Ford helped lead before departing for Raymond James.
For Cerity Partners, which has been expanding aggressively through mergers with regional wealth management practices—including its recent entry into the Oregon market via a merger with tech-focused RIA Cordant Wealth—the innovation officer role comes with a demanding mandate of helping knit together a single technology and service standard as the firm scales. Peng's background outside traditional wealth management, spanning startup leadership, venture investing, and enterprise fintech, sets him apart from peers such as Ford and Harvey, who arrived from within large financial institutions.
