Atomic Updates
The Money Movement Conundrum
October 1, 2025
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The phrase “bill pay” evokes strong emotions in the world of RIAs and family offices. Depending on what’s in the eye of the beholder, upon hearing these words one reaction might be, “We don’t do bill pay!!!”, but the opposite response could also be given with just as much fervor. One of the main reasons for this disparity is that the industry has historically lacked an agreed-upon set of definitions, processes, and tools to manage the variety of ways in which client money gets moved and traded. As a result, advisors often struggle to answer the deceptively simple question: “Where did my money go?”.
To help bring order to the chaos and defend their bps fee, more and more advisors are adding money movement and cash flow reporting services to their offering—things that were once the domain of only the highest of the high-end family offices. Fortunately, technology is finally starting to make providing family office services—and bill pay in particular—more scalable than ever before. But, before diving into how Atomic Insights is helping, it’s important to first define the different categories and approaches to moving money.
In today’s wealth management landscape, facilitating the movement of client money has become a focal point for competitive differentiation. To navigate this world well, Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and family offices must define their boundaries, their risk appetite, and their service philosophy regarding how they handle bill payments, inter-entity transfers, capital calls, and more. Despite its central importance to the client experience, money movement workflows have historically been disjointed, highly fragmented, and—until recently—rarely standardized across the sector.
The following will break down how firms map their bill pay and money movement models—whether they don’t do bill pay at all, facilitate ad hoc payments, or run a dedicated family office service desk. Regardless of the style and method of operating that a firm decides to embrace, they must all make deliberate decisions in each of the following areas or risk stumbling into a major error.
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A firm’s desired client profile, and the background and experience of the firm’s leadership may drive the decision on whether and how a firm moves money.
For example, a group of advisors who left a major wire house 20 or 25 years ago may naturally gravitate to one end of the spectrum, and a firm that spun out of an accounting or law firm may gravitate toward another.
Level of discretion is the major determinant of how to design the money movement process, and decisions made at this level drive a host of regulatory and compliance requirements.
At a minimum, firms must decide whether they will process client payments to third parties using standing letters of authorization. Some firms go even further and take power of attorney over one or several of a given client’s accounts.
The tools utilized to move money around will then be selected based on the level of discretion being taken.
Reconciliation refers to the degree to which a person or a tool looks at each and every invoice to decide whether it makes sense to execute the payment based on client-specific historical patterns. The classic example is a client’s August water bill for the house in Sedona—does it align with the bill from July? What about the bill from last August? Absent a human reviewing the invoice with some sense of the account’s history, a broken water pipe is unlikely to be discovered.
Reporting is just that, but the rub lies in deciding what system will be used to actually create the reports, how many accounts will be included in or excluded from the reporting, and whether the reporting will be tied out to other reports the client receives such as investment reports.
The Money Movement Continuum is best understood via four primary segments (or general case studies), each with distinct operational approaches, technology stacks, and regulatory exposure.
• Typical AUM: $1–2M or less per client.
• Scope: Investment activity (e.g., capital calls, SMA journals, first-party transfers); only, don’t engage in any money movements of other types.
• Discretion: None. Will facilitate first- and a very limited number of third-party money movements—but always requiring written client authorization for each payment. No standing letters of authorization for third-party money movements.
• Tools: Custodial portals for money movement; Excel or nothing at all for tracking workflows.
• Reconciliation: Minimal or none at all—often totally disconnected from performance reporting or portfolio management.
• Example: Wire for a capital call or a journal to fund a separately managed account—client initiates or advisor initiates and client signs a letter of authorization prior to any money moving. The advisor then executes the payment once the client has signed off. No reporting provided related to these payments other than custodial statements.
Operational Challenges: Smaller RIAs feel operational and regulatory friction with broad bill pay services, preferring to avoid custody rule entanglements. A high degree of client participation, oversight, and self-reliance drives all movement at this level. On the plus side, these are the most scalable businesses in the industry.
• Typical AUM: $5–25M per client (includes hybrid RIAs).
• Scope: Investment money movement plus “bill pay lite”—occasional payment requests, property taxes, contractor bills.
• Discretion: Some. Often use of Standing Letters of Authorization (SLOAs) for third-party money movements, but rarely utilizing Power of Attorney.
• Tools: Custodial portals; Excel or CRM workflows. May experiment with bill pay platforms (e.g., Bill.com) for ad hoc requests.
• Reconciliation: Cash flow reporting in Excel, which is unlikely to be integrated with client investment reporting.
• Example: Coverage team pays all capital calls using SLOAs. In addition, client receives regular invoices for a home construction project, forwards those invoices to a rep at the RIA, and the rep pays using a third-party SLOA via wire or check using the custodian portal. On a quarterly basis, a transaction report for this account is provided to the client using a spreadsheet kept by the coverage team.
Operational Challenges: Balancing fraud risk and operational capacity is key. Clients often expect white-glove service, but the firm’s infrastructure is typically not designed for high-frequency, multi-entity bill pay. For better or worse, clients love the support, and the compliance and documentation burden rises as payment requests grow.
• Typical AUM: $25–250M per client; often fulfilling a variety of client needs across investments, tax, estate planning, lending, philanthropy, next-generation education, etc. Focused on families with complex entity structures.
• Scope: Something approaching full-service bill pay—run nearly all personal household expenses and investment payments through the RIA; act as financial control tower or quarterback.
• Discretion: SLOAs broadly in place to streamline payments; operations staff move funds unilaterally and may have Power of Attorney in certain cases.
• Tools: Bill.com or other AP platforms may be utilized, but payments are almost always initiated from a custodian account rather than a traditional bank account, in contrast to the ways in which true family offices do bill pay. Cash flow reports usually created via Excel, though occasionally using general ledger software. Workflow tools are usually powered by Excel, or possibly a CRM system.
• Reconciliation: Very difficult to provide the same level of reconciliation that a family office would (i.e., literally opening every bill and deciding whether or not to discuss it with the issuer). This is another area where RIA bill pay and Family Office bill pay have historically deviated, with true family office AP personnel doing a much higher degree of reconciliation.
• Example: Managing all capital calls (whether sourced by the RIA or the client), paying all utilities bills, charitable donations, and taxes for a multi-generational household every month. Usually stops short of running payroll for household employees or tracking household employee hours. The client is usually provided with Excel-based cash-flow reports that may or may not tie with the broader investment reporting.
Operational Challenges: Requires a large team to manage a substantial number of client payments. Technology integration has been challenging historically, especially as clients add numerous private investments. Vulnerable to control lapses or lacking in controls, as teams often come from investment backgrounds rather than accounting backgrounds.
• Typical AUM: $250M+ per family structure.
• Scope: End-to-end concierge support for all payments, investments, multi-entity flows, and global transactions.
• Discretion: Move money unilaterally with full authority; operate bespoke systems for every family member, property, business.
• Tools: AP systems that aren’t all that well designed for this use case, manual GL reconciliation on a daily or weekly basis, payments typically originated from banking platforms—often with the support of dedicated Private Banking teams. Despite that, reporting is still manual and often GL-based reports are augmented by manually generated Excel reporting that is more client-friendly.
• Reconciliation: Daily or weekly GL-based manual reconciliation—every movement reviewed, categorized, and audited by a group of expensive humans.
• Example: Paying household staff payroll across many properties, investment managers, legal retainers, international contractors—plus family member expense accounts, all tied out via a GL.
Operational Challenges: Scale, complexity, and risk management grow exponentially. Requires huge teams, which are expensive. In an effort to control costs, teams are often leaner than they should be, resulting in high turnover. Must meet exacting standards for reporting and tax. Need layered permissions and entity-aware technology to adapt to changing family structures and staffing.
Offering expanded bill pay services introduces new obligations—especially around regulatory custody rules, client authorization, and risk controls. Historically, general ledger and off-the-shelf AP systems simply weren’t constructed to handle the nuanced, entity-driven requirements of wealth managers and family offices. Functions like tracking dynamic client consents, supporting surprise custody audits, or segmenting authority by family or business entity have been afterthoughts at best. This means that, for all firm archetypes, compliance has involved a heavy layer of manual control, duct-taped documentation, or risky Excel workarounds.
Traditional fraud protection and entity controls were awkward fits for these legacy platforms. Without purpose-built tooling, every payment introduced the possibility of missing paperwork or misunderstandings—and the audit trail, if one existed, rarely passed muster for a true RIA/family office environment. All compliance structures became much harder to standardize and scale as a result, with mistakes potentially compounding as a firm’s complexity and bill pay volume grew.
As companies attempted to stretch AP or general ledger platforms to meet high-net-worth bill pay needs, a handful of guiding principles has emerged—often more aspirational than achievable:
• Transparency: Clients place a tremendous amount of trust in their teams, but often lose trust when errors are discovered. Legacy systems made detailed, context-rich reporting difficult or impossible, and Excel workarounds often introduced errors.
• Efficiency: Automation and workflow structure are vital. While promised by many tools, they were generally optimized for corporate AP—unfit for multi-entity, relationship-centered scenarios.
• Control: Built-in approvals, dual controls, and permissioning—features rarely robust or flexible enough in off-the-shelf tools—are essential but seldom realized in practice.
• Customization: Specialized client segments demand tailored processes, yet most legacy options deliver “one-size-fits-all” features that don’t adapt to the operational reality of advanced wealth management.
Whichever archetype a firm follows, the truth is that the toolkit has always lagged behind operational realities. Bill pay and money movement require purpose-built solutions for RIAs and family offices, not just extensions of software meant for other industries. Legacy accounts payable and general ledger systems brought baggage—lack of purpose-built controls, clunky compliance, and a manual-heavy reconciliation burden.
Now, with the emergence of truly purpose-built technologies (a story for the next article), the path finally exists for wealth managers to deliver the secure, scalable, client-friendly bill pay experience that high-net-worth families demand—and answer “Where did my money go?” with real confidence.
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