Bill Crager is leaving the sidelines.
Two years after stepping down as CEO of industry behemoth Envestnet, Crager is returning to a top leadership role at a new firm he has helped to create. Called Field, the major components of its foundation are the technologies from two recent acquisitions made through iAltA, a holding company that Crager had joined as a managing partner in late 2025.
I asked about why he felt the need to take on the responsibilities of another CEO role so soon after spending so many years serving at Envestnet. (Crager co-founded Envestnet with Jud Bergman and had served as president since 2002, before assuming the CEO role in 2020.) He responded with a baseball reference.
“When you get called to the plate,” was how he jokingly began his response, but quickly explained that he recognized the time had arrived when technology had reached a point of development and maturity where it could finally unify the infrastructure that underpins both public and private markets, a category of technology he refers to as the wealth intelligence layer.
Speaking with him, it was clear he felt a responsibility to deliver this type of value to advisors and their clients, and that he was also fired up and energized by the challenge of running a new firm he thinks is at the bleeding edge.
Part of the technology he refers to, a major building block, is BridgeFT, a wealthtech API platform within Field, while Precept, a wealth technology platform providing real-time system integrations for fintech and wealth management providers, is the other core component. The terms of iAltA’s acquisitions were not publicly disclosed, but BridgeFT’s acquisition was announced in January, and Precept earlier this month.
Founded in 2015, BridgeFT was initially known for its cloud-based performance reporting and fee billing and launched its WealthTech API in early 2023. That API can provide aggregated access to financial data, analytics, as well as various applications from custodians, broker/dealers, correspondent clearing firms, prime brokers, banks, insurance carriers, asset managers, retirement plan providers, 401(k) recordkeepers and others.
In total, it represents more than 900 direct data partners, an ecosystem of integration and developer partners, and already serves many developers and institutions with multi-custodian data connectivity, normalization and delivery.
Precept’s integration technology—including the company’s artificial intelligence integration layer—connects data across custodians, CRMs, planning tools and alternative investment platforms.
In simplest terms, the platform allows product and engineering teams to access and deploy integrations across custodians, clearing firms, TAMPs, CRMs, portfolio management systems, analytics platforms and data providers in real-time without engineering support, said Crager.
“As things stand today, the advisor too often is not only the financial layer, the one paying for all of this, but also the integration layer as well,” he said, noting that with how different every advisory firm’s technology stack can be, most end up with consultants to bring everything together or a large and dedicated technology staff.
Asked how Field would differ from the services offered by Milemarker, Invent.us or BetaNXT, which all, in varying forms, provide approaches to integrations and aggregation of advisory firm data, Crager said that his company’s approach was fundamentally different.
“Integration and aggregation of data is an infrastructure issue, and what we bring to the table, where we are beginning, it is not the surface above, not frontend tools, which is how I think of Milemarker and Invent.us; we are solving the problem to allow firms to use AI and their datasets integrated into their environment because they will have the totality of the dataset,” he said.
“This is not a knock on them; it requires a very unique customization service as you build for each [advisory] firm,” he said. “No technology firm has yet been able to scale and lift that data up at scale the way we plan to.”
Finally, I told him that the question I get most often from advisors is: How much will it cost?
“What we want to do is provide a service where the ongoing, long-term value fully outweighs the initial cost,” he said, noting that each firm’s situation and the number of data sources and types, and accounts that Field will have to extract from, the overall compute, as he described it, will be different.
He said he could only provide the roughest of ballpark figures, approximately $50,000 for a firm that has $1 billion in AUM.
“It’s getting easier, but the reality is that data and cleaning data is still a significant skill and getting this right is super important for any firm, and if we can do it at a cost that is just a percentage of an FTE (full-time equivalent metric), I think we will be the industry leader in short order,” he said.
