In this episode of Advisor Ally, we've with us Oisín Breen, an award-winning Irish journalist, poet, systems thinker, and academic who's spent nearly a decade dissecting the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) space for RIABiz.From his unusual path (horse-riding in the Irish countryside, FX analyst gigs, and late-blooming academia) to his penetrating critiques of wealth management, media narratives, and artificial intelligence, Breen offers a rare, multidimensional perspective. He’s not just watching the RIA world evolve: he’s documenting its soul, its cycles, and its contradictions.

In this episode of Advisor Ally, we sit down with Brittany Brinckerhoff, CFP®, CSLP®, a dynamic and insightful financial advisor at Hilltop Wealth Advisors in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. With over a decade of experience, Brittany shares her inspiring journey from college intern to trusted advisor and leader in the financial planning world.

In the wealth management space, advice is everywhere, but understanding is rare.Most advisory platforms today are powered by backward-looking data: portfolio balances, transactions, and risk scores. These inputs make sense to systems, but not to people.Marla Sofer sees the blind spot. She started as a financial advisor, then spent over a decade inside the operating cores of JP Morgan and BlackRock. She’s helped scale product and partnership teams inside Microsoft. Today, she’s building Knowmee, a company that operates on a simple premise:

If you want to give better advice, you need better data. And not just more of it, more human data.