Meet Satyen Patel, Executive Chairman of Eton Solutions

Tell us about Eton Solutions.

Eton Solutions is focused on solving the complex challenges that wealth managers – from family offices to private equity firms to registered investment advisors – deal with. Our primary products, AtlasFive® and EtonAI™, already help wealth managers handle more than $1.3 trillion in assets. Currently we work with over 960 families, advisory firms, and private equity funds to manage 147,000 entities, 225,000-plus investments, and even $65 billion in bill payments every year. On top of that, we process more than $21 million in transactions annually.

Our core products fit directly into wealth managers’ day-to-day workflows, taking care of the manual tasks that usually eat up most of their time.

How was the idea for Eton Solutions created?

Before there was Eton Solutions, there was Eton Advisors—a multi-family office where the original idea for the platform came to life. One of the partners, Robert E. Mallernee, was looking for a better way to streamline investment advice and cut down on all the manual middle- and back-office work. But the firm quickly realized there wasn’t any off-the-shelf system that could do it. Trying to patch together a bunch of single-point solutions would have meant big IT costs, endless data processing, and constant headaches from duplicate data entry, not to mention errors in reporting.

That challenge is what pushed Rob to start building his own all-in-one platform, first inside his own firm. With limited resources, he kept at it for nearly a decade, developing what eventually became the foundation for Eton Solutions.

I first met Rob through a wine club, and I became a client before I really understood what he was creating. Once I saw the potential, I came onboard as an investor—and later as executive chairman—to help scale the business. My background in IT and financial services allowed me to pull in former colleagues and fintech industry veterans. Together, we matched Rob’s deep domain expertise and his idea of creating an integrated data model with enterprise-grade technology and built the market-ready Eton Solutions platform.

Tell us about your core products: AtlasFive and EtonAI.

AtlasFive® is the platform we built to bring everything together—liquid assets, alternative assets, data, reporting, workflows – all in one system of record. Instead of juggling multiple tools, wealth managers can integrate investment, accounting, and tax data in a single place, creating a true “single source of truth.”

On top of that data foundation, we built EtonAI™– a way for firms to embed AI directly into their daily operations. With more than 400 proven use cases, it helps drive efficiency and unlock insights by automating both structured and unstructured data. For example, the solution helps wealth managers automate document workflows, simplify reconciliations, accelerate research, strengthen compliance and more.

By combining AtlasFive’s rich data with advanced AI, EtonAI turns time-consuming back-office tasks into automated processes and delivers insights that help wealth managers make faster, more informed decisions. As a result, they can spend more time focusing on client relationship building.

This unified approach, built on a robust integrated data foundation, is what sets our products apart from others in the market. Most competing solutions are fragmented with separate tools for investments, taxes, and reporting – meaning there is no unified data store to deploy AI on top. Solving that fragmentation problem is exactly why Eton Solutions was founded.

What most excites you about the wealth management industry?

The wealth management industry is currently at a critical moment when firms are increasingly looking to adopt new advanced technology solutions that give them a leg up on their peers.

As we look ahead, we see several key trends shaping both our industry and Eton Solutions’ innovation strategy. In the near term, we are looking to expand beyond the family offices and private equity firms we already service to meet the needs of ultra-high net worth individuals. Like the solutions we already offer the family office space, we are looking to help these individuals track all of their investments across securities and also physical assets such as homes, cars, art collections and more on a single platform.

By aggregating this data into a holistic view, we empower our clients with timely insights that allow individuals to manage their wealth with data-driven foresight rather than reacting in hindsight. To achieve this, we are committed to creating solutions that are efficient, swift, and transparent, with privacy and cybersecurity at the forefront.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

As a company operating across 15 global markets, our biggest challenge has been managing rapid growth in a short period of time. Successfully navigating that growth starts with talent — attracting top-tier people and uniting them around a shared goal. Every company is ultimately defined by its culture, and long-term success rests on four pillars: People, Product, Processes, and Purpose. When a team rallies around a clear and compelling Purpose, everything else begins to fall into place naturally.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Aspiring entrepreneurs should recognize their strengths, and play into them, while building a supporting team, smarter than them who can fill in any gaps. This can help ensure confidence and clarity in innovative decisions to build the best product possible.

Additionally, entrepreneurs should innovate with longevity in mind and try to think a few steps ahead of the market. For example, at Eton Solutions, when we were initially building the product, we debated hosting it on premise or in the cloud – and ultimately settled on a cloud deployment even though we felt it was ahead of its time. This has since paid off tenfold, creating the perfect environment for future AI development.

What can we hope to see from Eton Solutions in the future?

Looking ahead, our focus is on two core areas: accelerating product innovation and deepening our AI capabilities. On the product innovation front, we are expanding into private equity, ultra-high net worth and funds space which are segments that face many of the same challenges as family offices but are about 25 times larger than our current core market.

Our long-term goal is to support the entire wealth management industry including single and multi-family offices, private equity firms, funds, RIAs, trusts, accounting firms, business managers, and global private banks. We see Eton Solutions becoming the go-to platform across all those segments.