The 1% Financial Advisor Fee in the Agentic Age
By Matt Frymier, Chief Financial Officer, Evernorth
I’m not sure there is an industry with more differentiation than the Financial Advisor industry. The approach, service, focus, skill, and performance varies widely – from large teams with dedicated specialists (tax, estate planning, investments, etc.) to sole proprietors. Each of these models have found their niche over time, and the one thing that has historically been similar between all of them is the underlying basic fee model: you receive these services and expertise in exchange for 1–2% in fees each year.
In the age of agentic commerce, how will that fee, and the services that Financial Advisors provide change? In an era where much of the underlying work is about to be done by software that doesn't sleep, doesn't charge by the hour, and doesn't need to pick up the phone, it may be harder to justify.
This shift is happening faster than most people realize, and the infrastructure that's making it possible already exists.
Disclosure: Evernorth is a digital asset treasury company that holds XRP. This analysis should be read with that interest in mind.
Meet your new advisor: agentic AI
"Agentic AI" is software that can perceive, decide and act on your behalf without waiting for you to click a button. Think of it as the difference between a calculator (you tell it what to do) and an assistant (it figures out what to do).
Goldman Sachs Research expects AI agents to drive a meaningful step-up in tech sector cash flows as usage scales — projecting that more than 60% of operating profit in the software sector could flow to agent-based systems by 2030, with global demand for AI inference rising roughly 24x over the same period (Goldman Sachs, 2026). Companies like Gemini, Bitget, and Neyro are already building agents that can hold positions, route trades, and manage portfolios across crypto and DeFi infrastructure.
So why hasn't your robo-advisor already replaced your human one?
The bottleneck
It's tempting to think of agentic AI as just a smarter robo-advisor. It isn't.
Robo-advisors follow a recipe. You answer a few questions, get sorted into a risk bucket, and the algorithm rebalances you across the same dozen ETFs everyone else in your bucket owns. It's automation, but it's static, like a vending machine running a fixed menu.
An AI agent works differently. It reasons about your specific situation, pursues multi-step goals, reacts to news and life events, and chooses between many possible strategies. It's closer to a personal CFO than a portfolio template. "Get me to retirement in 12 years, minimize my tax bill, and shift defensive if markets wobble" is the kind of instruction it can actually act on.
The catch: no matter how smart the agent is, it can only act on assets it can reach. And today, most of the interesting ones aren't reachable.
Say it's Saturday morning and your agent decides to rotate part of your portfolio into short-term Treasuries. It can't. The Treasury securities market doesn't open again until Monday. The instruction sits in a queue, and by the time the rebalance clears T+1 settlement, the opportunity may be gone.
It gets worse from there. The assets the agent would most want to use, such as private credit, structured notes, tokenized money-market funds yielding more than your bank, are gated behind brokerage minimums, accreditation rules, business hours, and clearinghouse intermediaries built for a 9-to-5 world.
That's a plumbing problem.
And the interface itself was built for humans
Imagine asking your AI to log into your brokerage, navigate to the trade screen, click through the confirmation popups, enter your two-factor code, and hit "submit." It can technically do that, but it's clumsy, slow, and can break every time the website moves a button.
That's the second wall agents run into. The financial system isn't just slow for them. It speaks the wrong language. Every layer of it assumes a person at a keyboard: login screens, brokerage UIs, KYC popups, "are you sure?" buttons, paper signatures masquerading as PDFs.
Blockchains don't work like that. They were designed from day one as machine-readable financial infrastructure. There's no login screen; there's a cryptographic key. Submit buttons are replaced by a signed transaction. The asset, the account and the rules for moving it all live in code that any agent can read and act on directly.
Tokenized assets aren't just available 24/7. They're available in a language an agent can actually speak.
Enter tokenized real-world assets
Tokenize a Treasury, a money-market fund, or a corporate bond on a public blockchain and both walls come down at once. The asset is reachable around the clock. The instruction to move it is a single transaction the agent signs and broadcasts.
The agent's reasoning finally has somewhere to land. Decisions become trades, and trades become settled positions in the same minute.
And the asset layer is forming:
- $33B in tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains as of May 2026
- Tokenized U.S. Treasuries as a category crossed $10B in February 2026 and were near $13B by April
- BCG and Ripple (an Evernorth investor) project $18.9T in tokenized real-world assets by 2033
In the past twenty months, the XRP network has grown from $3M to $404M in tracked tokenized assets, a 134x increase and faster than any other infrastructure Layer 1 from a comparable starting point. (More in our recent Velocity, Not Volume report.)
Every quarter, more of the assets a portfolio agent would actually want to use are becoming reachable.
What this actually means for you
Four things change when AI agents meet on-chain assets, and all four put pressure on that 1–2% advisor fee.
1. Personalized portfolio management gets dramatically cheaper. Human advisors charge in basis points because reviewing your situation, reallocating, and harvesting tax losses takes real time and attention. An agent does the same thinking continuously, at near-zero marginal cost. The quarterly review meeting becomes a background process running while you sleep and optimizing hundreds of times a day.
2. Access to a wider range of investments improves. Right now, you can't easily buy into a private credit fund, a structured note, or a tokenized money market position from your phone at 11pm on a Saturday. As those products tokenize, the mechanical barriers (business hours, intermediary routing, minimum transaction sizes) start to fall. Regulatory requirements like accreditation and suitability still apply, but the friction around accessing products you're already qualified for drops significantly.
3. Fees may compress for the “average” financial advisor. When the work costs cents, the 1–2% AUM line item starts to face real pressure unless you are truly providing tangible benefits. Advisors who deliver real value (e.g. sophisticated tax strategy, estate planning, life-stage advice, behavioral coaching) will keep their fees. Advisors who exist to push the rebalance button will not. Investing strategies become personalized to your tax situation, risk tolerance, and financial goals.
4. The best financial advisors will be able to handle more clients due to efficiency gains
A meaningful slice of the fee pool that intermediaries have collected for half a century is likely to shift over time toward the layer where the assets actually settle..
Why this matters for digital asset infrastructure
For investors thinking about where capital flows next cycle, the usual frame of "which chain has the most transactions?" is too narrow. The better question is:
Which chain's tokenized asset base becomes the substrate that agentic finance runs on top of?
That's not settled yet. Ethereum hosts the largest existing RWA base today. XRP is growing 2.2x faster YTD, with a settlement and compliance profile that Evernorth believes is well-suited to high-velocity, programmatic activity.
The direction is becoming clearer. Over the next decade, retail investing is likely to look more like an API call than a phone call.
The infrastructure that wins is the one that can actually be called.
This post is for informational purposes only. It is not investment advice and is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or digital asset. Evernorth Holdings, Inc. is a digital asset treasury company that holds XRP as a core treasury asset and has a direct financial interest in the adoption and value of XRP.
This post contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about future fee structures, technology adoption, market direction, and the competitive positioning of blockchain networks. These statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in Evernorth's Registration Statement on Form S-4 filed with the SEC. Past performance and current growth rates are not indicative of future results. Evernorth undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. Learn more about Evernorth: https://www.evernorth.xyz/blog-post-03-18-2026