The family office experience and the advisor are at the center of every wealth decision.
And for Christopher Baron, the future of wealth advice comes back to the relationship. He shares this belief with the team at Sofistic: advisors should understand the context to help families work through important financial decisions.
That perspective has followed him from Invesco, where he managed a territory of about 1,000 financial advisors, to Investissement Québec’s venture capital team. He first met Sofistic in 2024, conducted due diligence ahead of Investissement Québec’s November 2025 investment, and subsequently served on the company’s board before becoming CEO this summer.
Today, he and the team are working to help more advisors offer the depth of understanding associated with a family office, and to build a company that can support those relationships internationally.
Taking the lead
What first attracted you to Sofistic as an investor?
My time at Invesco shaped how I first looked at Sofistic. Working with financial advisors showed me how much effort goes into preparing for a client conversation. The advisor brings the expertise, but the information they need can be scattered across several places.
When I first met Sofistic in 2024, that challenge felt familiar. During due diligence at Investissement Québec, we looked at the market, the competition, and the potential for international growth. What appealed most was the chance to help advisors walk into a conversation with a better understanding of the family sitting across from them.
What brought you from the board to the CEO role?
The team played a big role in that decision. Serving on the board let me get to know the people building Sofistic and see the progress they were making. It also gave me the chance to take a more direct role and help move that work forward.The CEO role brought together my experience working with advisors and investing in startups. I joined to help the team build something advisors would find useful in their everyday work, and a business we could grow internationally.
Delivering the family office experience
What is the biggest challenge advisors face today?
Fragmented information keeps coming up in our conversations with advisors. An advisor can have a strong portfolio system, a planning tool, and a CRM, yet still spend hours piecing together a client’s situation before a meeting.
The harder part is what that fragmentation means for the relationship. If cash flow, borrowing, or family circumstances change and are hard to see, it can be harder to start the right conversation at the right time. Helping advisors see those changes gives them a clearer sense of where they can help, and more time to spend with their clients.
Does that mean advisors should replace their existing tools?
We want to work with the tools advisors already rely on. Those tools play an important role, and the opportunity is to connect the information they hold with custodian feeds and client documents, then keep the family’s financial picture current.
Sofistic should help an advisor see which families need attention this week and what would be useful to discuss with them. That is where a connected view becomes practical in everyday work.
What does a family office experience mean in practice?
It means a family can discuss a decision in the context of their whole financial life. Their investments, property, business interests, debt, insurance, and estate plans all fit into that conversation.
Consider a family buying a property. The advisor should help them understand how to fund it, what liquidity they will have afterward, and what it means for their other goals. They can also bring in the right specialist when needed.
We are working to make that depth of understanding accessible to more advisors. The family feels understood, and the advisor has the context to help them think through the decision.
Where do assets under visibility fit into that approach?
Assets under visibility are a useful way to open a broader conversation. Assets under management tell you what the firm manages. Assets under visibility describe the wealth the advisor can see, including assets held elsewhere with the client’s authorization.
That visibility is a starting point. When you connect it with liabilities, cash flow, and family goals, you can begin to understand what a decision means for that particular family. The advisor can then bring their experience and judgment to the client’s choices.
How do you measure the value Sofistic creates?
We start with whether advisors have more time for their clients and whether the conversations they have are more useful.
In National Bank of Canada’s (BNC) first 12 months using Sofistic, the team captured C$115 million in net-new assets. The model helped surface held-away assets and unused credit capacity within relationships the team had served for years. That example matters because it shows the value of understanding clients better than an advisor already does.
For a family office, the benefit might be preparing reporting more efficiently or seeing a liquidity need before a capital call. The key is having the information early enough to act on it.
Applying AI with trust
What should advisors ask before adopting an AI tool?
The client’s trust comes first. Families share very personal information with their advisors, and any technology involved in that relationship has to respect that responsibility. For our team, that responsibility guides how we approach client information.
Before relying on an AI tool, advisors should understand where information is processed, who can access it, how long it is retained, and whether it is used to train models. They should also know what the AI can do on its own and what needs a person’s approval. Those are conversations to have with a supplier from the beginning.
How should advisors assess the information AI produces?
An advisor should be able to review an answer and understand its source. They need to see the information and assumptions behind it, and know which figures were calculated and which explanations were generated by AI.
At Sofistic, we ground AI in the family’s financial model and keep financial calculations within documented calculation engines. We use AI to help raise issues and prepare discussion points. The advisor brings their knowledge of the family, evaluates the options, and decides what advice to give.
How is Sofistic applying AI today?
One of the most practical uses is helping turn statements and documents into structured information. That reduces the work of putting the family’s financial picture together. Sofi Chat also helps advisors explore that picture and identify relevant discussion points around liquidity, concentration, credit, and wealth transfer.
We operate in a controlled AWS cloud environment and use Amazon Bedrock under enterprise controls. We segregate and encrypt client data, with hosting regions set according to customer requirements. Customer inputs and outputs are not used to train the underlying foundation models. We have also completed a SOC 2 Type II audit.
The goal is to give advisors better support while keeping judgment and approval of client-facing information in their hands.
Where wealth advice is heading
The industry is increasingly moving toward consolidated, family-office-style experiences. While institutions like Scotia Wealth Management made headlines on October 6 by launching global intelligence services for ultra-high-net-worth clients, others were already ahead of the curve. BNC adopted Sofistic to deliver that level of service before the Scotia launch, and is already seeing real results.
How do you see the advisor’s role evolving?
We want the wealth advisor to be the first person a family calls when an important financial decision comes up. Buying a property, selling a business, or preparing to transfer wealth all involve choices that affect several parts of the family’s life.
The advisor can help the family work through those choices and bring in an accountant, insurance specialist, or estate professional where appropriate. Each person contributes their own expertise.
That is the role our team is working to support. Our ambition is to put Sofistic at the center of every wealth decision, with the advisor at the center of the relationship. Technology helps maintain the understanding; the advisor brings the judgment and trust.
What does this mean for banks and institutions?
Banks and institutions have an opportunity to bring together the expertise they already have. A family may have investments, deposits, and borrowing with the same institution, but the relevant information may sit in different divisions.
When those pieces come together within the bank’s permissions and controls, a wealth advisor can recognize when another specialist would help. For example, an upcoming liquidity need might call for a conversation with a lending team. The value is in making that conversation relevant to the family’s situation.
Where does Sofistic go from here?
Canada remains important to us. Sofistic was born here, and our team wants to keep helping advisors in our home market. The need we are addressing also extends beyond Canada. The United States is our next growth priority, and we see opportunities in Europe as demand, partnerships, and data access support expansion.
Our immediate focus is on helping advisors build a financial picture they trust and use it regularly to engage clients. Longer term, we want that understanding to carry across the family’s relationships with other professionals.
Our vision is a financial relationship network built around the household, sponsored by the advisor or firm. Other professionals could join through controlled invitations, with clear permissions and client consent, while keeping responsibility for their own advice. We intend to build toward that in stages.
The goal is for each conversation to build on the last, so the advisor understands the family better, and the family feels supported when a decision comes up.