Overview

Sequoia Financial is a national RIA with $32 billion in AUM as of 3/31/26, serving high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients across the U.S. They offer comprehensive wealth management services including financial planning, estate coordination, and business advisory. Sequoia partnered with Feathery in 2024 to modernize and scale their client onboarding infrastructure.

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Challenge

Sequoia’s legacy onboarding process was fragmented, relying heavily on manual data entry and multiple disconnected systems. Advisors and client service teams collected client information via email and calls, then manually filled out custodian-provided PDFs for account openings.

Clients were often confused by overlapping forms, and advisors spent excessive time chasing down incomplete or inconsistent data. The process led to high rates of NIGO (Not In Good Order) submissions to custodians, delaying onboarding and eroding the client experience.

With Sequoia onboarding thousands of new households each year, the inefficiencies were compounding.

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“In wealth management, the onboarding experience sets the tone for the entire client relationship. Feathery helped us transform what used to be a heavily manual process into a seamless, scalable digital experience for both advisors and clients.”

— Ryan Mahoney, Vice President, Business Systems at Sequoia

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Solution

Feathery enabled Sequoia to consolidate and automate their onboarding workflows with a client-friendly digital experience.

Automated Custodial Account Openings

Sequoia uses Feathery to power a dynamic, intelligent onboarding flow that adapts based on household structure, account type, and other client-specific conditions. Feathery pulls in existing data from Sequoia’s CRM to prefill known fields, reducing client effort and reducing manual entry.

The flow uses conditional logic to display only the relevant questions and validates inputs in real-time to ensure completeness and accuracy. Once all required information is collected, Feathery automatically pre-fills the appropriate custodial documents and triggers e-signature with the correct signees and identity verification steps configured.

This automation has meaningfully reduced NIGOs, saving advisors and operations teams significant time and accelerating the account opening process.

Integrated Tech Stack

A key advantage of Feathery is its flexibility — the platform works with virtually any API while also offering deep, pre-built integrations for the tools Sequoia already relied on. This made it straightforward to connect Feathery across Sequoia's core systems without custom development overhead:

• Salesforce for CRM and pipeline tracking
• Box for document management
• DocuSign for e-signatures
• Charles Schwab and Fidelity for asset custody

Client data now enters the system once and flows through the entire back office, improving accuracy and saving time.

Expanding Beyond Account Opening

Sequoia also uses Feathery for client surveys, contracts, and compliance forms. Feathery dynamically pulls in previously collected data to reduce duplicate entry and streamline the client experience across touchpoints.

Impact

• 45% Faster account openings: Cycle time for clean, In Good Order submissions has dropped substantially since implementing Feathery
• Fewer NIGO submissions: Real-time input validation catches common errors before they reach custodians, reducing rework for advisors
• Significant advisor time savings: Teams can now focus more on strategic client conversations

By modernizing their onboarding with Feathery, Sequoia Financial has scaled their operations without sacrificing service quality — all while delivering a more seamless, digital-first experience to their clients.

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