How Wealthie built an AI agent inbox in a day

The company

Wealthie is a wealth management platform built for New Zealand financial advisers, and it started as something narrower. Co-founder Riki Carston is a financial adviser by trade who spent years inside an industry he calls archaic, running on CRMs that have barely changed in close to a decade. His own specialty was retirement modelling: the graphs and projections that show a client where their money is actually headed, not the back-of-envelope math.

The trouble with detail is that it needs data, and a lot of it.

“With the depth of it, I ended up needing so much information that it ended up turning into a CRM anyway,” Carston says.

So the modelling tool grew into a full platform, built for New Zealand advisers with the workflows of the job baked in: discovery documents, risk profilers, statements of advice, task management, and interaction logging mapped to the structured six-step advice process.

Then Carston made a less obvious call. Most founders in his position would have spent the next two years selling the software to other advisers. He worked out that a tool good enough to sell to other advisers was good enough to run a better advice business with himself. Rather than talk reluctant practices into adopting something new, he turned the product inward. Today Wealthie is used exclusively by My Net Worth, a financial advice business running on its own software, handling investments, insurance, and retirement planning with the platform underneath.

The difference shows up in the numbers, boasting an 86% time reduction in document generation and reducing data capture and cleaning by over 90%, which Carston attributes to cutting admin and automating repetitive processes, rather than working harder.

An adviser might be able to service maybe 250 clients per year normally,” he says. “With the case studies that we’ve done, it’s more than four times that, just with the amount of admin you don’t have to do.

Riki Carston

Co-Founder @ Wealthie

The old way still looks like this: an adviser prints a document, hands it to an admin to bind, and posts it out. At Wealthie, everything goes out via a link, is reviewed and signed digitally, with the whole team working off the same view. 

The problem

Financial advice runs on email, and most of it gets lost. An adviser handles a client, then the lawyer gets involved, then an accountant, and sometimes a Trust (or a few!). Every one of those threads is a compliance record that has to be logged against the right household, but the people sending them rarely include any context. A document arrives with “have a look at this” and nothing else.

That challenge is amplified by how heavily regulated financial advice is in New Zealand. Advisers are expected to maintain comprehensive records demonstrating the advice process, client communications, and the rationale behind recommendations. Every email, document, and interaction can become part of the compliance record. Most firms still rely on advisers or administrators manually filing correspondence into CRMs, creating an administrative bottleneck that limits how many clients an adviser can realistically serve while increasing the risk of missed records. For Wealthie, automating that capture isn’t simply about saving time; it’s about maintaining a complete, auditable client record at a quality and consistency that would be difficult to achieve manually as the business scales.

Wealthie’s automations that let one adviser cover 4x the number of clients depend entirely on capturing that traffic. The platform logs interactions, updates records, and flags what needs a human only because it is fed real data: email threads, calendar activity, recorded calls. Starve it of data and there is nothing for it to act on. That is why so much of what Carston builds comes back to capturing communication reliably, and why Nylas ended up at the center of the stack.

Wealthie already solved the simple case. When an adviser emails a client who exists in the CRM, a Nylas webhook fires, the platform recognizes the address, and the interaction gets logged automatically against the household.

“That’s actually super handy and works really well,” Carston says.

The hard case is the third party. When the conversation moves to a client’s lawyer, the adviser does not want to copy the client in, but the exchange still needs to be logged against the household. There was no clean way to bring a sender who is not in the CRM into the right record without manual filing.

What they built

Wealthie built an agent inbox routing layer on Nylas Agent Accounts, dedicated inboxes the software owns outright, each with its own email address. An adviser emails an external party and tags the agent address. The email routes through an Agent Account, which reads the message and decides where it belongs:

• Deterministic routing first. If the email contains an explicit household reference, the agent matches on those characters and routes it immediately.
• Confidence-scored routing next. If there is no explicit tag, the agent infers the household from the sender, recipients, and subject.
• Human review for the rest. Anything below the threshold lands in a holding area where a person can manually assign it. 

It means correspondence with a client’s lawyer or accountant can be captured against the right household without an adviser sitting in the middle of every thread. Once an email is routed, it does more than sit in a log. Wealthie creates tasks from it and moves, updates, or reassigns workflows based on the content of the exchange. The adviser’s sequential advice process responds to what is actually happening in the client’s email.

What surprised Carston was the speed. He built the first working version in under a day.

The webhook payload made the wiring straightforward. Every message-created event carries a grant ID that Wealthie maps to a household entity in its database. When a webhook arrives with that grant ID, the platform knows the household, fires the right downstream action, and notifies the responsible adviser with what it has already done.

Where this is going

Wealthie’s roadmap turns the routing layer into something closer to a per-engagement system of record. Instead of inferring which household an email belongs to, each household gets its own dedicated Agent Account inbox, provisioned on creation with a single API call. An email that lands in that inbox belongs to that household by definition. The agent can then handle outbound reminders from the same address: chasing a trust document, following up with a lawyer, prompting a client for outstanding information, all scoped to one relationship.

The model fits how Agent Accounts are priced and built. Provisioning an inbox takes a fraction of a second, and the accounts are designed to be created and removed as freely as the relationships they represent. Activity is driven by what actually moves through the inbox, not by how many accounts exist. For a practice that thinks in households, deals, and engagements, the inbox maps to the relationship rather than to a person who might leave.

That last point matters because of where Wealthie is headed. The firm is acquiring financial advice books and rolling them into one practice, often from advisers nearing retirement who have run their clients on little more than a Word document. Dedicated household inboxes give the firm a stable address for every client relationship that survives the transition, even when the original adviser moves on. Acquired clients can keep emailing an address they recognize while the records consolidate behind it.

Why Nylas

Wealthie needs reliable inbox and calendar access across providers, the kind that breaks when built directly against Google or Microsoft at scale. Recurring calendar events alone carry edge cases that are expensive to handle in-house. Building that foundation was never where Wealthie wanted to spend its engineering time. Their differentiator is the advice modelling and the workflow, not the email plumbing underneath it.

Nylas provides the communications data layer so Wealthie can build on top of it: Email API for sending and receiving from the firm’s own domain, Webhooks for real-time logging against households, and Agent Accounts for inboxes that map to relationships instead of people.

Asked what had been hard with Nylas lately, Carston kept it short: “Everything’s mint.”