Project
Custodian Transition Automation
High-volume document recovery, generation, and e-signature routing for a firm-wide custodian move — finished on a timeline everyone said was impossible.
→ Large-scale paperwork migration finished on an “impossible” timeline
Starting point
A firm had to re-paper a huge book of accounts for a custodian move — with no clean export from the old system.
What I built
Recovered the source data, generated thousands of documents, and routed them for e-signature end to end.
What changed
Finished on a timeline everyone said was impossible — zero accounts left behind.
The person who scoped this is the person who built it. Same person on the handoff — that's the trade you make hiring one consultant instead of an agency.
Starting point
Where things stood
A custodian transition means re-papering every account — new account-opening documents, transfer authorizations, and disclosures — generated correctly for thousands of accounts and routed to clients for signature. The old custodian wouldn't hand over clean records, so even assembling the source data was a project of its own. Done by hand, the firm was looking at months of work and a real risk of missing the transition window.
Approach
The path we chose
The largest project I've ever owned: migrating a wealth management firm's entire book of business — roughly a billion dollars in assets — from one custodian to another, on a timeline both custodians said couldn't be done. (Internal work, so the firm stays unnamed.)
Build
How I built it
- Built web scrapers to recover the document trail and account data from the old custodian's portal, where no clean export existed.
- Created a document-generation pipeline that produced more than 10,000 correctly populated PDFs from templates.
- Wrote a ~2,200-line Python framework that routed every document through the DocuSign API — multi-signer envelopes, expirations, voids, resends, and exception handling.
- Logged every step so nothing got lost across thousands of accounts on a hard deadline.
The honest part
What made it tricky
The parts that didn't go to plan — and how I worked around them.
- The old custodian wouldn't release clean records, so assembling the source data was a project of its own.
- At this volume and timeline there was no room for silent failures — every step needed logging and exception handling.
After launch
What changed
- Finished the transition in under a month with zero accounts left behind.
- Both custodians had said the timeline wasn't possible.
- The receiving custodian was impressed enough to offer me a job on the spot.
Capabilities
What it does
Stack
Tools used
Services
Related services
This project is an example of these lanes — most real work touches more than one.
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