Field note
Custodian Transition Automation
Moved a wealth management firm's entire book — roughly a billion dollars in assets — to a new custodian in under a month, on a timeline both custodians called impossible.
→ ~$1B in assets migrated in under a month
What was broken
Move a wealth firm's entire book — about a billion in assets — to a new custodian on a timeline both custodians called impossible, with no clean export from the old one.
What we shipped
Scrapers to recover the document trail, a pipeline that generated 10,000+ PDFs, and a ~2,200-line Python framework routing every one through DocuSign.
What changed after
Finished in under a month with zero accounts left behind. The receiving custodian offered me a job on the spot.
The person who scoped this is the person who built it and the person you'd text when something broke. That's the trade you make hiring one consultant instead of an agency.
Starting point
The messy starting point
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.
Route
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 after
- 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
Lanes
Related services
Where this kind of work usually lives in the menu.
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