Updated:
COPIA Financial Solutions
COPIA Financial Solutions automates back-office fee billing and performance reporting for RIAs and family offices. Co-founded by Mike Collins in 2014.
COPIA Financial Solutions
COPIA Financial Solutions was launched in 2014 in San Francisco by Mike Collins and James Schaffer to address a persistent structural problem in the fragmented wealth management industry: the massive operational drag created by manual, error-prone back-office workflows. The firm does not manage assets or advise clients but operates as a pure-play software provider delivering automation for fee calculation, reconciliation, and client performance reporting. The founding thesis recognized that the independent RIA and single-family office market, while growing rapidly, lacked affordable institutional-grade middle-office infrastructure. COPIA's platform consolidates data from multiple custodians — including Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing — and applies rules-based processing to generate accurate, audit-ready fee invoices and performance reports. The system handles complex billing constructs such as tiered schedules, family aggregation, and multi-strategy account groupings, which are common among larger RIAs and multi-family offices. Confirmed integrations span the custody and portfolio-accounting ecosystem, with the firm positioning itself as a vendor-agnostic middleware layer rather than an all-in-one portfolio management system. The solution is delivered as a secure, cloud-based SaaS subscription. The company employs a focused team operating from its San Francisco headquarters. While total headcount and deployment volumes are not publicly disclosed, COPIA has methodically expanded its client base among RIAs with assets under advisement ranging from $500 million to several billion dollars. The firm brands its ongoing product development and community of users as the "COPIA Operational Intelligence Network," a supervised machine-learning framework that benchmarks operational performance and flags anomalous billing patterns across its client base. This data-network effect represents one aspect of COPIA's competitive moat in an industry still heavily reliant on Excel. COPIA's structure as a standalone software vendor — not a division of a larger asset manager or custodian — creates a genuine structural alignment difference in the wealth-tech landscape. Because it does not custody assets, execute trades, or provide investment advice, COPIA avoids the conflicts of interest that complicate bundled technology offerings from custodians or asset managers. Client contracts are pure software licenses with data-ownership clauses that have become a hallmark of the firm's legal posture. This architecture positions COPIA to benefit from industry consolidation and regulatory pressure, both of which make independent, automated operations control more valuable to a fiduciary.
General information
Firm type
Other
Year founded
2014
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
San Francisco
Corporate office
San Francisco, CA, United States
Principals
Mike Collins
Co-Founder & CEO
James Schaffer
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
Does COPIA manage money or act as a custodian?
No. COPIA is strictly a software company providing an operations platform. It does not manage assets, provide investment advice, or hold client custody of funds. Its revenue comes from SaaS licensing fees, which structurally aligns it with the operational efficiency goals of its RIA and family-office clients without the conflicts inherent in bundled provider models.
How does COPIA handle complex family-office billing structures?
The platform is designed to ingest multi-custodian data and apply highly configurable billing rules. This includes support for tiered AUM fee schedules, household aggregation, split-directed trustee fees, and multi-generational trust structures. In August 2023, the firm released a dedicated rules-engine upgrade specifically addressing the needs of multi-family offices that manually consolidate complex invoices (per the firm, August 2023).
Which custodians does COPIA integrate with?
Publicly confirmed data-integration partners include Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments, and Pershing (BNY Mellon). COPIA pulls raw transaction, position, and tax-lot data from these sources to automate fee calculation and performance measurement. The platform's architecture is designed to onboard additional custodians through a standardized API framework.
Who runs tech and product development at COPIA?
Mike Collins serves as CEO and oversees the firm's product vision and technology strategy, drawing on earlier roles in financial-services infrastructure. James Schaffer, as COO, handles client implementation, support, and day-to-day operations. The firm maintains a lean engineering team in San Francisco, though individual technical leads are not widely publicized.
What is the 'COPIA Operational Intelligence Network'?
This is COPIA's term for its supervised machine-learning framework that analyzes anonymized, aggregated operational data across its client base. The network benchmarks operational performance, flags anomalous billing patterns for compliance review, and helps firms identify back-office bottlenecks. It represents an attempt to create a data-network effect that expands the platform's value as the client base grows.
How does COPIA ensure client data ownership and privacy?
COPIA's standard client contracts explicitly assign data ownership to the client firm, not to COPIA. Client portfolio data is not used to sell products or shared with third-party custodians beyond what is necessary for reconciliation. This contractual posture has been a defining feature of the firm's legal architecture from its founding and is designed to satisfy the fiduciary obligations of RIA clients.
Is COPIA positioned for acquisition or independent growth?
COPIA operates as a private, venture-backed company and has not publicly signaled an imminent exit. The fragmented back-office-software market, where many solutions remain tied to custodians or legacy portfolio systems, creates a natural consolidation thesis. COPIA's vendor-agnostic model allows it to be an attractive acquisition target for larger wealth-tech platforms, though the firm's public posture remains one of independent organic growth.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
Need institutional-grade insight on family offices?
Altss delivers:
Prefer a guided tour?
We’ll walk you through: