The Integration Myth: Why APIs Won't Save Your Tech Stack
The financial advice industry has been promised that APIs will connect everything. They haven't. Here's why unified beats integrated every time.
For years, the promise has been the same: buy the best-of-breed tool for each job, then connect them all with APIs. It sounds elegant. In practice, it's a spider web of fragile connections, each one a potential point of failure. Data gets stale, formats conflict, and nobody owns the complete picture. This is especially devastating for AI. An AI agent working across fragmented systems is like an employee who can only see one screen at a time — technically functional, but deeply limited. The design industry learned this lesson: in 2022 there was an explosion of point solutions, by 2024 consolidation was underway, and by 2025 the winners were unified platforms like Figma and Canva that did everything in one place. Financial advice is following the same trajectory. The firms that will thrive aren't the ones with the most integrations — they're the ones with the least seams.