We've been doing this work for over two decades. Inktrust is what we wish we'd had the whole time.
Inktrust is a product of Midstream Marketing — a digital marketing agency that’s been generating leads and AUM for financial advisors since 2002. The patent and the platform came out of twenty-plus years of watching the same problem from the inside.
A marketing agency, since 2002. For financial advisors specifically, since 2010.
Midstream Marketing was founded in 2002 at a kitchen table in Pittsburgh. The work started broad — websites, search engine optimization, lead generation for whoever needed it. In 2010, the firm took on its first financial advisor client: Pinnacle Advisory, the firm of Michael Kitces. The work was different. The stakes were different. The compliance was different. And the results were different — measurable, durable, the kind of inbound traffic that compounds into actual AUM.
The financial advisor channel became the only channel. Today, Midstream Marketing serves dozens of advisory firms across the country — from solo independents to firms managing more than two billion in AUM. The team is small and senior. The strategies aren’t templated. The work is the kind of work most advisors don’t have the time, the writers, or the compliance comfort to do themselves.
That’s the problem inktrust was built to solve. Not a generic content tool repurposed for advisors. A purpose-built pipeline by people who’ve been the agency on the other side of the email — for over twenty years.
Midstream Marketing founded. Over two decades of digital marketing experience.
First financial advisor client (Pinnacle Advisory / Michael Kitces). Specialization began.
AUM at the largest advisory firms Midstream serves today.
Marketing professionals on the team across writing, strategy, SEO, and compliance liaison.
Christopher founded Midstream Marketing in 2002. Since then, he’s spent over two decades building digital marketing strategies for businesses, with the last fifteen years focused almost entirely on financial advisors. He directs the operations of a global team of more than fifteen marketing professionals serving advisory firms across the United States.
He’s a member of the Forbes Business Council and has published articles in Forbes, WealthManagement.com, and AdvisorPerspectives.com. He holds a Master of Arts from Gannon University and a Bachelor of Arts from Franciscan University.
Christopher lives in Steubenville, Ohio, with his wife and nine children. He runs Tough Mudder annually, has hiked Kilimanjaro, and volunteers with his church. He believes the financial advisor marketing channel is one of the most under-served, over-regulated, and under-tooled corners of B2B software — and he built inktrust to fix the part of it he couldn’t fix any other way.
Bachelor of Arts, Franciscan University
Published in Forbes, WealthManagement.com, AdvisorPerspectives.com
Christopher's writing on financial advisor marketing has appeared in:
Why a marketing agency built an AI tool. (And why it's not what you'd think.)
For more than fifteen years, Midstream Marketing’s writers have been producing articles for advisors — interviewing them, learning their voice, drafting in their style, navigating their compliance teams, and shipping the kind of inbound content that turns a website into a lead source. The work works. It’s just expensive, slow, and doesn’t scale to the firms that need it most.
By 2024, the AI writing tools coming into the market were not solving the problem. They were making it worse. Generic prompts produced generic copy. Template libraries shared the same article with three hundred advisors. Compliance was an afterthought. Voice was a slider on a settings screen. Bylines belonged to no one and everyone.
“The blank-page problem isn’t a content problem. It’s a ‘how do I sound like myself, fast, without getting in trouble’ problem.”
So we built what we wished existed. The interview process our senior writers have been running for fifteen years became the recorded discovery call. The brand-and-voice separation we do by hand became two structured artifacts. The internal-link mapping we do manually became the service graph. The compliance pre-screen our liaison team does over Slack became the two-pass rule library.
The patent application followed naturally. The product was the codification of the work — and the work, in financial advisor marketing, has been ours for a long time.
Inktrust isn’t an AI startup pivoting into financial services. It’s a financial advisor marketing agency, built since 2002, finally writing down what it knows.
Four principles. They're load-bearing.
Principle 1
The byline belongs to the human.
Inktrust will never ship a feature that obscures the fact that a human is publishing under their own name. We don’t pretend AI is the author. We don’t ghostwrite for the system. The advisor is responsible for what they publish, and our entire pipeline exists to help them be responsible well.
Principle 2
Compliance is assistive, not autonomous.
We do not approve communications. We flag them. The licensed reviewer does the approving. Any feature that conflicts with this principle is rejected at the design stage. This is non-negotiable, including with customers who would prefer faster shipping.
Principle 3
Your work is yours when you leave.
Brand profiles, voice specs, articles, audit logs — exported in clean formats on termination. We don’t hold customer data hostage as a retention strategy. If we’re not earning the renewal, the renewal shouldn’t happen.
Principle 4
No fake bylines, no fake testimonials, no fake numbers.
We will not publish testimonials that didn’t happen, manufacture customer counts, or use synthetic voices that aren’t anchored to a real interview. The product’s whole point is real attribution. The marketing has to live by the same standard.
If your firm is publishing in 2026, you should know who's behind the byline.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll record a sample interview, generate an article in your voice, and run it through the compliance pre-screen — before you decide anything.