Build-vs-Buy ROI Worksheet for Synthetic Wealth Data
The build-vs-buy decision for synthetic wealth data has a structural answer hidden in plain sight: most teams underestimate the compliance review hours. Engineering hours are visible; legal review, fidelity validation, regulator-tracking refresh cycles, and the opportunity cost of FTE time on non-product work are not. This worksheet computes the fully-loaded annual cost on each side and shows the payback period for switching to WealthSynth.
What you walk away with
~12 min · 4 sections · 10 fields- A fully-loaded annual cost for the in-house build, including hidden compliance and refresh costs.
- A like-for-like WealthSynth license cost.
- A payback period and a three-year cumulative cost comparison.
- A sensitivity view — what changes if a key input shifts.
In-house team cost
Engineering, data, and modeling FTEs spending material time on the corpus. Partial FTEs as decimals.
Salary + benefits + overhead per FTE per year. Use the firm's standard fully-loaded number.
Legal + compliance review time on the corpus annually — license review, PII/NPI attestation, regulator-tracking refreshes.
Hourly rate for compliance / legal review time.
Tooling and infrastructure
Vendor licenses (statistical packages, faker libraries), cloud spend on generation pipelines, storage for the corpus.
How often the in-house corpus needs to refresh (regulatory updates, tax-bracket changes, new product features).
Median engineering effort per refresh cycle.
WealthSynth license comparison
Use catalog pricing for the bundle(s) that match the firm's needs. Default reflects a typical compliance + tax bundle mix.
One-time engineering hours to integrate WealthSynth into the firm's test environments.
Hourly rate for the integration work.
Comparison
Comparison
Live calculations across both sides. Payback period and 3-year NPV anchor the steering-committee decision.
Sum of FTE, compliance, refresh, and tooling costs. The number that goes on the steering-committee slide.
One-time license plus one-time integration. Year-two and beyond carries no required vendor cost.
Year-two-onward savings: the in-house run-rate continues; the WealthSynth license was paid once in year one.
Months until the year-one WealthSynth investment is recovered against the in-house run-rate.
Cumulative cash savings over three years. The WealthSynth license + integration is paid once in year one; the in-house run-rate compounds annually.
Take the decision to the steering committee
The WealthSynth-vs-in-house comparison has a structured framework for the qualitative side of the decision (regulator coverage, refresh discipline, audit-readiness). The Maturity Assessment scores where an existing in-house corpus stands.
Key takeaways
- Compliance review hours are the most-underestimated input. A 1.5-FTE team often consumes 200+ hours/year of compliance time on the corpus.
- Refresh cycles are the silent killer. A pristine corpus from year-one becomes a liability by year three without a refresh cadence.
- WealthSynth absorbs the regulator-tracking refresh effort that in-house teams pay for in engineering hours. That's the largest portion of the savings for compliance-heavy firms.
- Sensitivity matters more than the point estimate. If the decision flips when FTE cost moves 10%, the answer is unstable; capture it in the steering-committee deck.
FAQ
Where do the defaults come from?
Calibrated against published wealth-tech salary surveys (2024-2025), observed compliance review patterns at fintechs going through SOC 2, and WealthSynth's published catalog pricing. Treat them as starting points; replace with firm-specific numbers before taking the result anywhere serious.
Why include integration hours on the WealthSynth side?
Honesty. A WealthSynth license has real one-time integration cost — fields to map, environments to update, processes to document. Including it lets the comparison be defensible.
What's the typical payback period?
Across the firms we've worked with, 6-14 months for compliance-heavy product lines, 12-24 months for greenfield product lines without a regulator scope. The sensitivity view captures that range.