Welcome to the November 2024 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors!
This month’s edition kicks off with the news that Holistiplan has announced the rollout of a new estate plan document extraction tool to stand alongside its highly popular tax return scanning tool – which highlights how advances in AI technology have allowed tools like Holistiplan to go beyond tax returns and scan nearly any kind of document to locate and pull out the key information within; but at the same time raises questions about how much demand there truly is for document extraction beyond tax returns, given how (relatively) infrequently households create and update estate planning documents?
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- Advisor sales enablement platform Nitrogen has announced its own feature for extracting information from prospects’ investment statements that can be automatically fed into Nitrogen’s analysis and proposal generation tools, which raises questions about the future of standalone tools like VRGL that have built much of their value proposition around document extraction but could become redundant if more of the platforms advisors already use start to build those features “in-house”
- CurrentClient, a text messaging platform that aims to offer a more modern and streamlined solution for advisors to communicate and engage with their clients via text, won the “Best In Show” award at XYPN’s recent AdviceTech competition, standing out as a potential solution to what has been a longstanding pain point for advisors in efficiently managing and archiving their text communication
- Quivr, a CRM overlay centered around advisor-specific workflows and automation, won the “Advicer’s Choice” award at XYPN’s AdviceTech competition, reflecting its emerging popularity among advisors who increasingly rely on workflows to scale their business but remain frustrated with the limitations of the current legacy CRM platforms in delivering effective workflow capabilities
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- Farther, one of an emerging crop of “digital RIAs” aiming to achieve better growth and profitability through a purpose-built and integrated technology infrastructure, has raised $72 million in Series C funding – which on one hand reflects the enthusiasm among investors for the possibilities of a highly efficient advisory firm enabled by technology; but on the other hand raises questions about how that efficiency will turn into profitability when the last 30 years of advances in tech-enabled efficiency have actually seen advisory firms become less profitable than they once were?
- Freewill, a consumer-facing estate document preparation service, has launched an advisor-facing version called Estately that combines both tools for clients to self-direct their own estate planning documents as well as capabilities for clients to work with a “live” attorney to get their documents done, allowing advisory firms to more efficiently offer estate planning to both complex high-net-worth clients (who need to rely on the expertise of a live attorney) and more simple “mass affluent” clients (who can be more efficiently served with the self-directed option)
And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular “Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map” (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!
*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to TechNews@kitces.com!
