The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech (August 2023)

Welcome to the August 2023 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, 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 estate planning platform Wealth.com has launched Ester, an AI-driven ‘legal assistant’ that uses machine learning to help advisors quickly review and extract the key information from clients’ estate planning documents, as it joins FP Alpha in the competition to become ‘Holistiplan for estate planning documents’ – although given Wealth.com’s core business as a document preparation service, Ester’s success may be better measured by how many new clients it brings in to create new estate planning documents, than its overall market share as a standalone estate planning software tool for advisors?

From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:

• Wealth Management GPT has launched as one of the first standalone AI writing tools for financial advisors, distinguishing itself from other tools that are integrated within already-existing AdvisorTech tools (which raises questions about how Wealth Management GPT will fit within an advisor’s tech stack, and whether its integration capabilities will make it attractive as a standalone tool that can fill in the gaps of advisors’ non-AI-enabled tools)
• The new Kitces Research AdvisorTech study is out, which along with giving an overview of the current trends in the AdvisorTech marketplace, highlights the depth and breadth of advisors’ challenges around integrating the components of their tech stack (which, as the research data suggests, may not just be a problem with the integration capabilities themselves, but with the usability of the software – an issue that could be addressed by better understanding of how and what advisors use integration for)
• A new crop of ‘digitally native’ RIA startups are promising to disrupt the industry by building advisory firms on top of custom-built, all-in-one proprietary technology platforms – which raises questions about whether, like robo-advisors who made similar avowals in the past, they may find that a seamless technology experience isn’t enough to persuade advisors to pay a significant portion of their revenue for access to it (or even to attract any more clients than they would have by using standard third-party technology instead of building their own platforms)

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:

• With advisors often facing a choice between recommending clients use a trust administrator from a bank who will try to compete for their investment management business, or an accountant or attorney who will likely cost the client more in fees, 2 new technology-enabled trust administration solutions have emerged in Valur and Luminary that promise to keep the advisor at the center of the relationship while offering tech-enabled trust administration at a reduced cost (though it remains to be seen how much advisors really want to be at the center, rather than focusing on just focusing on their traditional role of managing trust assets)
• With Twitter faltering and other competitors waiting in the wings to replace it, it’s natural to wonder whether we may see a reshaping of the ‘Big 3’ of social media networks popular among financial advisors – however, for reasons ranging from a lack of options to archive content on newer platforms for compliance to the fact that the other 2 major networks already fulfill most of the functions that advisors need from social media, it seems more likely that the Big 3 will ultimately just turn into the Big 2.

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!

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