Welcome to the May 2025 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 Altruist has announced a $152 million fundraising round, the latest in a steadily increasing series of capital raises as it has built out new technology features to compete with the “Big Two” custodians of Schwab and Fidelity – leaving the big question of what it intends to do with this fresh round of capital, whether it’s implementing (even more) new features, improving its existing product, or acquiring competitors in the ever-competitive race for custodial market share?
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- Charles Schwab has taken a minority stake in estate planning platform Wealth.com as it seeks to offer estate document preparation to its retail investor clients – which on the one hand gives Schwab a value-add that could keep its retail clients from switching to advisors for longer, but on the other hand may not be that much of a value add to begin with since most clients only update their estate documents every 10–15 years
- Flourish has acquired Sora, which helped advisors in aiding their clients in comparing and securing debt from mortgages to student loans to business loans, in the latest sign that the idea of “Liability-Management-as-a-Service”, while appealing in theory since most clients hold debt of some kind or another, falls flat in practice since most advisors would rather refer out clients to a third-party loan broker than have in-depth debt planning conversations themselves
- A new startup called Wing is launching a consumer-facing “robo planning” app that provides automated personalized financial planning recommendations based on the user’s inputs – but as the original crop of “robo advisors” realized nearly a decade ago, it’s hard to profitably serve financial planning clients on a mass-market scale if there’s not an efficient way to market to and acquire those clients
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- The financial planning platform Libretto has announced a new feature enabling advisors to create “one-click” personalized client letters based on the client’s data in the software, representing a potentially valuable use of AI technology that doesn’t require the user to master prompting a chat box but instead simply gives them the output they need out of the box
- Amid talk about “agentic AI” tools being the next big AI evolution on the horizon, it’s worth reflecting whether agentic AI is really something that advisory firms need, or whether – given the highly process-driven nature of most financial planning business – it’s really just better automation and integration features are needed to help make advisors and their teams more efficient
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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