RightCapital Reduces Switching Costs Of Changing Financial Planning Software With New Data Migration Tool (And More Of The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech – November 2025)

RightCapital's New Data Migration Tool Reduces The Switching Cost Of Changing Financial Planning Software

When an advisor wants to move from one technology provider to a competitor, making the switch is a bit more complex than simply logging into a different piece of software every day. The advisor's 'old' software often has years, or even decades, of accumulated client data, most of which must be ported over to the new software in order to ensure continuity between one tool and the other. For example, rebalancing software needs to reflect client-specific settings like cash set-asides and trading restrictions, performance reporting tools need to include historical client performance so performance history doesn't reset at the time of the switch, and financial planning software needs to move over at least the major components of each client's financial plan (e.g., their goals, planning assumptions, and cash flow inputs, along with information on their various assets and liabilities). And technology platforms, while often touting their data integrations with other types of advisor technology, don't usually make it easy to export data to competing software providers – because why make it easier for users to move to a competitor once they've already decided to make the switch? At most, they may provide a data export, consisting of one or many CSV spreadsheets, that technically contains the advisor's client data but has little structure or organization to make it easy to import into any other software.

As a result, "switching costs" – defined in general as the friction encountered when moving from one product or service to another, and specifically for AdvisorTech as the time and resources necessary for the migration and reconciliation of data between the old and new software – have long been a hurdle for advisors in adopting new technology. Which is a big part of why advisors tend to change software providers so infrequently (e.g., according to the most recent 2025 Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, around 3%–5% of advisors reported changing technology providers in the last 12 months in most categories, implying that advisors on average may stick with a single piece of software for 20–30 years): Any benefits or cost savings of the new software can't overcome the very real costs that come with making the change itself. For instance, imagine if an advisor has 100 clients, and each client requires two hours of work to migrate to and reconcile their data in the new system. That equates to five weeks of full-time work spent solely on switching software. Multiply that by several advisors at a firm, and the cost can easily add up to the equivalent of a full-time staff member dedicated to moving clients between technology platforms, ultimately amounting to tens of thousands of dollars in staff costs. Given that, it's no wonder advisors tend to stick with technology for such a long time, even when they aren't necessarily happy with the software they own.

But if technology providers don't generally make it easy to leave for a competing software, they do often invest in ways to make it easier for incoming advisors to switch to their platform. Providers often boast onboarding support teams that can help advisors convert the not-well-structured data from their old software into a format suitable for use in the new software, in order to ease the pain of switching. But even with onboarding support, the switching process can still be daunting for advisors – because not only do providers often charge additional onboarding fees to help them offset the expense of providing onboarding support, but advisors still usually need to be hands-on in working with the providers to ensure there is no loss or distortion of client data in the migration stage. All of which is especially frustrating since many of these pain points would be avoided if providers simply agreed to use the API capabilities they already have for integration purposes to make it easier for advisors to switch among them, rather than artificially raising switching costs that are ultimately borne by the advisors (and clients) using their software.

Against this background, it's notable that RightCapital has recently launched a new feature specifically aiming to make it easier for users of eMoney to switch to RightCapital, by scanning PDF copies of eMoney financial planning output and automatically mapping the client data to the relevant fields in RightCapital. However, as articles highlighting the announcement have reported, eMoney has quietly been using its own version of the same technology to transfer in data from other providers for the past year – meaning that RightCapital's announcement effectively declares that it has now caught up with its biggest competitor's onboarding capabilities, albeit in a splashier way ostensibly meant to signal its intent to pursue more advisors who currently use eMoney.

To that end, RightCapital's decision to design the first version of its data migration tool specifically for importing eMoney plans shows where it sees the biggest opportunity in finding new user growth going forward. Which makes sense, given that the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology showed that RightCapital has finally leapfrogged the other "big three" financial planning software provider MoneyGuide in advisor adoption amongst independent advisors, leaving eMoney as the sole provider ahead of it in market share. But while RightCapital has managed to close the distance between itself and eMoney somewhat (at 25.4% adoption for RightCapital and 31.1% for eMoney in the most recent study), there is still a nearly 6 percentage point gap between the two, and much of RightCapital's gains in adoption over the last several years have come at the expense not of eMoney but of MoneyGuide. It's not surprising, then, to see RightCapital target eMoney more directly by dangling a new tool to make it easier to switch from one to the other, in the hopes of landing some easy wins in the form of advisors who were already interested in making the switch but were deterred by the switching cost. (Though RightCapital also noted that it will be building a similar migration tool for MoneyGuide plans in 2026 to keep winning there as well.)

The interesting question, however, is how long tools like RightCapital's and eMoney's plan document importers will be necessary to reduce the friction of moving from one piece of technology to another. With the capabilities of AI tools rapidly approaching the point – if they haven't already – of taking nearly any type of unstructured data from one source (e.g., client meetings, account statements, and estate planning documents) and reformatting it to use in another software platform, it seems feasible that a solution could come along that can automatically convert client data from any financial planning software to import into any other financial planning software. Or from portfolio management software to portfolio management software, CRM to CRM, or anything else in the advisor's tech stack. The big question is whether AI is capable of doing such migrations with the high level of reliability and security that would be expected of a tool handling clients' critical and sensitive financial data: It probably isn't there yet (which is likely why RightCapital and eMoney have opted to rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rather than more sophisticated AI technology for their respective import tools), and despite the claims of AI boosters there's no guarantee that it will ever clear that hurdle. Still, though, any level of AI agents that can support and expedite data migrations, and reduce switching costs for advisors' years (or decades) of data, could materially alter the pace of advisors switching from one vendor to another.

Ultimately, while the new tools from RightCapital and eMoney represent a step forward, we're still by no means close to having a universal solution to the high switching costs imposed on advisors by their technology. Which is really unfortunate, as the friction from switching to new technology makes it harder for advisors to start using software that can help them serve their clients better, and it puts less pressure on technology providers to keep improving their own products to convince their users from jumping to a better competitor. Or put differently, if technology made it easier to switch from one software to another, providers would need to invest less resources into support for onboarding users onto their own platforms – and could invest those resources instead into development and making their software better, and compete on the quality of their solutions instead of relying on barriers to leaving.

Advyzon Is Building In-House Financial Planning Software To Launch In 2026, Despite The Struggles Of Other "All-In-Ones" To Offer Competitive Planning Tools

Of all the technology that financial advisors use, there are generally three key pieces of software that serve as the core of their tech stack: Portfolio management (which encompasses trading/rebalancing and performance reporting, once typically used separately but increasingly offered as part of a single solution), CRM, and financial planning software. In most cases, advisors use different technology from different providers for each of these functions: The most-used solutions in each category amongst independent advisors, according to the most recent 2025 Kitces Research on Financial Technology, were Orion for portfolio management, Wealthbox for CRM, and eMoney for financial planning, each of which come from different providers. However, that hasn't stopped some technology providers from offering solutions in two or even all three of the core AdvisorTech categories: Orion, for example, offers a CRM (Redtail) and financial planning software (Orion Planning, formerly Advizr) in addition to its portfolio management solutions; while Envestnet has its Tamarac solution for portfolio management and CRM and MoneyGuide for financial planning.

But while it makes sense in theory to offer a single all-in-one solution for all of an advisor's core technology needs – with portfolio management and financial planning software that can handle the two main pillars of client service, and a CRM to serve as the data layer seamlessly integrating with and keeping the other tools in sync – the attempts by technology platforms to do so haven't exactly been a resounding success. Take Orion for example: While its Eclipse portfolio management solution has generally been well regarded, its Redtail CRM has suffered from declining satisfaction and market share in recent years, while its financial planning solution has been all but ignored by advisors in favor of third-party tools like eMoney and RightCapital with more in-depth planning capabilities. And in general, the sentiment around Orion seems to be that its drive to package more and more different technology tools together into one sprawling solution has weakened its overall product. In other words, the story of Orion (which is similar to other attempts at all-in-one solutions like Envestnet, or historical providers like Sungard's WealthStation) is that the entire solution has struggled to add up to the sum of its parts – much less to achieve the synergies that would make those platforms even more valuable when packaged together.

There are at least three good explanations for why building an all-in-one solution hasn't worked out all that well for the providers who have attempted it. One is that it when providers go about building all-in-one tools by acquiring separate existing solutions and combining them together – as Orion did with Redtail and Advizr and Envestnet with Tamarac and MoneyGuide – it limits the tools' ability to deeply integrate with each other since they're fundamentally built on separate code bases, which in turn undermines the value proposition of using multiple tools from one provider.

The second explanation is that different advisors have different needs and preferences for software, and so when one provider offers multiple solutions, it only really appeals to the advisors who like that particular provider's version of each type (while the remainder would prefer to shop around for the best standalone solution for their own needs).

And the third explanation is that when a provider deploys multiple solutions at once, each solution must compete with the others for institutional attention and resources from the parent company in order to build and improve their products. Which puts all-in-ones at a disadvantage against standalone alternatives in each category that are focused entirely on being best-in-class in that category alone. In other words, all-in-ones need to fight a war on three separate fronts against competition that can focus on a single area.

All of which makes it notable that Advyzon, which currently offers portfolio management and CRM tools for advisors, has announced its intention to add a new financial planning offering to the mix in 2026, which would make Advyzon the latest provider to leap into the portfolio management-CRM-financial planning all-in-one ring.

At first blush, it seems curious that Advyzon would venture into financial planning software right now, given the spotty history of other attempts to wed portfolio management and CRM with financial planning. Making things even more difficult is the current state of the financial planning software marketplace, which is dominated by three entrenched competitors in eMoney, RightCapital, and MoneyGuide while newer tools like Conquest and planning-adjacent Income Lab are also making a strong push to gain a foothold. And Advyzon's planned approach of starting with "modular" and goals-based planning tools (echoing MoneyGuide's approach, which tracks with Advyzon's hiring of former MoneyGuide executives to lead the effort) is even more head-scratching. Advisors in recent years have increasingly moved away from simpler and/or goals-based planning tools in favor of solutions that allow them to go deeper and have more complex, higher-value planning conversations (such that eMoney and RightCapital have already been taking market share from MoneyGuide's goals-based planning solution for years). At the very least, Advyzon will need to expand into deeper planning capabilities in order to compete with the likes of eMoney and RightCapital, simply because that's the direction of the current in the financial planning marketplace.

At the same time, however, there's at least some reason to be optimistic about an Advyzon financial planning solution. For one thing, rather than being acquired from a third party and bolted onto an existing chassis, Advyzon's solution is being built in-house, meaning it's more likely to be truly integrated with Advyzon's portfolio management and CRM offerings for a fully cohesive experience. Also, unlike the stories of Orion and Envestnet, Advyzon has taken its time in getting to this point: While the former went on nearly decade-long buying sprees in the 2010s through early 2020s which gave them little time to ingest and integrate their newly-acquired solutions before moving on to the next acquisition, Advyzon has been comparatively cautious in building out new solutions over its 13-year history. By taking its time and building thoughtfully, Advyzon may have a better chance at building a financial planning offering that meets its users' needs, and that can complement (rather than diluting) its existing offering.

And finally, perhaps the best reason to believe that Advyzon can successfully tackle financial planning software is its own track record of building technology that advisors like. Advyzon garnered the highest advisor satisfaction rating amongst major providers in five different categories of the 2025 Kitces Research on Advisor Technology – Portfolio Management, Performance Reporting, CRM, Client File Sharing, and Client Portal – making them a notable exception to the general rule that all-in-one providers tend to struggle to put all of their individual pieces together and find it difficult to remain competitive in multiple categories at once. In other words, Advyzon's history suggests that, if anyone can execute the trifecta of portfolio management, CRM, and financial planning, it might be them.

But even with its announced expansion into financial planning, Advyzon, with its leadership team's roots coming from Morningstar, will likely always lead with portfolio management as their core offering. In that vein, it's possible that Advyzon's financial planning solution will remain more of a "planning light" tool meant to serve as a streamlined option for investment-centric firms who want to offer some amount of planning. In which case, a tool that's deeply integrated with Advyzon's portfolio management and CRM offerings, and built on a modern software architecture, may do a better job of meeting those advisors' needs than both the comprehensive planning and "planning light" options on the market today. And so while it's by no means a guarantee that Advyzon will be able to buck the trend of all-in-one tools failing to add up to the sum of their parts, it shouldn't be entirely dismissed either, given the hard-to-ignore data around its highly rated portfolio management and CRM, at least for the core segment of investment-centric advisors it has built so successfully with already.

Elements Financial Planning Software Reportedly Foreclosed On By Creditors As A Big Bet On "Planning Made Easy" Fails To Pan Out

One of the toughest problems to solve in the financial advice industry is how to profitably deliver financial planning to clients who don't meet the asset and/or fee minimums imposed by most advisors. This is the case both with middle-income "mass affluent" clients as well as higher-income "High Earning, Not Rich Yet" (HENRY) clients, neither of whom are likely to have $1 million or more in investable assets but who may be unwilling or unable to afford paying several hundred dollars per month ongoing or several thousand dollars for a one-time financial plan. In either case, the math simply doesn't work out when using the standard financial process: At 10-15 hours spent per client per year (between meetings, prep, follow-up, service tasks, and reactive support to client financial planning requests), advisors generally top out at around 100 clients before their direct client work starts to crowd out the administrative, management, and other non-client work on their calendar. And given the need to likely hire at least client service associate and possibly a paraplanner or associate advisor at that client level, the advisor would need to earn, on a gross basis, at least $300,000 in client revenue in order to be able to pay themselves a reasonable amount for their work. Which effectively leaves a bare minimum annual fee of $3,000 per client, or more if the advisor wants to realize any profit after paying for staff, overhead, and their own compensation as the lead advisor.

With the math as it's laid out above, the solution to profitably serving lower-fee clients may seem obvious: Find a way to reduce the amount of time needed to serve each client, and advisors can serve more clients while charging lower fees without sacrificing profitability. And so many financial planning solutions have attempted to step into that void, from eMoney's Foundational Planning and MoneyGuide's MyBlocks to a plethora of standalone "Planning Light" options like Goalgami, Advisys, Savology, and Projection Lab, all with the aim of facilitating streamlined planning for less-complex clients.

Except in reality, such "planning light" tools have failed to gain much traction over the years, for a number of reasons. First, as it turns out, the issue with trying to work with lower-fee clients profitably isn't necessarily the time needed to serve each client per year – it's the cost (in dollars and time) of marketing to and acquiring those clients at the scale needed to reach a critical mass. And so a tool that tries to solve with operational efficiency what is fundamentally a client acquisition problem is bound to have problems finding a product-market fit.

But the other even more fundamental issue with "planning light" tools is that clients just don't tend to hire financial advisors for simple financial problems that can be solved by simple planning software (much of which can also be solved with available direct-to-consumer DIY software solutions). Instead, consumers hire advisors for their complex problems, which means that advisors need planning software that can handle complexity regardless of the client's age or financial situation. And as it turns out, advisors have flocked to solutions like RightCapital, which since its introduction has run away from simplicity and instead built out increasingly sophisticated planning capabilities to handle more complex client situations. Which suggests that ultimately, the real reason that "planning light" solutions have struggled is that they don't help advisors solve the problems that clients actually want to hire (and are willing to pay) them for.

In this context, it's notable that Elements, a tool that was originally introduced as a "planning light" solution for assessing and monitoring clients' financial health, with a particular focus on working with younger still-working clients who don't necessarily have significant assets to manage (yet), has reportedly been foreclosed on by its creditors and is facing, at the very least, a dramatic restructuring of its software and business model, and could very possibly end up shutting down for good.

Elements was originally introduced in 2020 when its founder, Reese Harper, took a system that he had successfully developed and implemented for his own RIA firm, Dentist Advisors, and packaged it to sell to other advisory firms. It was a relatively novel system at the time of breaking down a client's financial situation into individual "elements" consisting of key financial ratios like equity percentage, insured percentage, and savings rate, and monitoring the movement of those numbers over time for each client. The system also fed into a growing enthusiasm for "advice engagement" tools designed to help advisors demonstrate their value throughout the year by creating opportunities for client check-ins and targeted planning conversations. Elements raised a total of $9 million of seed funding in two separate rounds, and apparently also took on an unknown amount of debt to fuel its expansion.

But while Elements gained a small base of enthusiastic users, it had difficulty gaining the widespread adoption it needed to meet its (and its investors') ambitious growth goals. And as it tried to find traction, it pivoted to a number of marketing angles and value propositions over time: From its original planning-light function ("Holistic Financial Planning Made Easy") to an ongoing advice-engagement tool ("Repeatable, Ongoing Financial Planning Made Easy") to a lead generation and sales tool ("Demonstrate Your Value And Get New Clients") and finally to a tool for advisors to offer to employers as a wellness benefit for their employees ("Grow Faster By Offering Financial Wellness Programs To Employers"). Yet in the end, the problem remained – Elements' "simpler" tools were largely solving problems that clients don't pay advisors for – resulting in a lack of product-market fit. A problem that was likely amplified by Elements' $299/month sticker price – more than even full-featured planning software like RightCapital, to work with clients who were expected to pay less than what advisors earn for delivering a traditional financial plan. Such that Elements suffered a precipitous drop in both adoption and advisor satisfaction between the 2023 and 2025 versions of our Kitces Research on Advisor Technology as advisors struggled to figure out how to get a return on their investment into the software… and appears to have run out of cash before it could pivot to a model that aligned with how advisors deliver value to their clients.

Sadly, though, Elements did have a small but loyal base of advisors who did find value in the software (albeit not enough of them to keep the company a going concern), and at this point it isn't clear what the ultimate fate of Elements will be: It could be sold to a new owner who will keep the company running, or it may be shut down if a buyer can't be found. If there is a buyer for the company, the new owners will likely need to make significant changes to its business model and/or value proposition in order to keep going – e.g., to reduce the price, release a direct-to-consumer offering for customers who'd rather self-monitor their financial health, or possibly be folded into another planning tool – even, for example, a platform like RightCapital or Income Lab, for which Elements could serve as an advice engagement feature rather than a full-blown standalone tool.

But regardless of the final outcome, the story of Elements is indicative of the ongoing struggle for "planning light" to fit in as a software category. Elements financially failed because it took on equity and debt financing that required it to achieve massive revenue growth that didn't end up happening. But the reason that growth never materialized is that in the end, the solutions that Elements provides are just not the ones that most advisors successfully charge fees to deliver (and scale, and acquire clients for) – which greatly limits their appetite to buy software for such solutions. Which isn't to say that "no one" can serve the masses profitably, but just because a "system" works well for one advisory firm and its clients, that doesn't mean that other firms with unique client bases of their own will automatically line up to pay $299 each month to implement it themselves.

Thanks to Cody Garrett of Measure Twice Financial for details about Elements' marketing and value proposition shifts over the years.

Hamachi Debuts As An AI Investment Commentary Tool, But How Much Communication Will Advisors Entrust To AI?

Advisors spend a lot of time communicating with clients, much of which is spent on email. According to the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Productivity, senior advisors spend about 4.1 hours per week on client servicing tasks (including email correspondence with clients). Which actually understates the amount of advisory team time is spent on email and client service because, for advisors who have staff support in the form of associate or service advisors, paraplanners, and/or Client Service Associates, much of the client servicing work tends to be delegated to the support staff: According to the same study, service advisors spent 5.8 hours per week on client service, associate advisors spent 6.5 hours, and financial planning specialists such as paraplanners spent 13.5 hours per week. So it's conceivable that, between a lead advisor and their support staff, the total amount of team time spent on client service – again, much of which is comprised of email – amounts to 10–15 hours per week.

It can often feel like these hours spent on email are a wasted opportunity (especially so while in the midst of writing them). It can take long enough to compose pre-planned emails, such as standard follow-up emails after a meeting. But when a client emails with a question – e.g., to ask something about their investments, or to get clarity on a planning strategy, or to break a piece of news that might require an update to their financial plan – it can take an hour or more to research the question and compose a thoughtful response. Which might be enough to derail an afternoon's productivity and disrupt whatever tasks the advisor had been planning to work on.

This is the pain point that Hamachi, a new AI tool created by the former founders of Orion, Redtail, AdvisoryWorld, and Advizr (now Orion Planning) for drafting client emails in response to investment and other planning-related questions, aims to solve. At a base level, Hamachi is a Large Language Model (LLM) that trains on an RIA's investment knowledge – e.g., the factsheets and prospectuses of the funds it offers or recommends, investment commentary or white papers it produces, information on its investment strategy, and any other written information that the RIA wants to incorporate into its knowledge base. Hamachi then sets up AI agents for the RIA that can automatically draft personalized responses to client emails based on the LLM's training. When a client sends the advisor a question via email, the AI generates a response that is specific to that client and incorporates the RIA's investment knowledge and philosophy. Before the email is sent, Hamachi also runs it past a compliance checker to ensure it meets SEC and FINRA standards for client communication and doesn't disclose any sensitive client information.

Investment commentary, and specifically email responses to clients' investment-related questions, makes for an interesting use case for AI. LLMs can be useful for pulling information from disparate and unstructured sources into a single output: One of the most successful early use cases of AI has been notetaker tools like Jump or Zocks that distill a client conversation into a summary and follow-up email. And so as a response to an unplanned client email, it might be helpful to have an AI bot that can draw on the firm's own analytics and commentary to create a response in a fraction of the time it would take to manually research and compose a reply.

But at the same time, it's also worth asking whether the time spent on researching and emailing responses to client questions truly is 'wasted', to the extent that using an AI tool to automate the process away is a net benefit. When a client emails their advisor with a question, they're doing so because they want the advisor's own expertise on the matter – not that of an AI agent trained on fund prospectuses and factsheets. In other words, the advisor's expert perspective is what the client really values all along, and is why they're paying to be a client of the advisor. And even though the advisor may read all of those same prospectuses and factsheets to craft their response, there's a difference between that information being filtered through the advisor's own brain – which knows the client and their goals, hopes, and fears, and can use its own experience and reasoning powers to end up at a response to the client – and when the information is filtered through an AI bot, which at best can reasonably mimic the advisor's tone but can't possibly replicate the experience and expertise that a human advisor brings.

And so the big question about Hamachi – and other similar tools that have come onto the marketplace, such as BlackRock's new Auto Commentary tool – is whether advisors will respond to its marketing pitch of eliminating 'wasted' hours of client communication, or whether they view that time as a key part of the value that they bring to clients and therefore not something that they'd want to automate away. Because as Kitces Research has consistently shown, technology that aims to speed up, streamline, or automate core parts of the advisor's job of advising and communicating with clients doesn't tend to fare well, with the struggles to gain traction of tools in the "Planning Light" category of streamlined financial planning software serving as a case in point: Advisors on the whole are looking to go deeper into those areas with clients – that is, to become better, not faster planners – and to the extent that they do want to reduce hours on some parts of their job, it's the more tedious non-client-facing administrative work that they often look to automate (even though our Kitces Research has also shown that it's usually better to hire and delegate that work to team members rather than looking to technology to improve efficiency).

Ultimately, it seems likely that Hamachi will be a better fit at larger investment-centric RIAs and broker-dealers, or asset managers that have a field force of wholesalers to train on home-office talking points, where there are more challenges in supervising individual responses to client questions and Hamachi's ability to generate firm-approved commentary and perform in-line compliance review can reduce regulatory and liability exposure. In other words, it might be better to think about Hamachi and tools like it less as communications tools – since advisors who view communication as core to their value aren't likely to trust that job to an LLM – and more as compliance tools to ensure that the responses that the advisor does send are compliance-approved and don't violate any SEC or FINRA regulations. In any case, as AI tools come along that promise to automate (or at least, greatly expedite) an ever larger share of an advisor's communications with their clients, the question of which areas of communication the advisor should handle themselves, and which they should have an LLM do for them, will become increasingly relevant.

Jump Acquires Mobile Assistant As AI Meeting Notetakers Turn To Inorganic Growth

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when the Client Meeting Support section of the Kitces AdvisorTech Map wasn't dominated by AI meeting notetakers. Since long before the current AI boom, services like Mobile Assistant, CopyTalk, and SpeakWrite have provided meeting notes and transcriptions for advisors by employing human transcriptionists to manually type meeting notes from audio recordings of client meetings. Such tools, however, have been heavily disrupted since the rise of the current generation of AI-powered notetakers, which transcribe meetings through pure technology and can therefore provide a transcription nearly instantaneously rather than requiring a 24-hour-plus turnaround for a human transcriptionist (which helps advisors who like to get their meeting follow-ups like emails and tasks sorted out quickly in order to keep the momentum rolling on any recommendations or action items from the meeting). AI-powered tools can also use their technological chassis to transform the meetings they transcribe into summaries, tasks, follow-up emails, and even to push new information out to other planning tools like CRM and financial planning software. In short, technology has largely passed over the original generation of human-powered meeting transcription tools and made them mostly obsolescent, in the same way that the jet age ended the era of steamships and email replaced fax machines in most workplaces.

At the same time, however, the explosion in the number of AI-powered meeting notetakers has created its own set of challenges for the providers in that category. The rapid proliferation of providers has led to an overcrowded category with, at current count, 18 different AI notetakers on the Kitces AdvisorTech Map all competing for the same limited pool of users. And in an AdvisorTech landscape where most categories tend to be dominated by at most two to three category leaders, the likely outcome is that only a small handful of the current options will survive, while the remainder will need to either pivot to fulfill a different function or perhaps be folded into a larger platform in order to keep going.

In fact, this consolidation is already well underway: In the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, Jump had by far the highest adoption rate among standalone AI notetakers at 9.7%, with a handful of others (Zoom AI, Zocks, and Fathom) trailing behind it, and none of the remaining providers garnering more than 0.5%. And the pressure is getting even greater with larger platforms starting to build their own in-house AI notetakers (such as Wealthbox's planned AI meeting notetaker and Altruist's recently introduced Hazel) for which they can leverage their existing user bases for marketing and distribution. It's getting to the point, then, where standalone AI notetakers need to grow their user base by any means necessary to capture as much of the market as possible, or risk stagnation as the number of new advisors adopting AI meeting notes levels off and the cost of acquiring users from other solutions starts to skyrocket.

At the intersection of these two storylines is the news this month that the AI meeting notetaker Jump has acquired Mobile Assistant, which was one of the original human-powered meeting transcription services.

From a technology standpoint, there's little need for an AI notetaker like Jump to acquire a service employing human transcriptionists, and indeed Jump's FAQ about the acquisition makes it clear that Mobile Assistant itself will cease operations on November 20. Instead, the acquisition is clearly all about acquiring Mobile Assistant's existing user base and distribution channels: Current Mobile Assistant users won't automatically be transitioned to Jump, but according to the FAQ they will receive credits towards a Jump subscription based on the amount of time left on their existing Mobile Assistant contract.

In other words, Jump is acquiring and shutting down Mobile Assistant with the idea that Mobile Assistant's users, needing a new meeting transcription tool, will move to an AI-powered solution, and that, with a financial nudge of a subscription credit, those users will choose Jump. It's likely that the acquisition was based in the reality that Mobile Assistant's future was already highly uncertain, that many of its users had likely already left or were planning to move to AI-based tools, and that building out its own capabilities to become an AI notetaker itself would have made Mobile Assistant simply one more entrant in an already overcrowded marketplace. From that perspective, it was sensible to sell Mobile Assistant while there were still users left for Jump to market to.

For Jump, acquiring a competitor was the logical next step for building on its already category-leading market share, something that it was positioned to do after raising $20 million in venture capital funding earlier this year. As the competition in the AI notetaker space has only increased since then, the cost of acquiring new users organically has grown in turn – to the extent that paying for the opportunity to market to Mobile Assistant's users, and to temporarily discount subscriptions of those who choose to switch over in hopes that they'll stick around for the long term, was likely to have a better return than investing more into traditional channels like ads and conference sponsorships. Which raises the question of whether Jump will go on to target other human transcription services like Copytalk or SpeakWrite, or even one of the smaller AI notetakers like FinMate AI or Mili, as a way to deploy its capital to acquire new users in chunks rather than fighting with 17 other tools for each incremental new advisor's business.

The bottom line is that it's clear that the AI notetaker landscape for financial advisors has shifted from a phase of rapid growth and introduction of new tools to one where the market leaders have largely been decided and are now focused on consolidating their positions. Which means we can soon expect to see a wave of recent entrants into the AI notetaker category begin to pivot in new directions, such as expanding their agentic AI capabilities or shifting focus to marketing, compliance, or proposal generation capabilities – otherwise, we may see them instead as the next targets for acquisition by Jump or other platforms that want to offer an AI notetaker (or at the very least, want a base of notetaker users to market to).

Dispatch Raises $18M For AI-Driven RIA "Data Orchestration" As A Lower-Cost Alternative To Data Warehousing

A persistent challenge for advisors who use multiple pieces of technology (which is almost every advisor) is how to make sure that the data living in one tool is consistent with the data in all the other tools. Nobody wants to enter or update data manually once in the CRM, once in the portfolio management software, once in the financial planning software, and again in every other tool that the advisor uses. Aside from the time suck of entering the same data into a half-dozen or more different systems, the chances of information being misentered somewhere or missed altogether increase exponentially the more systems need to be updated manually for every addition or change of client data.

Advisory firms have traditionally had two options for solving the challenge of syncing data across technology tools. First, they could rely on the integration capabilities of the tools they use, many of which employ APIs to send data to and from other tools. The problem with this approach is that integration capabilities can be wildly inconsistent across different software providers. Some may offer two-way syncing (i.e., the software can push updates out to different tools, as well as receive updates from those tools, so that data updated in either location will be synced everywhere), while others can only sync in one direction. Some allow advisors to view or update data in other platforms, while others are view-only. Some have a wide list of integration partners, while others only integrate well with a small handful of others. The point being that advisors relying on point-to-point integration often need to decide between the tools that function best for them and their clients, or those that integrate well with their other tools – because all too often, those aren't one and the same.

The other option for advisors is to centralize their data from all tools in one single "data warehouse" under their own roof, from providers like Skience, AppCrown, or Milemarker, which pulls in data from all of the advisor's tools, standardizes it, and stores it internally, pushing out updates so all the advisor's software is in sync with the centralized data hub. While this option can help ensure that data is consistent across platforms while allowing the advisor to use the technology of their choice, the drawback is that it's much more expensive to use and maintain than point-to-point integration. As such, data warehousing is employed mostly by bigger advisory firms that have the resources to build their own technology atop the data, since it really only makes sense for a firm to 'own' its data in a centralized warehouse if it plans to do something with that data besides sending it back out to other third party tools.

In other words, both of the usual options for RIAs to manage their data come with significant drawbacks, and choosing between the two often involves deciding which option has the least amount of downside.

Into this environment came Dispatch, which was founded as OneAdvisory in 2022 and rebranded to its current name early in 2024. Dispatch takes a third approach to syncing data across advisory systems, which it refers to as "Data Orchestration": Rather than centralizing and storing data in a single location before sending it out to the advisor's technology tools, Dispatch standardizes and streams data out to an advisor's technology tools without keeping it centralized in one place. The key difference being that while data warehousing only really makes sense for RIAs that plan to build their own technology on top of the data, Dispatch is made for those that plan to primarily use "off-the-shelf" third party software. Which ultimately makes for a much less expensive solution for unifying the advisory firm's data, when considering the cost of building and maintaining both the data warehouse for the client data to flow to as well as the in-house software that runs on top of that data.

In that context, the recent news from September that Dispatch has raised $18 million in Series A funding suggests that it has found some traction among RIAs that want to keep their data in sync across all of their technology but don't want to invest the resources in a data warehousing for an in-house solution.

From an advisory firm perspective, the existence of a tool like Dispatch significantly changes the value proposition of investing in in-house technology versus using off-the-shelf third-party solutions. For example, for an advisory firm looking for business intelligence dashboards for its advisory teams, it could be tempting to spend six figures to build them in-house if the firm already has a centralized data warehouse, instead of building out a dashboard in Salesforce for much less cost. Or for a firm looking to move its advisor compensation calculations out of Excel spreadsheets and onto a more streamlined software platform, it may decide to build its own custom version rather than pay a monthly license to a tool like AdvisorBOB that does exactly that, if the firm has already sunk the resources into its data warehouse. In other words, while data syncing between technology platforms is often the main use case that RIAs are trying to solve for when they invest in a data warehousing tool, that investment tends to subsequently open the door to more expensive investments into in-house technology to solve for other use cases that are in many cases solvable by much less expensive third party solutions. With Dispatch solving for just the data syncing use cases, without introducing the additional factor of now owning a massive client data lake, advisory firms may be less tempted to spend six-figure sums on problems that can really be solved for $50/month with an off-the-shelf solution.

At an industry level, the implication of more firms using tools like Dispatch is that there would be more of an opportunity for third party technology providers to sell to larger enterprise-scale RIAs that might have previously built their own in-house technology. Additionally, the ability to sync data through a tool like Dispatch that connects to everything means that third party providers may eventually need to focus less on providing endless point-to-point integrations with other third party tools (which grow exponentially in number the more new providers come on the marketplace), and instead be able to plug into a much smaller number of centralized hubs – subsequently allowing them to invest more in the technology itself.

Ultimately, while there will still be some firms that want to 'own' their own data, the emergence of Dispatch (and other solutions like BridgeFT's WealthTech API) makes it so that those who just want their data to be consistent across platforms – and don't have any actual need to own their data – have a solution that solves for only that. Because ultimately, advisory firms are not in the data business – they have no real way to monetize data directly since their revenue is entirely derived from client relationships, which gives them no direct advantage in "owning" their data rather than letting it live in the solutions they already use. And to the extent that they can use their data to improve their businesses, e.g., by better managing client relationships or tracking their business KPIs, they can do virtually all of that with off-the-shelf tools that don't require the data to be housed under one roof. And so now Dispatch can help to solve for unifying the data across those third-party providers at scale, without the need to spend on a custom solution for what is ultimately just a data syncing problem.

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In the meantime, we've rolled out a beta version of our new AdvisorTech Directory, along with making updates to the latest version of our Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map (produced in collaboration with Craig Iskowitz of Ezra Group)!

So what do you think? Does RightCapital's new OCR plan migration tool make it more tempting to switch planning software? Will Advyzon's planning software be able to live up to the high standards set by its portfolio management and CRM? Is it worth personally responding to client emails, or could that time be used more productively if the response were mostly automated? Let us know your thoughts by sharing in the comments below!