Articles About Financial Advisor Technology & FinTech

Welcome to the June 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 FinmateAI has announced a new integration with PreciseFP, which will allow financial planning data that's collected in advisory meetings (like balance sheet, cash flow, and savings information) to be pushed out to PreciseFP, and from there be sent on to financial planning software like eMoney and RightCapital (and specialized planning tools like Income Lab and Holistiplan) via PreciseFP's existing integrations – which represents one of the first steps by an AI meeting note tool to integrate with advisor technology outside of CRM and email platforms, and raises the question of whether more meeting note providers will follow suit (or build their own direct integrations to financial planning software rather than doing so indirectly through PreciseFP)?

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

• AdvicePay, a provider of client billing solutions for flat-fee advisors, has acquired AdvisorBOB, which helps RIAs efficiently calculate and facilitate payouts to their advisors, giving AdvicePay a solution that covers the entire client revenue cycle (from the time the client is billed until the fee is split and paid out to the advisor and RIA) and also covers a larger segment of the RIA market (since while AdvicePay only covers flat-fee billing, AdvisorBOB can handle payouts for both flat-fee and AUM models)
• Betterment has acquired Rowboat Advisors, a direct indexing and tax optimization technology provider, as part of a broader push to serve higher-net-worth clients of financial advisors through more flexibility and tax-aware portfolio management features – although the question going forward is whether advisors will really want to bring their HNW clients to Betterment given its reputation as a platform best suited for less-complex clients (or whether it's even a good idea for Betterment to diverge from its well established brand to compete with the likes of Addepar and Black Diamond)?
• Zoe Financial has announced a $29.6M Series B fundraising round, highlighting how Zoe has found an effective way to monetize its ability to generate leads not only by referring them to advisors (for which advisors pay 15%-35% of the revenue that they earn from the leads who sign on as clients) but also by serving smaller clients itself (who otherwise wouldn't be able to work with most of the firms on Zoe's platform) via its robo-TAMP platform

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

• CFP Board has announced the launch of a new CFP Practice Exam App, a bank of AI-generated (and human-reviewed) practice questions for candidates studying for the CFP exam – which is helpful as an exam prep tool to either supplement or serve as a less-expensive alternative to other comprehensive review programs, but also raises questions about whether CFP Board intends to start competing with third party exam prep providers (which could quash competition in that space since most candidates would likely opt for the "official" CFP Board version)
• Vanguard is testing out a new feature that allows advisors to generate client-friendly bullet-point summaries of Vanguard's quarterly market commentary, including the feature of giving advisors several dropdown options to choose from to tailor the summary the way they want it (e.g., client's financial acumen, age, and formal or conversational tone) – which is helpful for advisors who would rather not use an open-ended chatbot interface to generate client communication (which requires learning and practicing the prompts necessary to get the output that the user needs)

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!

*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.

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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!

*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.

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Welcome to the April 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 Wealthbox has announced it is planning to launch a new built-in AI meeting note tool that it seeks to integrate seamlessly with its existing CRM solution – which serves as a prominent warning for the many standalone AI meeting note tools like Jump and Zocks that have launched over the last few years about the threat they face from existing AdvisorTech providers, since although the standalone tools' existing users may be happy where they are, Wealthbox's new solution could attract a significant amount of the new users who are either adopting AI meeting notes for the first time or upgrading from a non-advisor-specific solution like Fathom, eating into the standalone tools' future growth rates and making it hard for them (and their VC investors) to realize a substantial return on their heavy investment into the category.

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

• All-in-one platform Advisor360 has announced the launch of a new standalone CRM designed specifically for independent RIAs as it attempts to make more inroads into the RIA channel – which raises the question of what other parts of its platform it might need to modify to better suit the needs of RIAs, when most of it was built to cater to its roots in the insurance and broker-dealer channels?
• Advisor workflow support solution Hubly has been acquired by Docupace, which suggests that Hubly might have struggled to gain a critical mass of users as a solution to help solve the shortcomings of advisor CRM systems' workflow capabilities – especially given that the price of Hubly was often as much or more expensive than the CRM platforms themselves, which may have been simply too much to expect advisors to pay compared to the magnitude of the problem it solves
• TaxStatus, a provider that had previously served as a service layer to automatically pull clients' IRS tax data either for monitoring by the advisor or to send to tax planning software like Holistiplan, has been steadily moving towards becoming a full-featured tax planning solution itself, as demonstrated by the release of its new Financial Baseline Reports that mirrors other platforms' tax snapshots to serve as a high-level overview of the client's tax situation as a jumping-off point for deeper tax planning conversations

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

• A new data visualization tool, Exhibit A, has launched with the goal of helping advisors add custom-branded investment visuals to their client proposals and marketing materials, rather than the all-too-common practice of pasting in images from third-party sources that don't serve to burnish the advisor's expertise and brand
• Alaris, a sell-side M&A consulting firm, has launched a new technology tool that helps sellers of RIA firms to narrow down from what could be dozens of potential buyers by algorithmically ranking them by the quality of their potential fit (rather than simply by choosing between the highest bidders, which can present pitfalls if the firms don't ultimately mesh together well)

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 [email protected]!

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Welcome to the March 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 Morningstar Office will be shutting down in early 2026 as a part of Morningstar's ongoing effort to refocus on its core investment data and analytics business – forcing advisors currently using the tool to switch (which might be a net positive for many of those advisors who have long complained about Morningstar's lack of investment into Office but have avoided making a change due to the arduous process of switching to another platform). And while Black Diamond has cut a deal with Morningstar to be the 'default' option for Office advisors to move to, a host of other portfolio management platforms are offering their own incentives as well, leaving Morningstar Office advisors with an opportunity to evaluate a large and crowded landscape of options to find the platform that will work best for them (so they don't have to endure another platform that they're unhappy with simply because of the high cost of switching)

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

• All-in-one portfolio management platform CircleBlack has acquired AssetBook, which was one of the few remaining standalone performance reporting tools on the market, in a move that was likely more about gaining AssetBook's client base of small- and mid-size advisory firms than it was about acquiring new technology (given that CircleBlack already has a performance reporting solution on its existing platform) - which suggests that perhaps we've reached a saturation point in the portfolio management technology space where the most cost-effective way to get new clients is to acquire competing solutions, and perhaps heralds a forthcoming wave of consolidation in the crowded portfolio management category?
• Advisor-focused AI meeting note solution Jump has completed a $20 million funding round, which reinforces its status as the emerging market leader in the crowded AI meeting note category – a status that may only increase from here if AI meeting notes, like most established AdvisorTech categories, evolves into a "winner-take-all" market where the top 1-2 solutions gain the vast majority of market share (with the caveat that Jump still faces significant competition from free or less expensive general-purpose AI meeting note tools like Zoom and Fathom that could hinder its ability to fully dominate the category)
• Archive Intel, an AI-focused communications archiving and monitoring provider, has announced a $1.5 million funding round, highlighting the increasing need for solutions that can archive a wider range of client communications, including not just email and social media but also "off-channel" communications like SMS text and messaging apps like WhatsApp – raising the question of how many firms will be open to archiving those channels with access to a platform that can do so, rather than simply banning employees from using them altogether?

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

• Datalign Advisory, a data-driven advisor lead generation platform, has raised $5 million, with the announcement underscoring the reality that despite the many complaints from advisors about the cost and quality of paid lead generation services, the demand for those services is still such that they can raise capital and increase their prices (as long as they can generate a reliable stream of prospective clients for the advisor to meet with)
• Estate planning and document preparation platforms Wealth.com and Vanilla each announced the launch of new capabilities for automatically summarizing and visualizing estate planning documents like wills and trusts, with the aim of streamlining the process of reviewing and updating documents – which, while addressing a common pain point for advisors in reading and summarizing estate planning documents, raises the question of how much advisors will trust AI tools to correctly interpret all but the simplest estate planning documents (which take the least amount of time for an advisor to do themselves, meaning the actual time savings of an automated tool might not really be all that great?)

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 [email protected]!

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Welcome to the February 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 FP Alpha has released its tax return extraction and analysis module as a standalone product, while RightCapital has separately launched its own tax return extraction tool bundled within its platform – with both announcements coming on the heels of Holistiplan implementing a significant price increase, suggesting that Holistiplan's decision to raise prices may have inadvertently opened the door for more competition within the tax planning technology category (which it had previously had all to itself)

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

• Move Health, a service that provides guidance on and implementation of health insurance solutions for financial advisors, has acquired Caribou, a software tool for analyzing and comparing different health insurance plans, creating a single end-to-end platform for healthcare cost analysis and implementation of health insurance – although the question remains how deeply advisors are willing to get into health insurance implementation with their clients when they tend not to be health insurance experts themselves
• Advisor Credit Exchange, a marketplace solution connecting advisors with lending solutions for their clients, announced that it plans to shut down – which raises questions for Envestnet (which had an equity stake in Advisor Credit Exchange and featured it on its platform) and if it will further step back from its "marketplace of marketplaces" model as it pertains to non-investment-based solutions under its new ownership; as well as about the outlook for other lending marketplace platforms and whether liability management is too far outside of advisors' core offerings to gain much traction?
• Wealthtender, a lead generation and advisor review gathering platform, has launched a new Testimonial Marketing Studio to help advisors better promote their client testimonials in social media and email campaigns, reflecting the reality that advisors have generally been slow to adopt testimonial marketing since the release of the SEC's Marketing Rule in 2021, and that platforms like Wealthtender have needed to offer tools like Testimonial Marketing Studio to encourage advisors to solicit and promote client reviews in order for those platforms to gain traction

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

• Mili, one of the most recent AI-powered notetaking solutions on the AdvisorTech Map, has announced a recent $2M seed funding round – although Mili's choice to position itself as the "most secure" notetaker reflects the reality that technology solutions often misunderstand what advisors want to see highlighted in technology (e.g., they expect all the different AI notetaker solutions to have a baseline level of data security, but beyond that they care about which one does the best job of solving their problems than they do about which one is the "most" secure)
• Advisor360 has announced its acquisition of the AI meeting notes platform Parrot AI, representing the first existing advisor technology platform to integrate AI notetaking into its own solution – which could be an ominous sign for the many standalone AI notetaker tools on the market, because if the trend to bring AI notetaking in-house picks up speed among existing advisor platforms, the market for standalone tools could shrink very quickly if advisors decide they would rather have AI notetaking as a feature within the tools they already use

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 [email protected]!

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Welcome to the January 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 Orion, the "all-in-one" advisor technology platform, has acquired Summit Wealth Systems (and its founder Reed Colley, who previously built performance reporting platform Black Diamond), a client portal and data hub for unifying key client information from multiple sources into a single client-friendly portal – which suggests that Orion feels the need to better integrate together the numerous components it has built an acquired over the years into a more unified client and advisor experience, but also raises the question of how much impact it will have on Orion's bottom line when individual advisors (who have their own struggles in pulling together data from disparate technology tools) weren't exactly flocking to portals like Summit Wealth to begin with?

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

• SEI has acquired LifeYield, which is designed to facilitate tax-efficient management of multiple accounts across an entire household, to bundle into its RIA custodial platform and investment management technology – underscoring the idea that tax-savvy portfolio management is increasingly being seen as table stakes for advisors who manage investments, rather than "just" a value-add they can use to differentiate themselves
• Range, a startup RIA with a subscription-style fee model and a technology platform that it built in-house, has raised $28 million in venture capital, highlighting how VC firms are still eager to fund firms with in-house technology based on its perceived ability to attract clients and serve them efficiently – although it remains to be seen whether Range's high-income target clientele will want to be served with primarily tech-based solutions, and if so, whether they'll be willing to pay the level of fees that will justify the cost of acquiring and serving them to begin with?
• FINNY AI, an AI-powered prospecting tool, has raised $4.2 million as it builds out a solution that not only identifies and prioritizes prospects but also seeks to create automated personalized outreach and follow-up messages to prospective client, which could potentially increase the notoriously low response rates from cold outreach to prospects by enough to easily justify the cost of the platform – at least until AI prospecting technology proliferates further and everyone is inundated with "personalized" messages, at which point it might become even harder to get a response from cold outreach

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

• Boosted.ai, an AI-powered "portfolio assistant", has raised $15 million as it seeks to expand its market reach from primarily institutional investors and hedge funds into financial advisors – and while Boosted.ai's ability to generate personalized market and performance commentary might be valuable from a client communications standpoint, it will need to prove that it can create better commentary and/or work more efficiently than free tools like ChatGPT in order to overcome advisors' preference to use the least costly solution
• Sandbox Wealth, a startup provider of banking solutions to clients of financial advisors, has raised $1.25 million of pre-seed funding – and while Sandbox's core feature of providing technology-enabled solutions like high-yielding cash accounts and lending to high-net-worth households taps into a real desire from advisors seeking to expand their menu of services and solutions for clients, their inclusion of an additional client portal feature means they may be inadvertently also be competing with other portal solutions like Addepar, which could create challenges in convincing advisors to adopt the technology and shoulder the cost of switching from their existing portal

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 [email protected]!

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Welcome to the December 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 the retail brokerage platform Robinhood is acquiring RIA custodian TradePMR, which appears to be less about Robinhood wanting to compete with the likes of Schwab and Fidelity in the custodial space and more about keeping the assets of its wealthier customers "on-platform" by giving them referrals to advisors who will keep them at Robinhood rather than pulling them to a different custodian (while simultaneously benefiting from the lucrative referral fees that advisors may be willing to pay for referrals from Robinhood's next-generation client base)

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

• All-in-one platform Advyzon has announced the upcoming launch of Auria, a family office platform targeted at advisors of ultra-high-net-worth clients, which serves to highlight how the gap between technology needs for UHNW and non-UHNW clients is shrinking as alternative assets like hedge funds and private equity become more available to 'mere' mass affluent and HNW clients, which might create more competition for platforms like Addepar and Black Diamond that have made their names working with an exclusively UHNW base
• Paid lead generation service SmartAsset has announced the launch of two new prospecting tools, further expanding on its recent rollout of solutions that help advisors with nurturing and marketing to the leads it provides (which serves to highlight the hunger for solutions that can help advisors across the entire marketing funnel, not just on the top end with lead generation or the bottom with marketing and sales)
• Zeplyn, an AI-powered meeting note tool, has raised $3 million in seed capital as it seeks to differentiate itself as the "most accurate" AI note taking solution rather than on the breadth of different functions it can perform, which makes sense in an era when advisors are increasingly wanting "best-of-breed" solutions over "all-in-one", though it will still be difficult to stand out as a relatively new provider in what has become a very crowded market for AI meeting notes

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

• Advisor CRM has launched as the latest of what has become an increasing number of CRM tools that seek to improve on the functionality of traditional CRM tools by including more workflow capabilities, automated portfolio management, billing, and other functions, which speaks to the relative dissatisfaction advisors have with the existing options for CRM solutions (although it's still not certain what the 'right' amount of capabilities is that advisors will still be willing to pay for)
• Ezra Group, which has been using its proprietary Integration Score to objectively rate the integration capabilities of over 500 AdvisorTech solutions, has announced a new portal where technology providers can enter their own information to update their scores, allowing for faster updating as technologies' capabilities change, and ideally creating more transparency into solutions' actual integration capabilities (and more incentive for providers to improve the depth and usefulness of their integrations with other technology)

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 [email protected]!

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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 [email protected]!

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Welcome to the October 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 digital estate planning platform Wealth.com has raised a whopping $30 million in Series A funding, following on the heels of Vanilla's follow-on $20M capital round just a few months ago – which on the one hand reflects the anticipated enthusiasm for solutions that can help advisors efficiently solve their clients' needs for estate document preparation (beyond 'just' estate planning software), but on the other hand raises questions about how big the market opportunity really is for advisor-driven estate document preparation, given that unlike tax planning tools (which have an annual cadence for filing tax returns with the IRS) most clients may only update their estate documents only 10–15 years (often amounting to no more than 2–4 clients per advisor per year).

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

• VRGL has announced a new venture capital funding round to continue building out its capabilities to extract data from prospects' investment statements and automatically generate investment proposals – but while VRGL has proven popular among some advisors for its ability to save time spent poring over paper statements, it remains to be seen how many will want to use (and pay for) it as a standalone investment analytics and proposal tool versus 'just' as a tool for extracting investment data (to send to the advisor's preferred analytics platform)
• Cashmere, an AI-driven prospecting tool aiming to help advisors "identify, enrich and engage" with prospective clients, has announced a $3.6 million seed capital funding round – although, as multiple new solutions have cropped up in recent years that also seek to help advisors catch money-in-movement events, fill in gaps in data on prospects, and match advisors with their best-fitting prospects, the question remains how many different solutions the market for prospecting tools can support (especially given that most firms tend to move away from prospecting as soon as it's feasible to generate most of their new growth from referrals)
• Fidelity has announced that it plans to effectively cut off access to 401(k) plans on its platform by Pontera and other technology that uses client credentials to view and trade in held-away accounts – which while putatively being about protecting client data and privacy, also serves to highlight Fidelity's conflicts as both a 401(k) provider and custodian (since now in order to manage within Fidelity-held 401(k) accounts, advisors will need to have custody assets on Fidelity as well), and raises questions about how Pontera can resolve its disputes with both state regulators and now plan recordkeepers to continue allowing advisors to manage clients' 401(k) assets on its platform

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

• Charles Schwab has announced that it plans to shut down its Institutional Intelligent Portfolios "robo-advisor for advisors" in the coming year, further accentuating the decline of the B2B robo-advisor space in recent years as the costs of attracting next-generation clients to sign up have continued to outpace the growth of new assets, to the extent that only a small handful of the original crop of B2B robo-advisors from the mid-2010s still exist today

• Retirement planning platform Income Lab has announced the launch of a new Annuity Planning tool aiming to model the impact of a wide range of different types of annuities on a client's overall retirement picture – which is arguably the first tool capable of subjecting many annuities to a robust and objective analysis (rather than the optimistic projections included in annuity sales literature), and may help to settle some debates over how certain annuities might perform in a range of different scenarios

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 [email protected]!

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