Welcome to the April 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 of an emerging wave of price increases from long-term AdvisorTech vendors like Orion and InvestCloud, which the companies are positioning as a necessary response to the impact of inflation on their underlying costs (from data to staff) and in some cases simply a fix to legacy pricing agreements that were no longer economical… but advisors are criticizing as their PE firm owners simply trying to squeeze more revenue and profitability out of advisory firms (that, to be fair, have had their own lift in profitability from rising markets in 2023, such that software price increases will still have a minimum impact on their overall profitability).
From a broader perspective, though, the pricing changes come in the midst of an environment where a growing number of AdvisorTech providers are increasing prices, from new “upstart” vendors that have improved their capabilities to the point that they can raise fees, to existing vendors repricing to “current market rates”. Which is opening the door to a new wave of lower-priced vendors (e.g., Advyzon and Panoramix competing against Orion)… with the question of whether they, too, will someday raise their prices as they gain traction as well?
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- Startup Wealthfeed raises $2M of venture capital to launch a new digital prospecting tool that helps advisors find prospects in the midst of various “money-in-motion” events who, in theory, would be receptive to a prospective financial advisor reaching out.
- SmartAsset launches an Advisor Marketing Platform to help advisors buying SmartAsset leads to automate the follow-up and nurture of those leads, from automated calls and text messaging to nurture emails, in an effort to lift lead quality and conversion rate.
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- Orion has rolled out a new Estate Visualizer tool as an extension of its Orion Planning tools, but it’s not clear if Orion Planning users will want to go that deep into estate planning just to reach next generation clients that they still might not be a good fit to serve.
- Vanilla announced a new Scenarios tool to facilitate advisors working with ultra-HNW clients that need to model various four-letter estate planning strategies (e.g., GRATs, SLATs, CRUTs, and ILITs) to show the impact of the advisor’s advice (at least for those clients who still have Federal estate tax exposure).
- Behavioral-finance consulting firm Shaping Wealth is developing a new AI conversational agent, dubbed Lydia, whose purpose is not to replace financial advisors in tough behavioral conversations with clients, but instead to replace (or at least, simulate) clients as a way for financal advisors to practice and train in handling difficult client conversations.
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!
