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 TechNews@kitces.com!
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