For two days this week, the wealthtech world was glued to their computer screens—even more than usual—watching and participating in the fifth annual AdviceTech.live conference.
The event's online audience of more than 1,000 attendees experienced 20 live, 10-minute demonstrations from advisory technology providers, several speaker and panel sessions, and could visit the virtual booths of 21 sponsors – all at no cost.
Obviously, it was too much for one intrepid tech columnist to absorb (and write), but here are some of the highlights.
Lydia
Adam Holt, founder and CEO of Asset-Map, stated that the theme of this year's conference was “Elevate People”.
And in that respect the first guest was one of my favorites. Brian Portnoya leader in behavioral finance and author of several popular books on the subject, who discussed several things, but what caught my attention the most was his firm Shaping Wealth's partnership with Alai Studios.
Shaping Wealth provides a learning and training platform for the wealth industry that aims to empower “human first financial instruction”. Alai specializes in building artificial intelligence technology.
The partnership combines various AI capabilities with behavioral finance content and coaching.
Portnoy had mentioned the name Lidia to me. As an archeology buff, I suspected it was referring to the ancient Lydian Empire that existed in what is now modern Turkey. Coins from Lydia are some of the oldest ever found, some dating from around the 7th century BC and made of gold and silver alloys.
“With Lydia, we're creating a kind of co-pilot experience that will roll out in the coming months — AI that's building customer empathy into a big language model,” Portnoy said.
“We want to amplify human brilliance … we want to create a partner in your daily workflow. “Let me run my agendas through you for my clients' upcoming meetings,” he said.
The intelligent chatbot will help consulting firms with meeting preparation, agenda setting, role-playing scenarios and real-time guidance, or so the plan goes. Counselors can visit Meetlydia.ai to find out what it can do and sign up for access.
Holistiplan
Torie Happe, head of partnerships at popular tax planning platform provider Holistiplan — which she reports is now used by 7,600 firms and has 34,000 users — talked about some new features during the company's demo.
Among them was Tax Report 2.0, which builds on the platform's flagship tax report with a more efficient workflow and improved visualizations.
A multi-year Roth conversion feature has been added and an estate planning one has been introduced, which remains in beta.
VRGL
Phil Crist, SVP, head of corporate revenue and strategy at VRGL, introduced the company's new acquisition workflow that includes a customizable 15-question risk tolerance questionnaire.
With it, advisors can tailor questionnaires closer to their organization's risk frameworks and further customize the assessment process to better match an advisory firm's approach to risk and investment allocation.
VRGL also introduced a tax transition feature designed to automate and optimize the structuring of a custom portfolio recommendation – while adhering to constraints on tax budgets.
blue leaf
Blueleaf, which sells a comprehensive wealth management platform that includes account aggregation, performance reporting, billing and rebalancing, announced that it has just gone live with an integration with custody and clearing provider Altruist.
“No (paper) forms, an instant online-only connection, and we already have 28 (advisory) firms live on it,” said Blueleaf founder and CEO John Prendergast.
Blueleaf won a 2023 Wealth Management.com Industry Award for its bundle as a service with direct client support.
EstateGuru
Chris Hall, head of business development and strategic partnerships for Estate Guru, which he said has been in business for 30 years, called it “the only attorney-embedded software” for estate planning.
“Think of us as a document engine; a lot of advisers think of us as the conduit for creating property documents,” he said before discussing the new concierge estate planning service Guru+, in which the adviser has “flexible involvement”.
“Instead of sending a client to an estate lawyer, send them to Estate Guru, and they'll meet with the client, answer their questions, and you'll be kept informed and may even get meeting and get it for a fraction of the regular cost,” Hall said.
UPTIQ
“Advisors lack visibility into their clients' credit, and finding lenders or loans (for clients) is usually labor-intensive … (and at the end of) a few weeks underwriting can blow up very easily,” said Jared Ingersoll, regional manager of sales at UPTIQ.
The UPTIQ platform can send an invitation for a soft loan request from within the interface, which will not affect the customer's credit. The app can then look at the customer's existing loans and offer refinancing options and opportunities, helping the advisor become the trusted source for lending.
The platform's lending marketplace features a network of over 60 lenders that support every type of financing, from luxury cars to boats or aircraft to commercial loans for customers who own their own businesses. He also introduced Samuel, the company's AI chatbot, which can now answer very specific questions.
“Expanding Samuel's role is a big part of our roadmap,” he said.
Asset-Map
“67% of work hours in the wealth management industry will be impacted by AI,” helping advisors turn their time around so they can elevate the human experience of their practices, Holt said.
Holt covered a lot of ground with what's new in Asset-Map, from the ability to display whether a client's “legal instruments” (wills, POAs, guardianships, living wills, buy-sell agreements) are complete and available up to “actionable insights” (being able to automatically and visually see portfolio allocation or other metrics related to your firm). I found the “beneficiary map” more interesting.
One of the most common failures in estate planning — after the lack of proper legal documents — is incomplete or haphazard selection of beneficiary designations, he said.
“There's often a lot of confusion about who gets what and making that match the client's intent… (with the beneficiary map) you can see a picture of what's assigned to the beneficiary and what's not,” Holt said.
end
It was a busy week and I missed demos from several other attendees, incl Estately, Pulse 360AND RISRwhich WealthManagement.com has previously written about.
Also, awards were given out to companies that participated in the demo based on audience voting: Pulse360 won the Community Impact Award, Holistiplan won the Industry Disruptor category, and Blueleaf won the Rising Tech Star.
As part of the conference, event sponsors also raised $37,500 in donations for this year's charitable partner, Philly Financial Literacy Week, Inc. During the last five years, the event has provided more than $140,000 to five different nonprofits.
Finally, I would be remiss not to point out that Asset-Map addressed the minor criticisms I voiced after covering past eventsadding the ability to communicate with event hosts (and the rest of the audience) via a real-time chat sidebar.
At several times during this year's event, the feature proved useful beyond audience members posting comments or asking questions, providing real-time feedback to speakers.
According to Asset-Map, access to virtual exhibitor booths and 'replay' recordings of the sessions will remain available on the event website for several weeks for those who have registered.