As more advisors recognize the value of holistic planning in better service and, perhaps most importantly, stronger client relationships, the so-called 'family office experience' has become the industry's new white whale.
In recognition of advisors' desire to provide a more comprehensive service, the wealth planning platform Wealth.com launched its new 'Family Office Suite' on Friday. It is supposedly tailored to the needs of firms serving high net worth and ultra high net worth clients.
According to Wealth.com co-founder and CPO Danny Lohrfink, “Among high-net-worth individuals, there is an inherent expectation that they receive family office-level care. This means addressing the entirety of the wealth picture, which includes estate planning.”
Perhaps the most obvious of these needs is the ability to take the various (and, to a layperson, not immediately recognizable as important) topics that make up an estate plan and present them in a way that helps the client to understand what he is trying to achieve and how he intends to do it.
Part of that is making sure the end product the advisor is presenting to the client is engaging and comprehensive (the latter is no small feat when you're dealing with some of the abstract concepts in an estate plan).
Features like Heritage Map, Legacy Navigator, EstateFlow and Irrevocable Trust One-Pagers aim to help advisors demystify and bring to life the nuances of estate planning such as sub-trust distribution schemes, federal estate tax implications and state, generation transfer tax exemption and non-exempt trust breakdowns. Additionally, for larger estates, Family Office Suite's estate tax calculators and scenario analysis capabilities offer advisors the ability to quantify tax implications and identify tax optimization opportunities.
However, Lohrfink emphasizes that what happens behind the scenes to create that “beautiful” delivery is just as, if not more, valuable than the product itself.
“If you think about what it takes to deliver to high net worth clients, there are three basic stages: 1) data collection; 2) data structuring; and 3) taking those data points and formatting them into an attractive customer proposition,” said Lohrfink. “Other firms focus too much on step three; that's not enough for us. We appreciate that the first two steps are the that take up most of a counselor's time.”
That's where Wealth.com's proprietary Ester AI helps simplify data collection by instantly extracting and storing key information from client planning documents.
“You upload client documents and extracts to Ester and instantly feed relevant information into final reports and client deliverables,” said Lohrfink. “What used to take weeks now takes minutes.”
It's important to note that many (though not all) of these capabilities already exist separately within the Wealth.com platform. The Family Office Suite is the “connective tissue,” according to Lohrfink, that allows them to work better together to better serve the HNW clientele while ensuring scalability.
Speaking of scalability, Family Office Suite is only intended for larger enterprise level users. Access to it opens on a minimum of 50 advisor licenses and for existing enterprise users, an additional enterprise license fee will be required.
“This is Wealth.com putting our flag on the ground,” said Lohrfink. “We officially have no net worth ceiling or floor and can help advisors serve any level of client.”