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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