Welcome to the September 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 RightCapital has introduced RightExpress, a feature of its financial planning software that allows advisors to create narrower single-topic financial plans for prospective clients as a way to demonstrate their value without building a full comprehensive plan – which on the one hand could be an effective way for advisors to more efficiently show their value by focusing on the one or two topics that their prospects care about the most, but on the other hand could struggle (as similar ‘simplified’ planning tools have in the past) if it streamlines the planning so much that it loses its ability to demonstrate the advisor’s value.
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
Altruist has announced the launch of a new subscription model where clients can get increased cash rates, tax loss harvesting, and discounted model marketplace funds in exchange for a 12 bps per year fee – which while being a step towards a more transparent fee model for custody, doesn’t quite embrace a ‘pure’ fee-for-custody model that would avoid the opacity and unevenness of the traditional custodial revenue model
Tax planning platform TaxStatus has unveiled a new lead generation solution for enterprise firms, giving advisors access to a trove of tax information directly from the IRS to better understand prospective clients’ financial situation – though the question remains how many prospective clients will be comfortable sharing their IRS tax data with a financial advisor before they’ve even started working with them?
“All-In-One” digital marketing platform FMG Suite has been acquired by private equity firm GTCR, signaling that FMG Suite could use its fresh capital to continue its long stretch of growth by acquisition by snapping up smaller digital marketing platforms (even though it’s still figuring out how to integrate all its existing pieces in a way that satisfies its users)
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
AI-driven prospecting provider FINNY has announced several new tools to ease the process of identifying, qualifying, and contacting prospective clients – although it’s an open question as to how many advisors are really looking for a better prospecting experience, when most advisors are focused on getting to the point where they don’t need to do outbound prospecting to begin with?
As enterprise advisory firms that have grown and merged over the years have an increasing need to address their “technical debt”, an emerging use case of AI is in making meaningful efficiency improvements without the cost of rebuilding systems from scratch – although the persistence of the underlying technical issues means that AI might simply serve as a short-term patch for a longer-term problem
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!
*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.
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