Executive Summary
With another strong year in the markets, most advisory firms are near or at record highs for their revenue, their numbers of clients, and the headcounts of their teams. Which is surprising to some, given that a decade ago, the emergence of so-called "robo-advisors" was supposed to displace human financial advisors and compress advisory fees. In reality, though, the robos struggled to gain traction, and the human financial advice business just continues to grow. To the point that now, ironically, the biggest emerging challenges for the profession are how best to leverage technology to further scale financial advice, and even with tech efficiencies, we may have an outright talent shortage as more and more advisory firms hit their client capacity wall and need to hire new advisor talent.
In a similar manner, the growth of Kitces.com over the past decade has led to capacity constraints, the need for an expanding team (which has already grown from 2 to 24 team members in under a decade!), and reinvestments into technology. And so we're excited to announce that, for 2025, our major company initiative will be a complete redesign and rebuild of our Members Section! Feedback from our Members has been clear that the navigation and user experience of our Members Section is one of the most challenging aspects of being a Member, and we fully recognize that the technology we use to power the Members Section, which was once cutting-edge, is now quite dated. Which means over the next 12 months, we're going to rebuild it all from scratch, with a modern technology foundation that will allow us to better scale over the next decade. (And also make it easier for us to redesign the Nerd's Eye View blog side of the website as well, in 2026!)
In addition to rebuilding the platform that runs Kitces.com, we're also making several updates to our content offerings for both Nerd's Eye View blog Readers and advicers who have joined our Members Section. After several years, we've decided to wind down our current Office Hours programs (Software Showcases and Advisor Makeovers), though the archives of our prior events will remain available to Members. However, this shift will free up time for us to focus on initiatives that we believe can have even more reach and impact!
Building on the back of our popular Advisor Technology Map and Directory, in 2025, we'll also be developing a new Advisor Services Map to make it easier to find whatever consultants, coaches, outsourcing partners, or other solutions advicers may be seeking (and like our AdvisorTech Map, will be openly available to the entire advicer community). We've also rolled out a new private community specifically for Directors of Financial Planning (DFPs), who are increasingly becoming the lynchpins that drive planning excellence in advisory firms… which is so in alignment with our own Kitces mission that we wanted to start hosting a community for DFPs to further foster their success! And we continue to expand the types of CE we provide as well, including the ability for Canadian CFP certificants to earn CE credit from Kitces (effective immediately for 2025!), and we're aiming to offer CE for Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) designees by the second half of the year!
We're also further expanding our more 'deep-dive' educational programs. In the second half of 2024, we launched two new 6-hour MasterClasses – one on Optimizing Roth Conversions, and the other on Optimizing Tax-Efficient Withdrawals From Retirement Portfolios – and in 2025, we'll be developing new MasterClasses on best practices in how to conduct a Discovery Meeting and a Plan Presentation Meeting with clients (launching in mid-year and Q4, respectively). We're also bringing back our popular IAR Ethics CE Day; save the date for Thursday, August 28th, to get all 6 hours of IAR Ethics CE (and cross-qualify the 6 hours for every other type of CE, too!) in one fell swoop, and registration is already open now! And based on your requests, in 2025, we'll be offering a second "CE Intensive" Day, sometime in Q3, to cover the other 6 hours of required IAR CE (on "Products & Practice") in a one-day virtual live event format (and again, cross-applying for other CE types as well). As always, though, we remain committed to providing IAR CE (and all our other types of CE!) for all of our Kitces article and webinar content as well; these CE Intensives are simply meant for those who would prefer to 'binge' the content all at once in single-day live experiences!
In the meantime, our own Team of Nerds continues to expand. We are currently hiring for a Research Associate to support the ongoing growth of our Advisor Productivity, Marketing, Technology, and Wellbeing studies (so please forward along to anyone you know who might be interested!). And we recently hired several new team members as well, including Managing Editor Shannen Patel (as former Managing Editor Sydney Squires transitions to become a Senior Financial Planning Nerd writer for Kitces) and Manager of People & Culture Dora Ogar!
If you're wondering how you can get more involved with the Kitces team, you can also sign up for our separate Career Opportunities mailing list (via our Career Opportunities page) to be notified when new positions open up! And for those who don't want to join the team full-time but would simply like to 'Nerd Out' with us for a bit and share what they do or know with their fellow advicers, remember to check out our "How To Contribute" page to see how you can engage with the Kitces platform as a guest writer, presenter, or podcast guest!
And all of this remains focused on advancing our core mission – to "Make Financial Advicers Better, And More Successful" – through our four strategic pillars of supporting 'Nnovation of AdviorTech tools, delivering insightful Education, conducting original advicer Research, and facilitating the Development of financial advicer skills across the spectrum of experience and firm sizes (and yes… our organizational strategy does spell N-E-R-D☺). We look forward to continuing the journey with you in 2025 and beyond!
Rebuilding The Kitces Members Section For A Better Advicer Experience
In its original incarnation going back nearly 17 years, Kitces.com was first launched as the platform of The Kitces Report, a premium newsletter service on technical financial planning topics that was modeled after Bob Veres' popular Inside Information newsletter on practice management. It wasn't until 2015, nearly eight years later, when we shifted to delivering all of our written content for free via this Nerd's Eye View blog and rolled out our Kitces Members Section to provide CFP professionals with CE credit for all of the blog (and later also webinar) content that we were creating for the financial advicer community.
In its early days, though, our Members Section was still relatively simple. After financial advicers read an article on our site, they could click a button to access the CE quiz for that article, and once they passed the quiz, we reported the completed results to CFP Board on their behalf. It was all built on top of WordPress – the platform we used to build and host the blog itself – with a series of plug-ins from the WordPress developer community that we adapted to our needs for everything from Member management to quiz administration.
However, Kitces.com has expanded tremendously since then. We still offer CE credit for Nerd's Eye View blog articles, but it's not just CFP CE anymore; we cover a wide range of CE types, including the new IAR CE requirements for advisors working under an RIA, all the designations from The American College of Financial Services, the College for Financial Planning, and the Investments and Wealth Institute, along with CPE credits for CPAs and Enrolled Agents.
In addition, the scope of our content has expanded beyond Nerd's Eye View blog articles and our historical The Kitces Report white papers. We now offer two webinars every month, our deep-dive MasterClasses, various Practice Management resources, the ability to save articles from Nerd's Eye View and suggest topics that we should write about in the future, and more.
Over time, this has made our Members Section increasingly difficult for financial advicers to navigate and find what they're looking for amidst a growing level of clutter. (We're well aware that the screenshot above does not represent the best practices in UI design!) And candidly, it has made the Membrs Section increasingly difficult for us to maintain and scale as we've grown from barely 1,000 Members at launch to more than 18,000 today.
While we've been able to solve for what used to be timeout delays when we launched an especially popular webinar (that could crash the website for a few minutes when everyone tried to log in at once!), your own feedback to our annual surveys has made it clear that navigating the Members Section itself is now the worst part of being a Kitces Member. ☹
And so I'm excited to announce that for 2025, our main focus of the year will be a total rebuilding of our Members Section. We're not even going to try to keep adapting it from what it's been; this will be a total rebuild, from scratch, as a standalone application, allowing us to pay down our so-called 'technical debt' accrued over the years and provide an entirely new foundation that we can build on for the coming decade (as we built on our WordPress-based Members Section for the past decade!). In addition, we'll be updating to a new Learning Management System on the back end to administer all of our content delivery and required CE quizzes, and weaving it into the new Members Section application to facilitate a better CE reporting experience on behalf of Members.
In the end, our goal is not just to reduce the clutter in general. We're aiming to make it much easier to find the content you're looking for – whether you want to search by title for a particular program, by topic area (e.g., tax content or retirement content), by CE type ("find me all the IAR CE Ethics content that also qualifies for CPA and CFP CE!"), or by content type (e.g., articles versus webinars). We also have a big focus on making it easier to track and manage the status of your CE credit – eventually, the Members Section will show what's been reported and when it was filed, indicate whether it was accepted or had an error that you may need to fix, and provide an easy way to get CE certificates to validate what was completed and/or self-report where necessary.
Notably, though, the sheer scope of this project means our team will be spending the entirety of 2025 rebuilding nearly every element of our current Members Section and migrating all of the associated content. As a result, our current Members Section experience will, unfortunately, remain the experience for the bulk of 2025 as we rebuild. However, stay tuned around Q3 for the opportunity to be part of an initial pilot group for the new Members Section experience, and expect a broader beta phase in early Q4 (as we're very focused on making sure these updates and the new Members Section really is a positive experience and improvement over the current version!).
The Kitces Team will be spending the entirety of 2025 rebuilding its Members Section from scratch. Stay tuned in Q3 for the chance to be part of the new Members Section pilot, where you can share your feedback as we build!
Completing the back-end rebuilding of the Members Section in 2025 will also set the stage for a broader redesign of this Nerd's Eye View blog in 2026 as well. We're cognizant that the blog has also become a bit dated in its design (what seemed so fresh and modern in 2015 is not so much in 2025!) and has similarly become more complex to navigate and find what you're looking for amidst the sheer breadth of our content. So design, navigation, search functionality, and more will be on the table for improvement in 2026. But from a technical perspective, redesigning the front end of our website is actually quite difficult due to how much it's entangled with the Members Section on the back end; by separating them and rebuilding the Members Section application on a standalone basis in 2025, we'll be better positioned to both redesign the Nerd's Eye View blog and continue to iterate on the Members Section in 2026 and beyond!
Updating Our Kitces Content Offerings: More CE Types, Directors Of Financial Planning (DFP) Community, Advisor Services Map, And More!
While the rebuilding of our Members Section is a major company-wide project that will run for the entirety of 2025, it's not the only thing we're working on to continue to reinvest into the financial advicer community and our efforts to make financial advicers better and more successful.
Throughout the year, you'll see a number of other significant initiatives, some within our paid Members Section and others available to all via the Nerd's Eye View blog, being built and rolled out!
Expanded Types Of CE For Kitces Members: Canada CFP, AIF, And More!
One of the most popular aspects of our Kitces Members Section is that one piece of content can qualify for multiple types of CE at the same time. So you don't need one program to complete your CE requirements for the CFP marks, separately do another for your IAR CE, and then also wrap up yet another to get the credits for your CIMA certification; instead, one article, webinar, or other program completion on Kitces covers all of those CE types at once. In fact, one of our guiding principles is "Advicers should get as much credit – by quantity and type – as we can appropriately grant for each hour they spend with us." And ideally, we'll report that CE on your behalf directly to the accrediting organization (if they allow us to do so!).
In continuation of that effort, we're aiming to keep expanding the types of CE that we offer as credit when consuming Kitces content.
First, we're happy to announce that effective immediately for content completed in 2025, any of our CFP professional brethren in Canada who become Kitces Members will now be able to self-report the Kitces CE certificates we provide to Members to qualify toward their own ongoing CE requirements as Canada CFP certificants! As FP Canada has recognized that the sheer amount of cross-border planning that commonly occurs for CFP professionals in Canada, coupled with the many aspects of financial planning that are not country-specific (e.g., client psychology), means that even US-based CE can be valuable for Canadian financial planners… and will now grant CE credit accordingly!
We're also working on qualifying our Kitces content to be eligible for Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) continuing education credits for those who have gone through the popular Fi360 program. We're still in the midst of updating our systems to accommodate the program approval and CE reporting requirements to add another organization's CE, but we currently anticipate that AIF credits for our Kitces content will be available in the second half of the year. Stay tuned for further details!
In the meantime, we're also exploring how Kitces can become a provider of the new firm-required AML/CFT anti-money-laundering training that will be required for SEC-registered investment advisers beginning in 2026. And we also have other expanded-CE initiatives planned for the coming year (that we'll announce once they're ready!).
Effective immediately for 2025, Canadian CFP professionals can get their CFP CE credit through the Kitces Members Section! In addition, Kitces CE credit for the Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) designation through Fi360 is expected to be available in the second half of 2025!
Introducing Our Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community, Hosted By Kitces.com!
When I first started in financial planning nearly 25 years ago, I took what, at the time, was a rather 'unconventional' path… rather than trying to prospect for my own client base, I took on a role as Director of Financial Planning at one of the early wealth management RIAs founded in the 1990s to build a department that would create and deliver all the financial plans to the clients of the firm, so the founders could focus on business development and growing the firm. In the years that followed, I had the amazing opportunity to deliver hundreds and hundreds of financial plans, grow and train a wonderful team of financial planners… and struggle in total isolation because, for years, I never met a single person who had a job description similar to mine, as most firms were simply too small to be able to centralize financial planning the way ours had.
In the years since, though, with the ongoing shift to assets-under-management and other recurring-revenue business models, more and more advisory firms have grown their revenue to the point that they, too, can begin to hire Directors of Financial Planning to centralize advisor development and to plan construction, financial planning technology, and client experience. Which means there are now more and more Directors of Financial Planning… who are still largely isolated in their firms, as while larger advisory firms may have multiple financial advisors, there is still only ever one Director of the department.
And so in late 2024, we launched a pilot of our new Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community… created to provide a place for DFPs to share best practices and learn from one another about how best to build a financial planning team and develop advisor talent. No solicitations or sponsors allowed – just private forums where DFPs can share with one another and monthly webinars where peers can share ideas and best practices. Our DFP Community is built to fill the void that I experienced as our firm grew – a challenge so many other DFPs continue to face as they grow theirs.
As we wrap up our pilot phase, we anticipate that the DFP Community will open for registration again at the end of the first quarter, with a brief application process (as we are screening to ensure that all members really are practicing DFPs!) and a nominal cost (to help us cover our costs to set up and facilitate the community). Those who are interested can submit their information to be notified when the community is open again here: https://www.kitces.com/directors-of-financial-planning-community/
Kitces has launched a new Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community! As the pilot phase wraps up later in Q1, it will be open for any DFPs who wish to join (but the team will be screening all applications to ensure that the community remains exclusively for DFPs!). Submit your information here to be notified when the DFP Community reopens again!
Ultimately, I believe that as more and more financial planning jobs are created in larger advisory firms that are scaling up, Directors of Financial Planning will become key positions that help to shape the future of the financial planning profession. And so, consistent with our mission of "Making Financial Advicers Better and More Successful", we want to do what we can to help support DFPs, too!
Adding An Advisor Services Map And Retiring Software Showcases (And Advisor Makeovers)
It was nearly seven years ago that we released our first edition of the Kitces AdvisorTech Map as a way to help document the ever-growing number of technology vendors serving financial advisors… in the hopes that by effectively cataloging them all into appropriate categories, it would be easier for the advicer community to find the right providers for their particular needs. And as the AdvisorTech Map grew – from under 200 companies in early 2018 to more than 500 today – eventually, the AdvisorTech Map became so crowded that we launched a standalone AdvisorTech Directory to make it easier for advisors to see all the vendors that have a solution in a particular category, get more information about how satisfied other advisors are with the software (based on our bi-annual Kitces AdvisorTech Research), and see how well each solutions integrates with others (via Ezra Group's WealthTech Integration Scoring system).
To further complement our efforts to help the advicer community navigate the plethora of AdvisorTech solutions available to them, in 2023, we began an additional webinar series in our Members Section that we dubbed "Software Showcases", where we invited multiple vendors from a single category (e.g., four financial planning software providers or four portfolio management tools) to provide sequential demos so advisors could compare and contrast each (and ideally, narrow down to a short list of one to two that they would vet further to make a final selection for themselves), hosted by our own Financial Planning Nerd Adam Van Deusen.
Based on Reader and Member feedback, though, we've decided to reconfigure our focus and efforts in creating these "Navigational Resources" (for advicers to navigate their choices of vendor selection) in 2025. First, we will be winding down our Software Showcases programs (and our Members-Only Advisor Makeovers as well) to allow our Members Section team to stay focused on providing the most Quality, Nerdy, and Relevant continuing education content for Members who pay for continuing education. Our historical Software Showcases and Advisor Makeovers will remain available as recordings in the Members Section, but we do not plan to produce any more of these programs. In the future, though, we are exploring whether we can embed more software demos directly into our AdvisorTech Directory (which would be available to all advicers, not just those who have paid for the Kitces Members Section).
In turn, though, by freeing up some of the time we were spending on our Showcases and Makeovers, we are aiming to launch a new Map (and supporting Directory) for the advicer community, this time for the wide range of Services providers who work with financial advisory firms. From marketing to compliance consultants, estate document providers to advisor-specialized bookkeepers, and sales coaches to M&A specialists, we hope to once again map the landscape of available solutions for financial advisors to make it easier to find the providers they need (and hopefully to help some great service providers get more visibility!).
Given the depth of Services providers for financial advisors across an incredibly wide range of categories, this will take the better part of a year for us to develop, but we aim to have a first version of the new Services Map available to the advicer community in the second half of the year!
Expanding Our Deep-Dive CE Programs With More MasterClasses And (IAR) CE Intensives!
By design, the Nerd's Eye View blog is meant to cover a wide range of practice management and technical topics for financial advisors. Our advicer readership covers the spectrum from first-year advisors to multi-decade veterans of the industry, those who love to 'nerd out' on taxes and retirement (like I do!) to those who are more focused on client psychology and how to better communicate the benefits of financial planning, and anything and everything in between. Accordingly, we work hard to catalog our content across the various categories so Readers can search for articles in particular topic areas, and Members can seek out CE by topic area as well.
However, the breadth of what we cover still means that advisors who are looking to go even deeper into a particular area can only get 'so much' from the Nerd's Eye View across the year. Which, in 2021, led us to start going deeper with the launch of our "Kitces MasterClass" programs, delving 4–6 hours at a time into particular learning areas. We started with practical programs on how to review a client's tax return, or their estate documents, or their life insurance policies and then shifted to optimizing key aspects of a client's retirement plan (Social Security, Roth conversions, and tax-efficient portfolio withdrawals).
In 2024, the Kitces team launched two new MasterClasses – one on Optimizing Roth Conversions and the second on Optimizing Tax-Efficient Withdrawals from Retirement Portfolios! Each program provides a 6-hour structured learning program, hosted by Michael Kitces and Jeff Levine, to help advicers implement tax-efficient retirement planning more effectively with their clients!
As these MasterClasses have grown in popularity – we enrolled more than 2,000 of our MasterClasses in 2024! – we are continuing to expand the lineup of programs. With an expanded Courses team, in 2025, we're aiming to produce two new MasterClasses focused on making client meetings more engaging, starting with Discovery Meetings and then moving on to Plan Presentation Meetings, with a goal of rolling out a third Meetings MasterClasses in early 2026 on the ongoing Client Review meeting!
The Return Of IAR Ethics CE Day, And A Second (IAR) CE Intensive!
Back in 2022, the first three states (Maryland, Mississippi, and Vermont) rolled out a new 12-hours-per-year continuing education requirement for Investment Adviser Representatives (IARs) of RIAs, codifying a Model Rule that NASAA had promulgated in 2020. In the years since, more and more states have implemented the Model Rule as well, such that by 2025, nearly half (21 out of 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands) have put the requirement in place. Though, in reality, more than half of all IARs are now affected, given the rule's rollout in some of the largest states (e.g., California and New York in 2024) and the fact that IARs are subject to the new CE requirement as long as they meet the de minimis number of clients in any state that has enacted the rule (which impacts a huge number of advisors who simply have more than five clients who have retired to Florida!).
To meet the demand for this new form of CE (that overlaps heavily with CFP certificants who already need CE for their designation as well), in 2022, Kitces.com became an IAR CE provider and began to qualify all of our Nerd's Eye View written content for IAR CE (in addition to all the other CE types we cover). In 2023, we expanded further with the launch of our "IAR Ethics CE Day", where advicers could get all 6 hours of their IAR Ethics CE requirement (which, in practice, seems to be the hardest to find content for!) in a single full-day virtual program. In 2024, we brought back our IAR Ethics CE Day and began to offer IAR CE credits for all of our (now twice-monthly) webinars as well.
And now, as we head into 2025, we are going one step further with the rollout of a second full-day virtual CE program for IAR (and all other types of) CE credit, or what we're simply now dubbing "CE Intensives" (to represent these 6-hour virtual programs that are… well, "CE intensive"!). Unlike our existing IAR Ethics CE Day, which is specifically focused on the Ethics requirement, our second CE Intensive program will be eligible for the Products & Practice (P&P) requirement for IAR CE (the other 6 hours of the annual 12-hour requirement), and we intend to cover a focused theme around tax and retirement planning.
For those who are interested, our IAR Ethics CE Day is already open for advance registration for our event date – Thursday, August 28th, from 11:00AM to 6:00PM ET– with pricing as follows:
- Registration: $247 for the full day of live content
- Registration for Kitces Premier Members: $197
- Dual registration for IAR CE Day and joining the Kitces Members Section: $386 (cost when priced separately: $436)
Notably, the cost of IAR Ethics CE Day registration already includes the $18 IAR CE filing fees as a part of the price. Additional discounts are also available for multi-advisor groups. To learn more visit this page.
In turn, we have yet to set the final date for our second CE Intensive, but are aiming for a program in the fall season. Stay tuned for additional details as they become available!
SAVE THE DATE: The Kitces IAR Ethics CE Day virtual event will return on Thursday, August 28th, for those who want to get all 6 hours of their IAR Ethics CE done in a single day… and would rather see the content live than simply read it on the Nerd's Eye View blog! Discounts are available for Kitces Members and firms that need to register multiple advisors at once!
And stay tuned for a second CE Intensive virtual full-day program, coming later this fall, to cover the other 6 hours of the IAR CE requirement (on Products & Practice) in addition to all of our Nerd's Eye View blog articles and semi-monthly CE webinars!
Ongoing Growth Of Kitces And Its Team Of Nerds…
As the updates above hopefully highlight, we are actively investing into the platform and programs it takes for Kitces.com to continue to grow for many years to come. Yet the reality is that because we are first and foremost a provider of education and professional development, the core of our business is not the technology platform or the CE and practice management programs we run… it's the people who make it all happen.
Which means that as our offerings to make financial advicers better and more successful continue to expand, so too has the Kitces team, now up to 24 full-time team members (and nearly half a dozen more in various part-time contractor roles). These are the people who not only create all of our various types of Kitces content but also manage our live events, administer our CE reporting, support Members when they have questions, develop the code that runs our back-end systems, and provide the leadership that ensures our team keeps running efficiently as a team!
In fact, we've added several team members in just the past six months, including new Managing Editor Shannen Patel (as former Managing Editor Sydney Squires chose to transition to a full-time writing role as our newest Senior Financial Planning Nerd!), and Manager of People & Culture Dora Ogar!
We're also actively searching now for our newest team member – a Research Associate to join Mark Tenenbaum, our Director of Advisor Research – to support the ongoing growth of our Kitces Research efforts. As we not only remain committed to our four core research studies on advisor Productivity, Marketing, Technology, and Wellbeing, but, in the coming years, will also be developing a Research dashboard to help advicers better understand their results and how they compare to other advisory firms at a similar size. We are also exploring how we can make our research data available to the various financial planning PhD programs to further support research on advisor best practices (appropriately anonymized, of course!).
Further details about the new Research Associate role are on our Kitces Career Opportunities page, and those who want to stay apprised of future openings with the Kitces Team can sign up for the Kitces Careers mailing list to be notified as each new role opens up, too!
The Kitces team is hiring a new Research Associate to support our Productivity, Marketing, Technology, and Wellbeing research studies… so if you're interested, or know someone who might be, check out the Kitces Career Opportunities page for more details!
All in continued pursuit of our mission at Kitces.com – to Make Financial Advicers Better, and More Successful, through our N-E-R-D-y organizational strategy: supporting 'Nnovation of AdvisorTech tools, delivering Educational Insights, conducting Research on Advicers, and supporting the Development of Advicer skills.
And notably, while we remain as committed as ever to creating our style of Quality, Nerdy, and Relevant content for the financial advicer community with our team of nerds, there are also plenty of opportunities for Advisors themselves to get involved or become contributors. So if you have some expertise or a best practice you'd like to share through the Kitces platform, you can do so as a writer, a speaker, or by developing a formal presentation! We encourage Advicers to take a chance and submit their prospective contribution if any of our opportunities sound like a good fit (click here for the details on how, for each of our various contributor options, you can get started now!) – after all, we only grow as an Advicer community by sharing our insights and solutions with others! (But it's totally OK to simply keep following the content journey with us!)
If there's anything else you think we should be working on that we've missed, please share your thoughts in the comments below!
