Morningstar Office To Shut Down And Push Advisors To Black Diamond (And More Of The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech – March 2025)

Morningstar Office To Shut Down, With A Hand-Off To Black Diamond But Advisors Are Evaluating The Whole Host Of Replacement Options

Portfolio management is central to the business of most financial advisory firms, and systems that facilitate the portfolio management process have long been one of the three core parts of advisory firms' tech stacks (along with CRM and financial planning systems). Given the importance of those tools to an advisory firm's business, then, it would seem to follow that most advisors would be focused on using the portfolio management software that works best for them. However, the reality of the advisory industry is that inertia often gets in the way of using the 'best' tools: The most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology found that only around 2.3% of advisors planned to change their portfolio management systems within 12 months, even as some systems rated 'only' a 6 or 7 on a 10-point satisfaction scale (which are particularly low numbers given the overall importance of the software to the advisor's business). At a switch rate that low, it means the typical advisory firms' tenure with any particular portfolio management system will often be "the entire career of their advisors with the firm".

The main reason why advisors tend to be so slow to switch to new software (even if they aren't all that happy with the software they're using) is that it can be a real pain to switch from one provider to another. Which is especially true in the "all-in-one" portfolio management category, where the software transition can be especially complex: Reams of historical client data must be ported from the old platform into the new one to ensure accurate historical performance (which even with modern migration capabilities, doesn't always replicate historical performance consistently); data connections must be re-established for each client for custodial and held-away accounts; custom trading rules and billing structures must be flagged and transferred into the new system. And so even though many providers offer support in aiding the transition from the advisor's existing platform, the migration process can still be arduous for advisory firms and their staff, which often leads them to stay with their current technology, even when the firm is somewhat unhappy with it, until they're truly forced to make a move – either because the old software simply becomes incompatible with the advisory firm's needs in continuing to serve their clients, or because another event comes along to force the issue.

One of those events occurred this month with Morningstar's announcement that it plans to shut down its Morningstar Office portfolio management platform at the beginning of 2026. Advisors currently on the Morningstar Office platform will need to decide whether to move to Black Diamond – which cut a deal with Morningstar to offer streamlined migration support, discounted platform fees, and continuing access to Morningstar's investment research capabilities in exchange for a cut of Black Diamond's revenue from the advisors who move to its platform – or to find another solution to switch to in the next 12 months before Morningstar Office is officially sunsetted.

Morningstar's decision to retire Morningstar Office is somewhat surprising in that it's rare for a major technology provider to simply shut down a longstanding offering. However, it's been clear for some time that Morningstar wasn't investing the resources into Office that were necessary to keep up with the competition in the portfolio management space. Office's satisfaction ratings have significantly lagged behind other providers' in the latest and several prior versions of our Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, and anecdotal (albeit anonymous) evidence shows that at least some advisors were noticing the low level of investment that Morningstar was putting into its product. For its part, Morningstar has made several recent moves to refocus on its core business of providing investment data and research tools, including the sale of its TAMP business to AssetMark and the launch of its new Direct Advisory Suite portfolio analytics tool, and so cutting bait on Morningstar Office was less of an out-of-the-blue decision than a continuation on a theme of getting back to the solutions that Morningstar is best known for.

For advisors on the Office platform, the offer to move to Black Diamond will prove tempting, given that it reportedly includes sweeteners such as a 50% discount of Black Diamond's first-year fee, a waiver of the usual implementation fee for supporting the conversion of client data, and a conversion period where advisors can use both platforms in parallel without paying fees to both platforms. The caveat, however, is that Black Diamond is reportedly requiring advisors to sign a contract that locks them into the platform for five years in exchange for those incentives – which is perhaps not as big of a downside as it seems given that once advisors go through the ordeal of switching to a new portfolio management platform they aren't likely to want to jump to another one within a few years anyway, but it still provides Black Diamond with some assurance that it will recoup the cost of the incentives it's offering (and the share of revenue it's giving up to Morningstar in exchange for being designated the default "incumbent" platform for Morningstar Office advisors).

But for Morningstar Office advisors who are being forced to make a change either way, it likely makes sense to consider all of the portfolio management software options that are on the table, many of which are rolling out their own offers to peel off a share of Office advisors from Black Diamond and other competitors. Advyzon, for instance, has made a case to be considered the natural successor to Morningstar Office given that it was founded by the people who originally built Office (and then left to create the product that they thought Office could have been once it became clear that Morningstar wasn't investing the resources necessary to improve enough on the product they had). But there are numerous other options as well, from fellow all-in-ones like Orion, Envestnet | Tamarac, CircleBlack, Addepar, Blueleaf, AdvisorEngine, Panoramix, and d1g1t; to portfolio management platforms built as extensions to other advisory services like Altruist (which is free for advisors on Altruist's custody platform).

Ultimately, while Morningstar Office's shutdown may prove disruptive for advisors who hadn't planned on a major technology switch in 2025, hopefully the fact that so many advisors were unhappy with the platform to begin with means that the outcome will prove to be positive the long term – an impetus for advisors who already weren't satisfied to make the change that they were reluctant to make due to the now-inevitable switching costs. At the same time, it can serve as a reminder to those same advisors of why it's worth evaluating the whole portfolio management landscape in order to find the 'right' platform to transition to – because while incentives and discounts from providers might help to ease the transition to a new platform, it's likely that most advisors will remain on their next portfolio management platform for long after those incentives expire, at which point it will be better to be on the platform that actually works best for serving clients instead of being 'stuck' on (another) one that isn't up to par.

CircleBlack Acquires AssetBook, Foreshadowing A New Round Of Consolidation As Portfolio Management Tech Tools Hit Full Saturation?

At a base level, when an advisor manages their clients' investment portfolios, they need three pieces of technology to make everything work. First, they need a trading/rebalancing platform that will calculate the trades that needs to be made in the client's accounts and transmit that information to the custodian. Second, they need a performance reporting platform that receives daily balance and transaction data from the custodian, calculates investment performance in a GIPS-compliant manner, and reports that performance in a client-friendly format. And third, they need a billing platform to apply the specified formula to calculate the advisor's fees and bill those amounts to the custodian to be deducted from clients' accounts.

Historically many advisors used separate, standalone tools to submit trades, report performance, and bill advisory fees. In particular, performance reporting once made up a large section of the Kitces AdvisorTech Map, with the category consisting of as many standalone tools as it did "all-in-one" or multifunctional portfolio management tools. But over time, the performance reporting category has dwindled down to just a handful of providers as some tools were merged into and absorbed by other companies, and some (like Orion, Black Diamond, and Addepar) built or acquired new functionalities to become all-in-ones portfolio management systems themselves. Which is indicative of the pricing pressure that many providers faced as portfolio management became more commoditized in the robo-advisor era, and the economies of scale that software providers could achieve by building multiple technology functions atop the same stream of client investment data.

And now, it appears that the list of standalone performance reporting tools will shrink even further as AssetBook, one of the few truly standalone performance reporting providers remaining, is being acquired by all-in-one portfolio management provider CircleBlack.

When an all-in-one platform acquires a standalone technology provider, it's often with the goal of adding to the all-in-one's feature set in some way (e.g., Orion acquiring Redtail to integrate a CRM into its platform or Morningstar acquiring TRX to incorporate trading and rebalancing). But what's curious about CircleBlack acquiring a performance reporting solution in AssetBook is that CircleBlack already has its own integrated performance reporting function. Which means that the deal could be more about acquiring AssetBook's client base of primarily small- to mid-size RIA firms than it is about integrating AssetBook's technology into its own.

For its part, AssetBook appears to have been aiming for an acquisition for at least the last several years. In 2020, the firm hired Marwa Zakharia as its CEO, a former consultant who had specialized in positioning companies as acquisition targets, and in recent comments after stepping down from the role Zakharia made it clear that her mission from the beginning had been to set the company up to find a buyer. So while the competitive pressures of the performance reporting software landscape may have had at least something to do with the acquisition – and may have put it in a place where it needed a multi-year turnaround strategy to become a viable acquisition target – the ultimate reason for the deal may have simply been AssetBook's founders looking to exit the business they've owned since 2007.

And so while on the surface this deal seems like a case of a struggling performance reporting platform being snapped up by a larger competitor as advisors increasingly seek all-in-one portfolio management systems over buying the parts piecemeal, it may actually say more about CircleBlack's struggle to gain traction in a crowded all-in-one portfolio management category. If CircleBlack (and its PE firm owner Long Arc Capital) have decided to grow inorganically by buying a competitor and its client base, that's presumably because they have determined it's still less expensive, even at software company multiples, than acquiring new clients organically through marketing and outreach. Which makes sense given how the high cost of resources required to switch portfolio management platforms makes it hard to convince advisors to leave their current platforms, while new and breakaway advisors have seemingly been gravitating to Altruist, whose portfolio management software comes bundled in with its custody services and obviates the need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees for a separate portfolio management solution.

The question, then, is what CircleBlack (and other smaller portfolio management software firms like Blueleaf and d1g1t whose adoption rates fall in the bottom half of the portfolio management category) can do to grow going forward, in a category that already has nearly 90% adoption rates (where most of the remaining 10% are just too early/new to even afford the software) and where the average advisor keeps their existing system for, literally, decades. If it really is so difficult to gain adoption organically among advisory firms, the AssetBook acquisition could herald a new wave of consolidation much like what happened in the performance reporting category before it. Which in the end could shrink what is now a packed category of portfolio management tools into a much smaller number of incumbents with the scale to remain competitive.

Jump AI Closes $20M Funding Round As Investors 'Jump' On The Emerging AI Meeting Note Category Leader To Help it Keep Its Lead

How much is an AdvisorTech company worth if every single advisor uses its product? In all there are around 400,000 people registered as IARs for investment advisory firms, though a large number of these are institutional advisers and fund managers who don't advise retail clients. In reality there are closer to 300,000 individuals in the US actually giving personal financial advice, so we'll call that the addressable market for a piece of technology charging individual licenses for each user. If each advisor pays $100/month for a piece of technology, that equates to 300,000 × $1,200 = $360,000,000 per year in revenue, and with wealth management tech companies currently being valued at around 4x to 7x revenues, the total valuation of that hypothetical company would equate to between $1.4 billion and $2.5 billion.

Of course, there isn't any one piece of technology that's used by every single advisor. Some do come close: In the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, over 90% of advisors reported using CRM systems and financial planning software, and over 80% used some kind of portfolio management and performance reporting system. But outside of those core categories, it's fairly rare for any one type of technology to gain more than 50% adoption, especially when considering tools that are bought on a standalone basis and not bundled in with the advisor's custodian, broker-dealer platform, or other technology systems. And so a more realistic valuation for a hypothetical tool that could gain 50% of market penetration among financial advisors would be 'only' $700 million to $1.25 billion.

The fastest-growing category of the Kitces AdvisorTech Map over the past year has been the Client Meeting Support category, which has added 10 new tools, all of which have been some form of AI meeting note solution. The rapid growth has been a reflection of the sheer perceived utility of a tool that can meaningfully reduce the amount of time that advisors spend on digitizing their meeting notes, sending a meeting recap email to clients, and assigning follow-up tasks after each meeting (which can amount to significant time savings, given that Kitces Research on the Financial Planning Process shows that advisors on average spend as much or more time on meeting prep and follow-up tasks as they do actually meeting with clients!).

In fact, the newest Kitces Research on the Financial Planning process – which will be fully introduced at the upcoming Future Proof Citywide conference in March – shows that 18% of advisory teams in the aggregate use an AI meeting note tool. Which is an impressive adoption rate given the fact that the category was essentially nonexistent two years ago and that advisors are generally reluctant to adopt new technology, but still represents a relatively small market penetration compared to other advisor technology.

Even as new tools keep getting added to the Client Meeting Support category seemingly every month, however, there are already signs that advisors are consolidating around a small handful of providers to the exclusion of almost all the others. In the newest Kitces Research on the Financial Planning Process, as shown below, nearly half of the advisors who used AI meeting note tools used either Zoom's AI tool (which comes bundled for free with the standard Zoom Pro subscription) or Fathom (which comes with either a limited free tier or a $15/month "premium" tier). Of the tools that are specific to financial advisors, the leader by far was Jump, which had an adoption rate of 20% (of advisors using AI meeting note tools, meaning about 3.6% of advisors in total).

In this context, it's notable that Jump recently announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round, which represents the largest announced funding round for an advisor AI meeting note tool to date, and also comes less than a year after raising $4.6 million in June 2024.

Jump's total finding to date of $24.6 million dwarfs the amounts announced by other providers like Zeplyn (which raised $3 million in November 2024) and Mili (which raised $2 million in January 2025). And it makes sense that investors would focus on Jump as it emerges as the market leader in the crowded AI meeting note category, given that it could shape up to be a "winner-take-all" market where the vast majority of adoption goes to the top few players (as is common in almost every AdvisorTech category we track, where 80%+ of market share is typically held by only one to three vendors). By investing heavily into (i.e., "hyperfunding") the early market leader, VC firms can fuel marketing and scaling efforts that allow the company to grow rapidly – rather than investing smaller amounts into multiple providers, which has a lower expected return since there's a much lower chance of success for any provider that isn't currently the market leader.

In a way, the current AI meeting notes market is reminiscent of the robo-advisor boom of the 2010s, when a flurry of new robo-advisor offerings popped up early on only to have Betterment and (to a lesser extent) Wealthfront dominate the market, leading virtually every other firm to merge or shut down (including most recently Ellevest, which announced the sale of its robo-advice unit to Betterment this month). If a similar scenario plays out with AI meeting note tools, then Jump could similarly dominate the advisor-specific portion of the market (provided it has or raises enough capital for a marketing blitz to grab its market-leader market share before competitors can encroach).

Still, the relevant question for Jump and its investors remains how big the advisor-specific portion of the AI meeting notes market is poised to be going forward. As noted above, a tool that manages to gain 50% total market share among advisors could conceivably be worth $1 billion – however, even though Jump seems to be in a position to hold a large portion of the market share among advisor-specific AI notetakers, it still has to contend with the reality, at least for now, that many more advisors seem to prefer less expensive general-purpose tools (e.g., Fathom) or solutions that are simply built into what they already use (i.e., Zoom). Additionally, there are growing signs that existing AdvisorTech platforms may be aiming to integrate their own AI notetakers into their own software (such as Advisor360 buying Parrot AI to incorporate into its platform, and Orion announcing that it is beginning to incorporate generative AI into its software, albeit for meeting agenda preparation first and not AI meeting notes… yet?). Which leaves providers like Jump in the difficult position of offering standalone solutions that duplicate what advisors can already get for free from their existing platforms.

Ultimately, though, even if Jump gains 'only' 10% of market share among advisors, that still adds up to 30,000 users, who paying $100/month equates to $36 million in annual revenue and a valuation at four to seven times revenue of $144 million to $252 million. Which is certainly enough for Jump's investors to earn a decent return on their capital, even if Jump doesn't achieve billion-dollar unicorn status. Though if Jump captures that much market share, it doesn't bode well for any of its 9+ smaller competitors also trying to validate their valuations as well?

Archive Intel Completes $1.5M Funding Round For Archiving And Monitoring "Off-Channel" Communications

The last several years have seen a steady drumbeat of announcements from the SEC about fines it has levied on advisory and broker-dealer firms whose employees engaged in "off-channel" communication, i.e., any type of communication with or about clients that isn't archived by the firm according to its books and records policy. This can include both communication on firm employee's personal, non-work accounts (e.g., text messages on personal cell phones or email and social media through personal accounts) as well as on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal that generally aren't set up to be archived by most communications archiving technology (much of which was designed at a time when email was the predominant form of written communication).

For firms concerned about being hit by SEC fines for off-channel communications, there are effectively two options: Either find a way to archive all of employees' communication to ensure there is no channel that isn't being archived where client communication could potentially be taking place; or else impose strictly-enforced bans on any communication that isn't set up to be archived.

There are potential issues with both approaches. The problem with archiving all employee communication is that it can potentially broach on much of employees' non-work-related communication, like personal texts, emails, and social media messages, which presents a hosts of privacy concerns for employees who don't want their employers to intrude on their personal lives. There are also operational challenges with this approach, since an ever-shifting landscape of favored communications channels requires constantly updating the archiving software to support new channels, while there's also the issue of sifting through a huge trove of written communication for each employee to spot any questionable or misleading language.

On the flip side, limiting work-related communication to only company-sanctioned channels creates opportunities for more communication to slip through the cracks, not only for dishonest purposes but also simply because many clients might want to use those communications channels, which puts advisors in the difficult position of having to choose between accommodating their client's communications preferences or adhering to their firm's communications policy.

Traditionally, most firms have chosen the second approach of banning any off-channel communications, mostly on account of the challenges of capturing all communications to monitor employees' interactions effectively. But for firms who would rather lean towards the first approach, Archive Intel launched in 2024 as a tool to archive and monitor both traditional work channels (e.g., email, Slack, and Bloomberg chat) as well as many of the "off-channel" channels whose use has gotten firms in trouble in the past, like SMS and iMessage texting, WhatsApp, and social media platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram.

Founded by tech entrepreneur Larry Shumbres (who previously founded Totum Risk, later acquired by TIFIN), Archive Intel has, per the company's announcement, grown to 220 clients and 2,000 users since its founding in 2024. And now the company has announced a $1.5 million seed funding round as it seeks to further develop its communications archiving and monitoring technology.

In addition to archiving a wider range of channels, Archive Intel purports to use AI as a way to streamline the monitoring of all those different channels. Rather than compliance software that typically searches communications for specific keywords like "guarantee" – which not only is easy for employees to evade by simply avoiding those words, but can also generate a high number of "false positive" flags where the word isn't used nefariously – Archive Intel has trained its models to spot sentences or phrases that could be suspicious. Which is an approach taken by compliance technology like Hadrius (which also monitors marketing materials, trades, and disclosures as well as client communications, making Archive Intel a more appropriate solution for someone looking strictly at communications archiving).

For advisors, Archive Intel looks like a particularly interesting solution for bigger firms, since the larger the firm size the more challenging it is to monitor employees' communications and set policies that can ensure firmwide compliance with SEC regulations. And to that end, it does appear that Archive Intel will target primarily enterprise firms where the issue of off-channel communications is most acute.

The question remaining, however, is how many enterprise firms will be willing to take the more expansive approach to communications archiving that Archive Intel theoretically enables. In addition to the employee privacy concerns that can arise when archiving communications that could potentially be used for both work and personal purposes, there's a potential selection bias issue for the channels that do get archived. If employees once used WhatsApp specifically because it wasn't being archived by their employer, what's to stop them from simply moving to a different messaging channel once WhatsApp starts being archived? Which sets up a perpetual cycle of employers adding new communications channels to their archiving policies, then their employees moving to new and different "off-channel" channels, which leads to those channels being archived, and so on. Some firms might find it simpler to just set strict boundaries around on- and off-channel communications, and accept the possibility of an SEC fine for employees breaking those rules as a cost of doing business. (And it's also worth noting that there could be far fewer SEC enforcement actions for off-channel communications under the new Trump administration and a Republican-controlled SEC.)

Ultimately, though, in an era in which clients increasingly to prefer to communicate via text and messaging apps, it gets harder for advisory firms to set policies that don't allow advisors to meet their clients where they want to be. Providers like Archive Intel that can accommodate a wider variety of communications channels while also making it feasible to scan them all for actual instances of specific language are well poised to work with the firms that do decide to modernize their communications policies.

Datalign Advisory Raises $5M As Paid Lead Generation Thrives Despite Low Advisor Satisfaction

One of the difficult questions of the financial advisory industry is how much an advisor should be willing to pay to acquire a new client. On the one hand, when clients pay advisors thousands of dollars each year and client retention rates generally exceed 90% each year, the lifetime value of any new client can be incredibly high, and therefore an advisor can pay quite a lot to acquire that client and still realize a positive net lifetime value. On the other hand, however, that lifetime value is accumulated steadily over many years, and so if the advisor pays a significant amount to acquire the client upfront, it can take years to actually get "in the black" with that client. At the extreme, if the advisor pays too much upfront for too many new clients, they could find themselves running out of funds before they ever get a chance to flip to profitability for each client.

And so there have long been differing opinions between financial advisors regarding paid lead generation services, which provide prospects to the advisor and charge some sort of fee in return – often a percentage of lifetime revenue, but occasionally flat fees per prospect or subscription-style fees as well. Some advisors complain that lead generation platforms charge too much, and provide too few high-quality prospects, to be worth it for those who do ultimately become clients (which may well be the case if the advisor themselves is handling every lead and spending a significant time talking to prospects who don't ultimately pan out). While other firms – typically those large enough to have a business development staff dedicated to pursuing the prospects sent by lead generation services – find the cost to be well worth it for the organic growth it generates.

Paid lead generation especially makes sense for enterprise-oriented firms aiming to ultimately be acquired. At a time when PE firms and M&A partners often pay 2x-3x revenue to acquire a firm, any new client instantly adds to the firm's valuation – for example, a new client who pays $10,000 per year in advisory fees boosts the firm's valuation by $20,000-$30,000. And so even if the firm pays $10,000 to acquire the client, they've still netted at least $10,000-$20,000 in enterprise value more or less instantaneously.

The caveat is that the lead generation service still needs to provide a stream of prospects, at least some of whom will ultimately become clients. And the more efficiently the service can qualify prospects and pre-match them to advisors who might make a good fit, the higher the potential ROI on the fees paid to the lead generation service. As a result, a number of lead generation platforms have arisen in recent years that aim to better target prospect referrals to the advisors who can best serve them, including Finny, Couplr AI, and Datalign Advisory, all of which take a more quantitative approach to matching leads with advisors by crunching data on the prospect and advisor to find the right match.

This month, Datalign announced that it has raised $5 million in venture capital, just under a year after its first funding round of $4 million, at total a post-money valuation of $75 million, to continue developing and scaling its AI-driven lead generation capabilities.

At first glance, what's notable about Datalign's fundraising announcement is that, for all of the complaints of advisors around lead generation platforms, there is still enough interest in – and use of – paid lead generation for new providers to get VC funding (as with Datalign and FINNY, which raised $4.3 million in funding in December 2024), and for existing platforms to raise their fees (as Charles Schwab recently did when it raised the fees for its referral program by 5% across the board). Which is all the more remarkable given that lead generation platforms received the lowest average satisfaction rating out of all technology categories at 6.5 out of 10 in the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology – although it's possible that the lack of satisfaction with the current options signals more opportunities for a disruptor who can develop a product that advisors are happy with.

To that end, there's a potential path for success for providers like Datalign who can reach the types of advisory firms that aren't served well by the current generation of lead generation platforms. In many cases, the firms that make the most use of paid lead generation are those that are big enough to have specialized business development staff, because most advisors in solo or small-ensemble RIAs simply don't have the capacity to spend a lot of time holding prospect screening calls. The more a lead generation platform can precisely match an incoming prospect with an advisor, the more feasible it becomes for non-enterprise-scale firms to use them for growth, since there can be at least a reasonable chance that an inbound prospect can be converted into a client and there's less risk for the advisor of spending a lot of time in prospect meetings that don't result in new clients.

What remains to be seen, however is how much big data and AI tools can realistically improve the prospect-advisor fit for paid lead generation. With a multitude of factors influencing the comfort level between a client and advisor – not just net worth, area code, and planning specialty, but also a whole range of less quantifiable aspects of personality and trust level – there may be maximum limit on the "batting average" that any lead generation platform can reasonably expected to achieve, no matter its data-crunching capabilities. But as the demand for lead generation shows no sign of abating for the firms that do use it, tools like Datalign don't have to improve the quality of the client-advisor fit that much to gain adoption – they just have to generate a reliable flow of prospects to the types of firms who already gladly pay for them.

Wealth.com And Vanilla Launch AI Estate Planning Assistants To Streamline The Estate Plan Review And Update Cycle

The role of estate planning in the financial planning process has evolved greatly over the years. At a base level, it's important simply to have estate documents in place (wills, trusts, beneficiary designations, and so on as necessary) to ensure that the client's intentions regarding their assets will be carried out once they're gone. But while at one time planning for the estate tax was also a core part of most clients' estate plans – for example, in 2001 any taxable estate worth more than $675,000 was subject to estate tax – the prominence of estate tax planning has dwindled as the estate tax exemption has hiked higher and higher over the years, to almost $14 million per person ($28 million per couple) today. And so, save for some ultra-high-net-worth clients and those who live in states with a state-level estate tax, many advisors' estate planning conversations today are predominantly focused on ensuring that clients' estate planning documents are up-to-date and reflective of the client's wishes.

While it's easy enough to know whether or not a client has estate documents to begin with, it's not always so simple to understand what's in an estate planning document when it's drafted. Few estate planning attorneys make the effort to create a simple summary of what's contained in the pages and pages of will and trust documents that they draft, and so often it's up to the financial advisor to parse those documents and summarize for the client, as best as possible, the mechanics of how their assets will move after their deaths. If there are changes needed, the advisor might set up a meeting with the estate attorney – or recommend a new attorney – to get a new or amended set of documents. The process then repeats itself every few years or whenever a major life event necessitates more changes.

Since most financial advisors aren't lawyers they generally don't prepare estate documents themselves, but usually with some training and practice they can learn how to efficiently read through estate planning documents to find the information that they need (since in reality, most estate planning documents are heavily templated by drafting software other than in the cases of some very complex trusts). What's often more tedious is the process of putting together summaries, whether they be in bullet-pointed text form or visually depicted as a diagram or flowchart. Tools like zCalc Estate Planner have existed for decades to help perform calculations and construct diagrams, but they still rely heavily on manual data input from the advisor, who must pull together for themselves all of the relevant information about the client, their beneficiaries, their account balances, and the estate plan itself.

In this context, it's notable that two prominent estate planning and document preparation software providers, Wealth.com and Vanilla, have both introduced versions of an AI-powered estate planning assistant in recent months that aim to expedite the process of summarizing and visualizing clients' estate plans. In December, Wealth.com rolled out a new feature that automatically reads clients' uploaded estate documents and extracts an Executive Summary with the key information (linked to specific citations within the documents), which also feeds into a visual summary of the estate plan. And in January, Vanilla introduced a new AI "Copilot" that similarly creates automated summaries and visualizations and also includes a chat function allowing the advisor to ask specific questions about the documents.

Wealth.com and Vanilla's new tools aren't the first to make use of AI to extract and summarize estate documents: FP Alpha has provided an estate planning module since 2022, and Holistiplan launched its own estate document extraction tool in the fall of 2024. What's notable, however, is that rather than being sold as 'pure' software, Wealth.com and Vanilla's AI tools are being bundled in with their estate document preparation services, which places them within the cycle of summarizing and then updating estate planning documents that advisors tend to repeat with their clients every five to ten years.

But while there's undeniably utility in streamlining the way that advisors review and update clients' estate documents, it's an open question how many advisors will fully trust AI technology to handle that process for them. In simple situations, an advisor might be comfortable to let AI handle the work of putting together a summary, but in those cases the technology doesn't actually save the advisor all that much time (since it wasn't a complicated estate plan to begin with). On the other end of the spectrum are more complex trusts where it really would take an advisor a long time to parse and summarize the documents – but in those cases, the advisor might feel compelled to check the AI's work at many points along the way, which means the net time savings might not be all that great in those cases either.

In other words, the number of clients whose plans are complex enough that they can be meaningfully streamlined by technology, but not so complex that the advisor doesn't trust the technology to handle the work effectively, may not be all that large. And with multiple competing standalone software products already on the market, Wealth.com and Vanilla's actual differentiator remains their ability to handle the document preparation part of the process as well, which as noted above is really only necessary once every 5-10 years for each client.

And so at the end of the day, the question is whether the prospect of a bundled, technology-enabled estate plan review and document preparation process really makes sense for advisors who will use it for  five to ten clients each year (assuming 10%–20% per year at 50 clients per advisor). Or, knowing that the simple plans don't actually take that much time to summarize and the complex plans are likely to need a more intensive review either way, is it better to invest those resources in training to quickly read and understand the documents since they're unlikely to need frequent updating anyway? 

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In the meantime, we've rolled out a beta version of our new AdvisorTech Directory, along with making updates to the latest version of our Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map (produced in collaboration with Craig Iskowitz of Ezra Group)!

So what do you think? Will the sunset of Morningstar Office lead advisors to consider other replacement options besides the 'default' Black Diamond? Will Jump AI gain enough market share as a standalone, advisor-focused AI meeting note tool to justify the funding it's received? Will advisors trust AI-powered estate planning tools enough to handle complex estate plans where they can save meaningful time? Let us know your thoughts by sharing in the comments below!