The Ultimate* AdvisorTech Stack - II

the sequel, I'm doing lots of these - these days

Author

Joe Moss
December 07, 2024

The hook 🪝

Some would say it’s not prudent to “build an advisortech stack” from scratch. In fact, some did on my LinkedIn post asking for ideas.

Are you hooked, did it work?!

But I think there’s a place for this… planting one’s flag and recommending* one tool above the rest. Although smarter people than me have dissented. So I could be wrong.

You can study the Kitces and T3/Veres surveys, demo the tools, review the directories as I have.

my son helping

You can even hire a consultant for many thousands of dollars… Lots of excellent options here.

Or…

You can make yourself a cup of coffee/tea and review my generic recommendations* here… for free.

Or you can do all of the above. Which some of you will or have done already, so I figured I’d address ya’ll advisortech nerds directly. :)

But I’ll bet you didn’t get a signed Kitces advisortech map!

So at the beginning of it all, you could start with the end in mind, monster out all your processes and your ideal client experience.

Or…

You could find some tools that are pretty darn close to the best* and build your ideal client experience off of these advisortech founders’ genius.

Or you can do all of the above in the right order or the wrong order.

There’s way too many shoulds these days. Crikey.

This list is NOT a list of shoulds.

This list is one advisortech nerd’s opinion of what he thinks are some of the best* options available.

*Here I feel the need to give a very long disclaimer. “ultimate”, “best”, “recommended”, are subjective and objective. My original goal with all this was “let me sit down, make a list of the Kitces advisortech categories, and decide once and for all (at least for this week), what I would pick if building a stack from scratch.”

Just because these are tools I would pick does not make them the best in the category, or the best for you. Also, we’d need to clarify what type of firm it was, what the sub-sub-niche was, what the services were, what country we were in, is it April 2018 when the first Kitces advisortech map was published or is it 2028 when it will be twice as big as it is now. Or half as big… the jury is still out.

I’m also not saying that if an advisortech company isn’t on this list that its not a good option. There’s lots of great ones that didn’t make this particular list.

hopefully this disclaimer will do, we’ll soon find out, probably add some more at the bottom

So…

Without further pontificating…

I sincerely hope you enjoy!

I feel like I’ve summarized my life’s work in this post. Yes, even those lawns I mowed when I was 12.

Stihl is the best LandscapeTech out there. No disclaimers needed.

my personal collection

The Stack

If I was building an #advisortech stack from scratch, here’s what I would choose*:

First Altruist of course (read more here), if they’re missing an acct type or feature, or if you have a client that wants to stay at Schwab, it’s my 2nd choice.

I wrote a post on why here, and I shan’t repeat myself. Give it a read if you’re still seeing Frank the angry unicorn* from time to time. You’ll be overwhelmed (and inspired) that you did.

  • Portfolio Management / Performance Reporting : Advyzon

Advyzon does many things very well - something All-in-One’s are not really known for. In this stack its covering CRM, portfolio mgmt (and trading), performance reporting, document management, fee billing, and data gathering.

Now you may not have heard of Libretto. It’s kinda different, and expensive. But, oh sooo good. Probably the #1 feature I like is that it includes current value of future earnings (called human capital) in net worth. It also considers a mortgage to be a negative fixed income position, and includes Social Security benefits as an asset. And holds only the fixed income necessary to cover expenses and allocates the rest to equities (as one ages), thus increasing long-term wealth. Versus the standard age=bonds (fast track to the poor house)…

Don’t click this picture, you might get a demo

  • Document Management : Sharepoint, Advyzon

I think Sharepoint/Onedrive are great for document management, and they do very well on the tech surveys as well. But I don’t like using Sharepoint via Sharepoint… I prefer to create Teams within Msft Teams, manage the permissions that way - you can even create a team for each of your clients if you want (and they use Teams). We did that when I was at Simplicity Ops. Also can be synced to File Explorer and easy to access files that way as well.

Advyzon is great for static files, that aren’t regularly updated or where multiple people are accessing and changing. Uploading client statements, vendor contracts, invoices, and the like. Since Advyzon is the hub, you have any info you want about your clients, vendors, prospects, reference documents… within a couple clicks.

  • Investment Data / Analytics : Kwanti 

Kwanti does what it does very well, and not a smidge more. I like it for risk scoring portfolios, doing investment research, charting, model comparisons, IPS creation, proposal creation. They recently added a risk tolerance feature that’s fully customizable and will do very well for many firms.

  • Fee Billing : Advyzon

I had one slight workaround to bill a particular set of funds at a special rate, but otherwise, I’ve been very pleased with Advyzon’s billing prep and submission.

I was legit thrilled when I first saw Greenboard. A few ai/compliance solutions have come out but bad UI, price was an issue for me. Greenboard is priced well, looks great, has lots of features for making compliance tasks much more manageable. Ohh, and its vendor due diligence is very cool, it gives you multiple ways to get the information - scrape the web, send them a questionnaire, fill in missing items manually…

  • Communications Archiving : Greenboard

And it does archiving, so you don’t need a separate tool for that. Very nice. And it has AI search, so you can search across all your compliance stuff, all your communications, a HUGE upgrade to many of the archaic archiving solutions people use.

Risk tolerance is something I put some work into researching and summarized here. I settled on Tolerisk because I like its combination of (tolerance for risk) and (capacity for risk) different, I know. It’s clean, simple, has some great presentation tools.

  • Data Gathering : Advyzon / TaxStatus / PreciseFP*

Advyzon has fact finders for filling out all your basic contact/household data so that’s a no-brainer.

But TaxStatus is a game-changer! Ping the IRS for everything it knows on a prospect / client. Saves you and them a ton of back and forth. Probably helps you uncover things even they don’t know about. It also integrates with Holistiplan which I’ll get to soon. Let me try this file attachment feature of beehiiv:

TaxStatus presentation.pdf1.99 MB • PDF File

PreciseFP is good for all other data-gathering. I particularly like the data completeness score:

Some categories are interesting because there are just soooo many options both within and outside the industry. Yes, there are some fancy tools like GReminders that can trigger a workflow in Redtail/Wealthbox. But we’re not using those CRMs. Calendly is the market leader both inside and outside the industry, has all kinds of useful features, is very easy to use, people recognize it. It’s integrated with google/microsoft/zoom very well.

So I almost put Zoom Scheduler because I scheduled an appt with someone last week that was using it. But I know nothing about Zoom Scheduler. I LOVE that the meeting video and the scheduling happen on the same platform. SIMPLICITY people. Fancy fails, simplicity scales.

And a last shout-out to SavvyCal which can overlay the person schedulings’ calendar with the available spots. That seems like a no-brainer, but I don’t believe Calendly has that last I checked.

But for most people, just go with Calendly.

Actually just for fun, let’s show a few scheduling pages and see what you like:

Can you guess which is which?

  • Retirement Planning : Libretto

Retirement planning and financial planning seem to go together, so I’m putting Libretto here too

  • Tax Planning : Holistiplan

Holistiplan is a unicorn, the good kind of unicorn (not Frank the angry unicorn). A tool that shows up on the scene and dominates market share almost immediately. You could say they created the “Tax planning” category? No, probably not. Don’t say that.

But if you can dominate satisfaction score AND market share… my oh my:

So actually, Holistiplan’s estate planning isn’t live yet. But based on the info above, it will probably be excellent. And I’m always game to consolidate tools.

I think that says about all you need to know:

LLIS is very well-known in the XYPN crowd, there’s probably lots others. I went with Highland because it seems very comprehensive, very capable, works with lots of well known names.

If you want to help your clients with their loans, Sora is the way to go, and it has good UI:

When I demoed this one, it seemed great, and I’m not aware of anyone else doing it quite like this.

For these, I’m going to link a couple of demos. I think they’re both unique and both very useful parts of a tech stack.

  • Proposal Generation : Libretto / Tolerisk / Kwanti

All three of these already discussed and important pieces of a prospect proposal.

Dustin Belliston is the king of AdvisorTech UI, and this one is beautiful, and it wins awards (like the XYPN tech competition). Most likely the next unicorn like Holistiplan.

Client communication via phone/text is still around and it’s beyond past due for a modern solution like CurrentClient.

Combined with Greenboard, this is your solid Cyber/Compliance stack. And its getting more important than ever.

Whaaat, no Pontera? I think with the recent hullabaloo with Fidelity, there may be a better way. I haven’t personally demoed Absolute, but its been highly recommended.

If you want to offer identify theft, credit monitoring, email address monitoring, financial transactions monitoring, and mix in a little lead gen, and have a bundle to share with beneficiaries when your client passes, Carefull is slick, affordable, simple to use.

You may have seen my posts where I’ve said there are 79 AI notetakers for financial advisors. It’s not quite true, but there are waaaaay too many. Let me quote Ben Olsen:

2-3 of these will survive, smart founders will see the writing on the wall and probably sell within the next 2-3 years to a big name company that needs to catch up. The rest will die.

I believe FinMate is one of those 2-3. Founded by a financial advisor, listed as the most accurate summaries by XYPN, super focused on privacy and security and not playing with your CRM and email data. I think its a very good first choice as we all start to implement AI and give it our client data.

I’ve demoed and trialed many of the prospecting tools for advisors. Aidentified was my favorite. It’s scary how much information about people is publicly available, and what AI can do to fill in gaps. But nonetheless, if you want to know as much as you can about a prospect short of using TaxStatus, check out Aidentified.

Part of the tech stack? Maybe not, but I think keeping tabs on your valuation, making profitable improvements to your ops, client base, etc is part of a good data/tech stack. They’ve done thousands of valuations last I heard and have got it down.

And non-AdvisorTech specific tools:

There’s essential parts of a tech stack that may or may not be on the Kitces’ map.

All the kool kids are using it:

  • Lead Generation : Pick a niche, do your own lead gen (wait, did I just say that out loud?) supplement with Wealthtender, Couplr AI, etc.

  • Video Meetings : Zoom 

Zoom is like Calendly, household name, actually has the best video meetings, simple to use interface, Zoom is a no-brainer.

  • Team Communication : Microsoft Teams, Superhuman 

Teams is integral to my tech stack for internal communication, Superhuman is for collaborating on email

  • Email Hosting : Gsuite (I think its better than Microsoft, but both are perfect)

  • Email Overlay : Superhuman 

The better way to email, period. For a full demo:

Also, like Calendly and Zoom, Docusign is market leader, easy to use…

  • "YourFirm"OS Manual : Skool

Joe, Skool? Last, really? Here’s how I think you can use Skool in your firm:

And join some of the best advisor communities on Skool while you’re at it:

Ok, that wraps up the Ultimate AdvisorTech Stack, please also add some password management, anti-virus… but you can’t list them all.

Do you need all of the above categories of tools? Maybe, but most likely not, Bob Veres said most firms have 8-9 advisortech tools, but I’ve surveyed firms with 20+ easy.

The Starter Stack

For the new RIAs, don’t spend too much on advisortech. The cards are already stacked against you.

  • Altruist, Wealthbox, Gsuite or Microsoft365, Calendly and pick one of these:

  • ProjectionLab, Asset-Map, Elements, RightCapital, Boldin

So there you have it, the Ultimate Stack and the Starter Stack, but there’s 400 other tools too for you to check out. Oh, well, that’s why I made this list, to narrow it down for you.

I hope its helpful! Maybe pick up an idea or two.

Warmly,

Joe

For extra credit, you may review these prior posts on the subject.

Some extra disclaimers:

*This is not tech stack advice. Consult with your advisortech professional or fractional COO before demoing or purchasing any advisortech. If you need a list of these people, check out: conneqtor.beehiiv.com/p/144

*PreciseFP and FinMate AI are sponsors of my email newsletter

*Frank the angry unicorn would show up whenever Redtail ran into an error, and it happened far too much when I used Redtail. Also referenced here.

⬆️ This is Frank, I’m not sure if he’s still around (I try to avoid the place where he lives)

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