Fintech company FP Alpha this week unveiled a new tool that it says allows financial advisors to cut through pages of estate planning documents by summarizing and visualizing key aspects of a client’s plan.
The Estate Snapshot, unveiled Tuesday at the T3 Advisor Conference in Denton, Texas., is a first of its kind in the market, said FP Alpha’s founder and CEO Andrew Altfest.
Altfest said that the tool, which uses AI to simplify clients’ estate plan documents, will help save advisors a lot of time and help them be more proactive with their clients. “It will revolutionize the way they do things,” he said.
Instead of poring over pages of documents, advisors can simply upload clients’ wills, trusts, power of attorney documents onto the tool, which then produces a summary and visual of the crucial components of the documents. “It shows how assets are set to transfer, who the key people are in those documents as well as trustees, executors … and it gives clients an easier understanding of how their estate is set to transfer, and it also will be able to uncover problems,” he said.
Altfest, also president and principal advisor at Altfest Personal Wealth Management, a $1.5B RIA based in New York City, noted that most advisors are not involved in estate planning, even though studies have shown that clients overwhelming want their advisors to help them in this area as much as with investment management.
“I think right now very few people are doing [estate planning] because it’s too time consuming and too complicated,” Altfest said. “Estate planning now is not tech-enabled. It’s in the Stone Age,” he added.
But Altfest believes the ease of using the Estate Snapshot will incentivize more advisors to do estate planning. He said that there is more competition on the investment side and as advisors grow, they have to show how they can offer services in more areas because “they have to keep up with other advisors who are doing this well.” He added that as an advisor, he found that incorporating estate planning insights into the larger planning discussion allowed him to provide a holistic approach to planning.
The Estate Snapshot had been in pilot with a large financial institution for a period prior the launch, and was well-received, he said. The same held true during the launch at the conference, according to Josh Grossberg, FP Alpha’s head of sales and business development. “The booth was very busy. The reception has been extremely strong,” he said.
“This is a tool that is going to impact advisors of all sizes,” Grossberg added. For example, he said, a full practitioner firm with little knowledge or resources will now be able to offer estate planning and compete with the more sophisticated or larger institutions and advisors “because this is now going to allow them to get to a point in an efficient way to scale their estate planning reviews and it also allows them to have the confidence and ability to be in conversation on the opposite end of the spectrum.”
The Estate Snapshot is a component of FP Alpha platform’s Estate Planning Module, which identifies key estate planning opportunities that allow advisors to quantify the value of their advice.