FP Alpha, a New York-based wealth tech platform for tax, estate and insurance planning, has released more comprehensive estate planning for financial advisors seeking to work with clients in that area.
By leveraging artificial intelligence-driven data extraction, the tool gathers hundreds of data points from estate planning documents such as wills, trusts and powers of attorney. Andrew Altfest, founder and CEO of FP Alpha, said the upgrades advance the estate planning tool to give advisors actionable insights.
“The insights are personalized to the particular client based on their estate documents and other information on the platform,” he said. “The advisor gets all these issues to bring to the client’s attention.”
The new tools provide AI-backed document analysis, guidance on advisors’ next steps and visual presentations to support client conversation and action items. They are available for any advisor using the full FP Alpha platform, which costs $1,995 per advisor license, or at higher price points for a full office to get logins, according to the firm’s website.
Altfest said the added insights can be small, such as ensuring a client’s financial institutions have power of attorney documents, or helping avoid large, “potentially catastrophic” issues for the client’s financial situation.
He also gave an example of a couple who had set up a special needs trust for their autistic child. When going through the estate plan, the software identified improper beneficiary designations on their retirement accounts, which would have sent the assets directly to the child, not the trust, as they had wanted.
According to a survey by the online estate planning platform Vanilla, 80% of advisor clients late last year said they expect estate planning to be part of their advisor’s job. More than half said they view estate planning as a non-negotiable service.
These demand and demographic trends partly prompted Altfest and the team to enhance the tool’s insights for advisors.
“You don’t have to be an attorney, you don’t have to have mastered all these areas of estate planning,” he said. “But it’s all there, explained to the advisor so that they can have a confident conversation … and the advisor can work with the client as an attorney to help develop a closer relationship with that attorney, who could be a good referral source.”
Rachel Schwab, head of product at FP Alpha, said the team worked with several attorneys to help guide the creation of the tool.
“It’s our team working with our AI team, product team and estate attorneys,” she said. “We like to get various opinions on what they would point out to a client if they read a case, and then we can program to look for that provision or clause or phrasing, whatever it is, and then we can create an insight based on that information.”
Altfest also noted the potential to use estate planning as a bridge to the children of clients who may be involved in the future and be potential clients.
“They’re able to meet with their clients and show their clients what’s going on in their estate plans, but also ask if they want their kids to understand what’s going on because they’re going to play a role as executor, trustee, agent, etc.,” he said. “It allows the advisor to build trust with the next gen.”
Altfest, also president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, started FP Alpha in 2018 as an answer to the time-consuming work of providing holistic financial planning. As the son of the RIA founders Lewis and Karen Altfest, he saw those challenges firsthand, first as an observer and then as a senior leader at the $1.6 billion fee-only RIA.
Earlier this year, FP Alpha launched an unbundled tax service as a standalone product for advisors after receiving feedback that they wanted the option to receive only tax-related planning tools.
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