I wrote a column last summer entitled “Finny and the Great AdvisorTech Acceleration,” largely about the startup but also about the momentum surrounding the rapid advancement and integration of AI among third-party technology providers.
Less than a year later, the velocity of this trend continues to increase.
In fact, WealthManagement.com’s WMIQ research arm just published its fourth annual 2025 WealthStack Study, introducing new survey questions on AI. I was amazed by some of the findings, including that 68% of the 414 respondents are currently using or plan to adopt AI-powered tools—only 32% had no plans to do so.
More exciting to me, however, was how this adoption and usage goes beyond the freely available generative AI like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Google’s Gemini, no, 29% of respondents reported using standalone AI-based communications generation and management tools, 26% had begun using AI assistants for investment research and portfolio analysis, and 21% were making use of AI-powered chatbot platforms for client support and engagement.
It has become a challenge to keep up with new rollouts.
Let’s take just this week. So far, I’ve written about AI notetaker Jump and its integration with the financial planning application RightCapital, and the AI-powered financial planning application and company Conquest Planning and its $80 million fund raise to help accelerate its U.S. expansion with significant support from some large firms.
In addition, the custodian Altruist announced not only its rebrand and redesign but also introduced Hazel, its internally built AI assistant, to its advisors. LPL CTO Greg Gates wrote about his firm’s rollout of Generative AI Search for its Resource Center, which thousands of advisors use every day.
Among the things I’ve been unable to get to in-depth this week was an integration similar in some ways to that of Jump and RightCapital: a new collaboration between the popular PreciseFP, a client engagement and data-gathering software (today part of Docupace), and AI notetaker Zocks. This bidirectional integration is meant to both automate and speed up onboarding and advice-related workflows for advisory firms.
Finally, I was excited to interview Royi Markowitz and Jonathan Dane, the CEO and chief financial planner, respectively of the AI-powered and AI-driven financial planning startup Quinn, which came out of stealth this week and announced an $11 million seed round of funding, led by the Israeli venture capital firm Viola Fintech.
There is no direct-to-consumer version; it is meant for use by intermediaries and can be white-labelled. Part of the company’s announced mission is to be a force multiplier for advisors, enabling them to save time and support more clients.
I have yet to receive a demo, but the application, which can be implemented via API or, more often, directly embedded, and used by advisory shops or institutions to power onboarding and the harvesting of data from prospects or clients and plan generation. Unlike what has come before it, the technology has built-in generative features allowing clients and prospects to ask questions specific to their own situations and, in turn, get answers that can be built into the plan.
Markowitz said Quinn had been in development for almost three years, and was first released to the general public in extensive validation tests and had its first formal coming out during FinovateSpring 2024 in San Francisco.
“My co-founder and I knew that if we could apply AI—and by that I really mean machine learning—we could help the wealth management industry scale to new markets and demographics, there is such an untapped demand, especially among the mass affluent,” said Markowitz.
“We are designed to augment, not replace the advisor, and help preserve the advisor’s time and we’ve programmed the application with the logic that we think the best advisors use, and everything was 100% built in-house by us, we built the engine and logic ourselves,” said Jonathan Dane, Quinn’s CIO and chief financial planner, who is both a CFP and has a CFA designation and been a part of the wealth management industry for 20 years. He said the application adhered to the established tenets of the CFP curriculum.
For advisors worried about reaching the next generation of investors, Quinn carried out its user validation testing in what has become the traditional, if labor-intensive, route for Silicon Valley-type direct-to-consumer startups: recruiting thousands of test users at college campuses and through social media.
“One of our [college-age] testers in interviews told us: ‘Acorns [the robo advisor] and my neobank are the players but Quinn is the coach,’” explained Markowitz. He said that this tester and many others who had some experience with robos or other fintech products had not gotten detailed advice on their own personal situations regarding what to do until they had tried Quinn.
In serving the advisor market, I can see Quinn as an assistant coach or a team of assistant coaches with the advisor as the head coach.
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