Next-gen wealth clients demand next-gen service. The modern wealth planning stack is here to help.

The wealth management industry stands today at a pivotal moment in its evolution.

The Great Wealth Transfer is now underway, with over $70 trillion in wealth expected to flow from Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation to their heirs over the next few decades. These digital-immigrant and digital-native wealth recipients demand more than traditional financial advice; they seek solutions that combine technology with convenience, sophistication and personalization, requiring financial advisors to adopt a tech-forward approach to wealth management. Meanwhile, the growing focus on wealth planning has revealed a substantial gap in financial preparedness: while 70% of Americans recognize the importance of estate planning, only 26% have a formalized financial plan.

This confluence of circumstances has led to the birth of the modern wealth planning stack, an ecosystem of digital solutions that leverage cutting-edge technologies including AI and generative AI (Gen AI) to streamline wealth planning operations, enhance speed and accuracy, and provide predictive and personalized insights. These tools can help financial advisors improve their operational efficiency, reduce manual errors and free themselves up to focus on high-value activities such as deepening client relationships and advising both existing and emerging wealth clients. By adopting them, the wealth management industry can better position itself to capture the opportunities the Great Wealth Transfer presents and to serve the evolving needs of a more technologically adept client base.

As long-time wealthtech investors, Citi Ventures has been tracking the rise of the modern wealth planning stack. Read on for our analysis of the space and the startups driving its rapid evolution.

The Modern Wealth Planning Stack

The landscape of tech- and AI-driven tools for financial advisors consists of two broad categories: Advisory Software and Wealth Data and Infrastructure Tools.

Advisory Software

Advisory software solutions provide suites of digital tools that advisors can use to understand and manage their clients’ finances across the following categories:

1. Financial Planning

   Financial planning is the cornerstone of wealth management, arming clients with comprehensive strategies to achieve their financial goals. Financial planning tools range from legacy systems that have long been trusted by advisors — such as MoneyGuidePro, eMoney, RightCapital and InvestCloud/NaviPlan (a Citi Ventures portfolio company) — to modern platforms that offer more dynamic, real-time planning capabilities.

   Emerging financial planning platforms are increasingly leveraging AI to enhance personalization and efficiency. For example, Conquest Planning, founded by NaviPlan founder Mark Evans, features an AI-based strategic advice manager called SAM that financial advisors can use to quickly build detailed, accurate and flexible financial plans for their clients. Recent updates to SAM help advisors provide an even more robust client experience by proactively identifying gaps in their financial plans and surfacing opportunities to close those gaps. Conquest’s modern architecture makes the tool easy to navigate as well, which encourages adoption.

2. Estate Planning

   Estate planning ensures not only that wealth is stewarded according to the client’s wishes, but also that clients get to make and maintain living wills and other advance directives. Modern solutions are making this historically opaque, manual and expensive process more accessible and streamlined, while emerging platforms such as our portfolio company wealth.com are incorporating AI and other advanced technologies to demystify and democratize estate planning — helping more people than ever before prepare plans and adapt them to life changes and evolving laws.

3. Investment Planning

   While financial planning tools often contain embedded investment modules, specialized investment planning tools enable advisors to manage their clients’ investment portfolios and prepare more sophisticated, personalized investment proposals — better addressing client goals, risks, rebalancing, direct indexing, tax loss harvesting and more.

4. Other Wealth Planning

   Various other advisory software products focus on specific areas of wealth planning, including: tax planning, helping maximize wealth retention by minimizing tax liabilities; retirement planning, enabling clients to build financial stability for their later years; and philanthropy planning, helping clients manage and optimize their charitable giving.

Wealth Data and Infrastructure Tools

In wealth management as elsewhere, data is an invaluable asset; after all, the effectiveness of a financial plan depends on the accuracy of the data it’s built on. In order to provide the holistic, personalized, real-time and seamless service clients demand, financial advisors must therefore aggregate data from numerous sources, extract meaningful insights from it, and ensure that it flows freely across systems and remains up-to-date and accurate over time.

To facilitate this effort, a new crop of tools has emerged that leverage AI and automation to ingest, organize and store the vast amounts of data critical to wealth planning. These tools underpin many modern advisory software platforms, helping power the decision-making process, improve portfolio performance and personalize client interactions.

The three main types of wealth data and infrastructure tools are:

1. Wealth Data Aggregation Tools

   Data aggregators such as Masttro (a Citi Ventures portfolio company) and Addepar consolidate a client’s disparate financial accounts along with investment and market data from various third-party sources, analyze that data to glean meaningful insights from it and provide technology that helps investment professionals make better decisions about their clients' portfolios.

2. Wealth Data Abstraction Tools

   In addition to the structured data sources aggregated by tools like Masttro, critical wealth planning insights can be derived from a wide array of unstructured sources such as meeting notes and voice recordings. Emerging startups like Powder and Zocks leverage AI agents to extract and clean data from these sources then use it to arm financial advisors with unique client insights, portfolio analytics and personalized action steps.

3. Wealth Data Management Tools

   Once wealth planning-related data has been aggregated and abstracted from these myriad sources, it must be structured and secured for easy access by the platforms that use it. Data management tools like Finbourne and Dispatch not only organize, unify and synchronize data but also use it to enhance the accuracy, transparency and compliance of wealth management operations. Finbourne helps wealth managers centralize and manage data, thereby building a uniform, scalable platform financial institutions can use to improve decision-making and operational efficiency. Dispatch, meanwhile, streamlines the flow of data across various systems, improving operational fluidity and allowing wealth managers to provide real-time insights to clients.

Together, these advisory software solutions and wealth data and infrastructure tools make up the core of the modern wealth planning stack, visualized below. By leveraging the stack, financial advisors can better serve their existing clients with wealth accumulation and decumulation; connect with the next generation and onboard their clients’ heirs as their own clients; and appeal to new clients who either haven’t worked with advisors before or whose advisors haven’t adopted modern tools.

The Road Ahead

The Great Wealth Transfer is just beginning, as is the age of Gen AI. As trillions of dollars of additional wealth flows to ever-younger and more tech-savvy generations, we at Citi Ventures expect the modern wealth planning stack to continue to evolve, adding new technologies and capabilities to support wealth managers’ ongoing quest to offer more personalized, efficient and comprehensive client services. In order to evolve with them, we recommend that financial advisors and institutions adopt the modern advisory software solutions and wealth data & infrastructure tools that best enhance their ability to serve their clients.

The future of wealth management lies in the seamless integration of these solutions as well as those to come. At Citi Ventures, we can’t wait to see — and invest in — what’s next in wealthtech.