Why XYPN Ended Its Tax Service for Advisors

September 20, 2023 at 02:04 PM
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XY Planning Network wound down its XY Tax Solutions service for advisors after the 2023 tax season, Alan Moore, the firm's CEO and co-founder, told ThinkAdvisor on Tuesday, during an online briefing from the ninth annual XYPN Live conference in Atlanta.

"We've definitely seen a growing number of advisors offering tax planning and sometimes tax preparation as part of their practice providing comprehensive financial planning," Moore said. The planning process "can be kind of looked at through a tax lens to ensure that it's what's in the best interest of the client," he noted.

The decision to wind down XY Tax Solutions was made "not for lack of demand," he stressed. "We couldn't find a way to make the economic model work through advisors in providing tax preparation services like what we were offering."

The firm will shift its attention to other service lines that are growing, Moore said. The firm is also evaluating whether to introduce its own corporate registered investment advisor in 2024, which XYPN announced at the conference.

In 2019, XYPN added various new services to its financial planning platform that it said were designed to help fee-for-service advisors at all stages of firm ownership, from preparing to scaling. Those services included XY Tax Solutions.

Underscoring just how important offering tax services to clients has become for advisors, earlier this month, Cetera Financial Group said it was buying Avantax, formerly Blucora, in an all-cash transaction for $1.2 billion.

Dallas-based Avantax has some 3,075 financial professionals focused on tax and wealth management, as well as nearly $83.8 billion in assets under administration and $42.6 billion in assets under management.

Pictured: Alan Moore, CEO and co-founder of XY Planning Network

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