Wealth.com Expands Its RIA Reach (Again)

Wealth.com is hiring human experts while also deploying capital toward the development of artificial intelligence tools and other tech-based capabilities, according to the executive.

One example of the firm’s innovation efforts, White detailed, is the platform’s ability to analyze and onboard complex estate planning documents that are created externally. The platform digests the information and automatically generates a visual-based overview of the client’s estate.

“Being able to do this digitally and efficiently is a game-changer for advisors working on the estate planning topic,” White said. “The old-fashioned way required advisors and attorneys to sit down and pore through the documents on an ad hoc basis.”

Such capabilities, he continued, complement the platform’s document-creation power that may be of more use to end clients who are lower on the wealth scale and who may lack essential planning documents such as wills, trusts and advanced directives.

"The vision is to be able to help support advisors who are themselves supporting clients at all wealth levels," White explained. "Estate planning services are about more than tax savings for just the wealthiest Americans."

A Red-Hot Market

No service category in the wealth management domain has more inherent opportunity than estate planning, White maintained.

“There’s a good reason why you see so much investment and interest in this space — and why we have some great competitors and colleagues in this space,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is that we are looking at, without exaggeration, more than $84 trillion globally that is expected to change hands in the next decade. That's a lot of market share to go around,” White added.

Meanwhile, about 67% of U.S. households lack a formal estate plan.

“And even within that 33% of households who have engaged in estate planning, the chances are that many of them could use a thorough review and a restatement of their plan,” White said. “That’s a fact set that gives us a tremendous amount of optimism for what we can achieve as a company.”

Perhaps even more notable is that only about half of high-net-worth households have established a formal estate plan, according to White. And, while 93% of people want estate planning services from their advisor, only 22% report getting the necessary help in this area.

“These kinds of figures show just how much addressable opportunity is out there for us and our RIA partners,” White said.

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