Welcome to the March 2025 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors!
This month’s edition kicks off with the news that Morningstar Office will be shutting down in early 2026 as a part of Morningstar’s ongoing effort to refocus on its core investment data and analytics business – forcing advisors currently using the tool to switch (which might be a net positive for many of those advisors who have long complained about Morningstar’s lack of investment into Office but have avoided making a change due to the arduous process of switching to another platform). And while Black Diamond has cut a deal with Morningstar to be the ‘default’ option for Office advisors to move to, a host of other portfolio management platforms are offering their own incentives as well, leaving Morningstar Office advisors with an opportunity to evaluate a large and crowded landscape of options to find the platform that will work best for them (so they don’t have to endure another platform that they’re unhappy with simply because of the high cost of switching)
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- All-in-one portfolio management platform CircleBlack has acquired AssetBook, which was one of the few remaining standalone performance reporting tools on the market, in a move that was likely more about gaining AssetBook’s client base of small- and mid-size advisory firms than it was about acquiring new technology (given that CircleBlack already has a performance reporting solution on its existing platform) – which suggests that perhaps we’ve reached a saturation point in the portfolio management technology space where the most cost-effective way to get new clients is to acquire competing solutions, and perhaps heralds a forthcoming wave of consolidation in the crowded portfolio management category?
- Advisor-focused AI meeting note solution Jump has completed a $20 million funding round, which reinforces its status as the emerging market leader in the crowded AI meeting note category – a status that may only increase from here if AI meeting notes, like most established AdvisorTech categories, evolves into a “winner-take-all” market where the top 1-2 solutions gain the vast majority of market share (with the caveat that Jump still faces significant competition from free or less expensive general-purpose AI meeting note tools like Zoom and Fathom that could hinder its ability to fully dominate the category)
- Archive Intel, an AI-focused communications archiving and monitoring provider, has announced a $1.5 million funding round, highlighting the increasing need for solutions that can archive a wider range of client communications, including not just email and social media but also “off-channel” communications like SMS text and messaging apps like WhatsApp – raising the question of how many firms will be open to archiving those channels with access to a platform that can do so, rather than simply banning employees from using them altogether?
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- Datalign Advisory, a data-driven advisor lead generation platform, has raised $5 million, with the announcement underscoring the reality that despite the many complaints from advisors about the cost and quality of paid lead generation services, the demand for those services is still such that they can raise capital and increase their prices (as long as they can generate a reliable stream of prospective clients for the advisor to meet with)
- Estate planning and document preparation platforms Wealth.com and Vanilla each announced the launch of new capabilities for automatically summarizing and visualizing estate planning documents like wills and trusts, with the aim of streamlining the process of reviewing and updating documents – which, while addressing a common pain point for advisors in reading and summarizing estate planning documents, raises the question of how much advisors will trust AI tools to correctly interpret all but the simplest estate planning documents (which take the least amount of time for an advisor to do themselves, meaning the actual time savings of an automated tool might not really be all that great?)
And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular “Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map” (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!
*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to TechNews@kitces.com!