Gateway Financial Planners, a registered investment advisor, will begin offering its clients estate planning as a result of its recently announced strategic partnership with estate planning platform Wealth.com.
The partnership means that the Glastonbury, Conn.-based firm’s 170 advisors can use Wealth.com’s comprehensive platform, which includes access to standard estate planning documents such as wills, trusts, healthcare directives and other things.
It also includes flowcharts and reports of estate plans so advisors can show their clients their plan in an easy-to-read format, according to Tim White, chief partnership officer at Phoenix-based Wealth.com.
Using artificial intelligence and other machine-learning technology, the system scans an individual's estate planning documents and extracts important information. It then takes that information and creates a visual presentation of it in the form of flow charts, graphs, or other illustrations, White explained.
“We instantaneously create a visualization report that walks through key roles, definitions, flowcharts, everything that is in the estate plan into a visualization report that’s easy to consume for the household,” he said in an interview.
Gateway’s advisors can now provide estate planning to their more than 60,000 clients and better serve them, but David Wood, founder and chief visionary officer at Gateway, sees it as an opportunity to serve future clients as well.
“Because that advisor is now involved more holistically in the estate planning process, with the client, I think that really lends itself to keeping those assets in the next generation,” he said in an interview.
All of Gateway’s advisors will have use of the platform, although the firm will take time to roll it out to everyone, Wood explained. In the meantime, each advisor will receive training from a representative from Wealth.com on how to properly use the technology, according to White.
The demand for estate planning has been growing among family offices, one group that Gateway is looking to cater to with this partnership, Wood said.
Investors are placing greater demand on their advisors to offer more services, and Gateway saw the partnership as a way to do that.
“I think advisors who are just doing conventional wealth management are really going to become extinct,” Wood said. “Advisors today need to provide a very differentiated client experience, and that client experience needs to involve financial planning, it needs to involve estate planning and it needs to go much deeper into that client relationship, because I think the competition in the industry is getting a lot better.”