Meet the Future of Financial Tech: Winners of AdviceTech of XYPN LIVE 2024

"XYPN has been at the forefront of fee-for-service financial planning since we were founded 10 years ago, and we knew that supporting new business models in financial planning to serve new clientele meant also supporting new technology that didn't yet exist in the industry. So we founded our AdviceTech competition specifically to help create a space for new up-and-coming tech vendors to get seen and noticed by our XYPN membership for the AdviceTech they're building,"

Michael Kitces

XYPN Executive Chairman Michael Kitces

Each year, the XYPN LIVE AdviceTech Competition showcases the leading tech solutions of tomorrow in a live, 7-minute-pitch-style competition. For 2024, XYPN expanded the scope of the competition to any technology built to support real Financial Advicers in:

• Serving their clients
• Running more efficient and profitable practices, OR
• Growing their reach

To participate, companies had to have launched in the past 12 months, or the company (or its new offering) must still be below $1M in annual recurring revenue. 

Michael Kitces, Director of Partnerships for XYPN David Bowman, and a committee of XYPN members evaluated more than two dozen initial submissions to determine the six finalists who offered the most promising and dynamic new tools to enhance advisors’ practices. Given AdviceTech's pace of innovation in the past 12 months, the field was packed with exciting new solutions, and competition was fierce.

At XYPN LIVE 2024, a panel of noteworthy industry-expert judges selected the AdviceTech Competition Best in Show, and the Advicer’s Choice was chosen by the true financial planners in attendance evaluating new solutions for their own firms. 

The judges panel consisted of:

• Michael Kitces, XYPN Executive Chairman Michael Kitces
• Craig Iskowitz, Founder and CEO of Ezra Group
• Justin Wisz, Founder, Investor, Advisor of Thicket Ventures
• Rachel Witkowski, Tech/AI Reporter at Financial Planning 

WealthTech expert and commentator Bill Winterberg was the event’s distinguished master of ceremonies and kept the action rolling.

"After 8 years, though, the AdviceTech competition has gone far beyond 'just' XYPN members. Prior winners Snappy Kraken, Vestwell, Holistiplan, and Income Lab have grown far beyond the startup phase and are now widely adopted in the industry, and we're incredibly excited for CurrentClient to join the prestigious ranks of XYPN AdviceTech competition winners!"

Michael Kitces

XYPN Executive Chairman Michael Kitces

Best in Show

Following the process of blind voting by the judges, the Best In Show winner was clear: CurrentClient. 

CurrentClient debuted a compliant texting solution for advisors designed to reimagine this category's user experience and capabilities. With both web-based and mobile apps, CurrentClient provides an elegant and enjoyable experience in a space long overdue for a more modern approach. It takes the advisor-texting experience from possible to easy and intuitive. With the obvious convenience of interacting with your advisor and the fact that you are accustomed to communicating (via mobile text messaging), CurrentClient enhances the advisor’s ability to stay in compliant contact with clients and prospects more naturally. 

“It was so obvious to us that the advisors we talked to at XYPN LIVE care about going all in to help their clients. This is what CurrentClient is all about, and we can't think of a better conference to be our first as a launchpad to announce to the industry that we are here and building something advisors love.”

Dustin Belliston

CurrentClient Founder

Advicer’s Choice

This year’s Advicer’s Choice, a Salesforce overlay for comprehensive financial planners, Quivr CRM is designed to help its users implement and partially automate their entire service calendar, emphasizing efficiency and accuracy.

In his presentation, co-founder Steve Drost highlighted the potentially devastating cost of letting a single promised client deliverable fall through the cracks, a risk his company aims to eliminate with their solution. Steve, a practicing advisor himself, also shared that this new CRM design and approach allow a team’s administrative staff to ensure that never happens, with minimal oversight from the advisor. He returned the praise to XYPN and its members for their support of Quivr’s work.

“As advisors, we are especially honored and grateful to be recognized by our peers. This community has been very kind and supportive, and we are thrilled to help real planners transform their practices and clients’ lives.”

Steve Drost

Quivr Co-Founder

The two winners received an array of momentum-boosting prizes for their excellence, along with bragging rights for joining the prestigious ranks of past competition victors. Simply making the finalists stage was a noteworthy accomplishment in itself. 

The 2024 Finalists 

• CurrentClient - Best in Show
  
• Quivr CRM - Advicer’s Choice
  
• FinMate AI
• Trayecto
• Jump AI
• Testimonial iQ

The competition also felt the pervasive emergence of AI applications in the AdviceTech space. AI notetakers and workflow tools Jump AI and FinMate presented distinct approaches to preparing for, documenting, analyzing, and implementing client and prospect meetings and other touch points. Perhaps the most in-demand application of AI so far in the advisor’s tech suite, these meeting-workflow efficiency platforms both showed impressive and thoughtful designs built specifically with real planners in mind.  

Trayecto, a financial planning platform designed to address how modern workers earn and allocate money, reimagined how to analyze financial planning for today’s clients. Its in-depth tax insights on equity compensation and other income-related events were front and center and especially novel.

Finally, Testimonial iQ made a strong case for the power of regular, authentic Google reviews to catapult advisors’ websites into their location-specific top-three organic search results. They highlighted the emerging regulatory opportunity for client reviews to help level the online playing field for smaller firms with larger wirehouses and broker-dealers. They shared their low-lift solution for compliant-friendly testimonials. 

"I think the theme of this competition was boldness. Trayecto and Quivr are offering new takes on mission-critical workflows in planning and CRM and are going up against deep-seated players there. CurrentClient demoed a solution to the fundamental problem of texting clients with new tech against legacy players. I was impressed with all their willingness to go toe-to-toe with the competition for best-of-breed products. In terms of innovation, Testimonial iQ is a pretty obvious upgrade for all advisors now that the SEC allows it, and FinMate and Jump are at the forefront of AI notetaking, which is quickly becoming a table stakes for advisors. XYPN assembled a group of solutions that every advisor should be looking at.”

Justin Wisz

Founder, Investor, Advisor of Thicket Ventures