As more advisors recognize the value of holistic planning in better serving and, perhaps more importantly, strengthening relationships with clients, the so-called ‘family office experience’ has become the industry’s new white whale.
In recognition of advisors’ desire to offer a more all-encompassing service, estate planning platform Wealth.com launched its new ‘Family Office Suite’ on Friday. It is purportedly tailored to the needs of firms that service high- and ultra-high-net-worth clients.
According to Wealth.com co-founder and CPO Danny Lohrfink, “Among the high-net-worth, there’s fundamentally an expectation that they’ll receive a family office level of care. That means addressing the entirety of the wealth picture, which includes estate planning.”
Perhaps the most glaring of those needs is the ability to take the disparate (and, to a layman, not immediately recognizable as relevant) threads that make up an estate plan and present them in a way that helps the client comprehend what it is trying to achieve and how it aims to do so.
Part of that is ensuring that the ultimate deliverable the advisor is presenting to the client is both attractive and comprehensive (the latter of which is no small feat when you’re dealing with some of the abstract concepts in an estate plan).
Features like Heritage Map, Legacy Navigator, EstateFlow and Irrevocable Trust One-Pagers look to help advisors demystify and bring to life estate planning nuances such as sub-trust distribution schemes, federal and state estate tax implications, generation-skipping transfer tax-exempt and non-exempt trust breakdowns. Additionally, for the largest estates, the Family Office Suite’s estate tax calculators and scenario analysis capabilities offer advisors the ability to quantify tax implications and identify tax optimization opportunities.
However, Lohrfink stresses that what happens behind the scenes to create that “pretty” deliverable is just as, if not more valuable, than the deliverable itself.
“If you think about what it takes to deliver for high-net-worth clients, there are three basic stages: 1) data collection; 2) structuring the data; and 3) taking these data points and formatting them into an attractive client deliverable,” Lohrfink said. “Other firms focus too heavily on step three; that’s not enough for us. We appreciate that the first two phases are what take up most of an advisor’s time.”
That’s where Wealth.com’s proprietary AI Ester helps simplify data collection by instantly extracting and storing key information from client planning documents.
“You upload the client’s documents and Ester extracts and instantly feeds the relevant information into back-end reports and client deliverables,” Lohrfink said. “What used to take weeks now takes minutes.”
It’s important to note that many (albeit not all) of these capabilities already exist separately within Wealth.com’s platform. The Family Office Suite is the “connective tissue,” according to Lohrfink, that allows them to more seamlessly work together to best service HNW clientele while ensuring scalability.
Speaking of scalability, the Family Office Suite is targeted solely at larger, enterprise-level users. Access to it unlocks at a minimum of 50 advisor licenses, and for existing enterprise users, an additional enterprise license fee will be required.
“This is Wealth.com putting our flag in the ground,” Lohrfink said. “We officially have no net worth ceiling or floor and can help advisors serve any and all levels of client.”