One thing that many financial advisors learn when they work with a variety of client types is that the planning challenges don't necessarily get more or less complex as clients go up and down the income and net worth spectrum, they just become different kinds of complex. A client with $50,000 of assets and one with $50 million of assets both have planning challenges and problems to solve, and though the scale of the problems might be different between the two – e.g., the $50,000 client is much more likely to be worried about running out of money in retirement than the $50 million client – they're problems all the same, and both types of clients may be equally willing to pay advisors who can solve them.
One of the common complexities for clients on the higher end of the net worth spectrum has to do with paying for things. UHNW clients might have their assets spread out across dozens of different accounts – multiple types of personal and business bank accounts, revocable and irrevocable trusts, retirement and taxable investment accounts, etc. Different accounts might be designated for different types of expenses: One account might be used to pay a large tax bill, another to meet a capital call for a private fund, one to invest in real estate, and yet another for big personal purchases like cars or jewelry. And rather than take the time to keep everything straight themselves, UHNW families might be happy to delegate the job of managing payments to someone else who can be trusted to know the rules and effectively handle the client's cash management needs.
Hence, advisory firms that serve UHNW clients sometimes offer "billpay" (i.e., payment management) as a value-added service. But there are many moving parts involved – the rules for which accounts can be used for what, vendor and invoice management processes, approval workflows, cash flow reporting, etc. – which has historically made payment management a fairly time- and staff-intensive service to offer. As a result, billpay has been mostly offered as a kind of concierge service by firms that serve an ultra-ultra-high-net-worth segment of clients (e.g., $100 million of assets and up) who are willing to pay enough to make it cost-effective.
However, two different providers that have each announced capital raises this month provide examples of how advisors can offer billpay and other cash management services with less overhead cost.
The first is Aquilance, which has operated for nearly 40 years as an outsourced bookkeeper and billpay service for UHNW families, which recently announced a $16 million investment and strategic partnership with Ten Coves Capital. Aquilance approaches payment management as more of an outsourced service enabled by technology, with its own staff of accountants and bookkeepers who can work in conjunction with an advisor's team to provide the service without needing an internal staff to support it. Although notably, Ten Coves Capital is generally known as a technology investor (including an investment in the business financial operations platform Bill.com). Which could either mean that Aquilance is looking to further streamline its outsourced services through technology (while still retaining its fundamental nature as an outsourced, human-staffed service), or it could be aiming to launch a 'pure' technology offering that advisors' teams can use themselves to facilitate billpay for clients.
Representing the other approach to billpay is Atomic Insights, a newer startup that is already in the 'pure' technology category and has announced its own $10 million seed funding round led by Aquiline, with participation from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures. As a tech-only offering, Atomic Insights connects to the advisor's custodians, CRM, and portfolio management software and facilitates workflows by which advisory teams initiate money movements, manage vendors and invoices, log approvals, and send wire or ACH transfer instructions to the custodian. Meaning that the advisory firm needs to have its own staff to manage the process, but it can now be handled in a continuous workflow on a single platform rather than needing to switch between systems and make various manual handoffs between staff members.
With both of these providers, the end goal is to reduce the amount of overhead cost needed to offer billpay and payment management as a service for clients, which could have the add-on effect of making it more viable to provide those services to a wider range of clients. And the fact that both are now backed by eight-figure venture capital investments suggests that investors also believe that the future of billpay might not be just for a tiny segment of UHNW clients anymore, but that there's instead potential to bring it downmarket to a bigger range of 'mere' HNW clients – and that the natural magnetism pulling advisory firms towards offering more value-added services to go upmarket will entice more advisors to offer billpay going forward.
But what's yet to be seen is how far downmarket billpay services can conceivably go. At some point on the net worth scale, the complexity of a client's balance sheet and cash flow needs decreases enough that managing payments ceases to be a pain point that they're willing to pay someone else to solve for them (or at least as much as an advisor would need to charge to make it worth offering). If technology or tech-streamlined services can reduce that breakpoint from, say, $100 million in assets down to $10 million, that could open up a meaningful new market for advisors to offer billpay as a service. But if it 'only' reduces the threshold down to $50 million, will there be that many more advisors willing to offer billpay to be worth the investment?
Ultimately, what's clear is that there's some attention from technology providers and their investors in the kinds of services that advisors are offering to UHNW clients and the possibility of bringing that downmarket to a bigger segment of the industry. As advisory firms – particularly PE-funded acquirers – increasingly seek to go upmarket, it's conceivable that they'll be enticed by the ability to offer concierge-style payment services as a differentiator. Or to put it differently, when the technology seeks to bring billpay downmarket, and when RIAs look to go upmarket, they'll eventually both meet somewhere in the middle.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-feb2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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