For many decades, communicating with clients via phone didn't require much in the way of technology other than the phone itself. An advisor would have a business line connected to their office, and if they needed to get ahold of a client (or vice versa) all they had to do was pick up the phone and dial. An advisor might (if they were very close with their clients) give out their home phone number in case the client needed to get ahold of them in the evening, but that was about as complicated as it got: As long as the advisor had a Rolodex of their clients' phone numbers, and business cards with their own number to give to clients, there were no other systems to create friction in making telephone calls to and from clients.
Things started to change after the advent of cellular phones, however. Now advisors could be reachable to clients at all times on a single phone number, whether they were in the office or at home or anywhere in between. On its own, that wasn't necessarily a problem – some advisors might not have been comfortable giving out their personal cell number, but others embraced the newfound potential to be more intimately connected with their clients. But concurrent with the rise of cellphones was the rise of text messaging, and that raised a host of new issues. Because unlike voice-only phone communication, texting is a form of written communication – which per SEC and state regulations, must be archived for compliance purposes. At first, a lot of firms to simply forbade their advisors from texting with clients to avoid the headache of archiving and reviewing client text messages from each advisor's phone (especially since those phones also likely contained personal messages that would need to be filtered out from the client ones). But over time, as texting gradually became one of the predominant channels for people to communicate with each other, there was increasing pressure for advisors to be able to text with clients in order to communicate on a more personal and less formal level than the "official" business communications channel (which by and large has remained email). Which is important in a personal relationship-based business where one element of building that relationship is connecting with clients on the level that they prefer.
The issue, however, was that because the compliance considerations for voice calling and text messaging were so different, the technology for each evolved along different lines. Advisors who wanted to use a separate business phone number on their cellphone for client purposes rather than giving out their personal number could use a VoIP solution like Google Voice, RingCentral, or Zoom Phone – with the caveat that as general-purpose solutions, they generally don't connect to advisor-specific software like CRM or compliance archiving tools, making them hard to use compliantly for texting. And while advisor-specific texting solutions like MyRepChat emerged to make it easier to archive text messages specifically, they tended not to integrate well into the broader phone ecosystem (e.g., requiring a separate phone number for texts versus phone calls) and had clunky apps which ultimately undermined the utility of having an easy, informal communications channel for clients.
Into this environment came CurrentClient in 2022, which aimed to create a more modern and unified phone and texting solution for financial advisors. Advisors connect a dedicated business phone number to CurrentClient – either by porting in an existing phone number or by setting up a new one created by CurrentClient – and conduct all their client calls and texting through the single dedicated app. The app connects to CRMs like Wealthbox, Redtail, Salesforce, and Slant to log individual client communications. It also stores text messages and sends them to compliance review tools like Hadrius, Greenboard, and Archive Intel, and allows for scheduled messages like automated post-meeting follow-ups or birthday greetings. All of which represented a significant step up over the existing options in its user-friendliness, connections with advisor-specific tools, and additional client engagement features (as evidenced by CurrentClient winning the "Best In Show" award in the AdviceTech Competition at the 2024 XYPN Live conference).
And now CurrentClient has raised $1.25 million in seed funding in a capital raise led by Thicket Ventures, which CurrentClient will use to put resources towards sales to scale up its growth (having already hired away the head of sales from the AI prospecting provider FINNY, which has gone through its own period of growth and scaling in the last two years). It also plans to build on the AI capabilities that are currently sold as add-ons to the core phone and texting solution, such as automated transcripts and summaries of client calls through the app, AI call screening and routing, and an AI "receptionist" to pick up calls when the advisor isn't available.
This latest fundraise provides some validity to the idea that CurrentClient is solving a real pain point for advisors by creating a unified phone and texting system that plugs into advisor-specific CRM and compliance tools. Which sounds simple enough, but sometimes innovation is just recognizing when a system that's grown over the years to become the status quo is different from what it would look like if it were built up from the ground up today… and then actually building it. It's a credit to CurrentClient that it saw the problem and built the solution to solve for it, without trying to do too much beyond that. The question from here will be whether the initial success of CurrentClient will spawn any competition, either from existing players like MyRepChat (which recently released its own update to modernize its interface, though it's still predominantly a texting tool) or from other startups who rise up in CurrentClient's wake.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-may2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
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 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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