Financial advisors often like to be involved in planning for all of the major events in their clients' financial lives, from buying a house to having children to planning for retirement. But there may be areas where the advisor is less directly involved in implementing the advice than others. Many advisors are hired and paid to manage their clients' investments, so naturally most investment-related decisions are likely to be implemented by the advisor. In areas like tax, estate planning, and insurance, there is often enough overlap in knowledge between financial advisors and professionals in those fields for the advisor to take at least some hands-on involvement in analyzing options and making specific recommendations (though many advisors are also careful to avoid giving tax or legal advice, and refer the advice and implementation out to an appropriate specialist when needed).
But there are other areas where it's still rarer for advisors to get directly involved, and one of these is obtaining mortgages and other (non-portfolio-related) debt. This is partly for structural reasons, as mortgage brokers need to be licensed through NMLS and few advisors have enough clients needing a new mortgage at any given time to make it work obtaining and maintaining a mortgage broker license. Plus, with financial advisors more likely to come from a securities, tax, or insurance background than mortgage and banking, they may not be as comfortable getting in-depth into the ins and outs of one particular mortgage offer versus another, and so will prefer to refer out the whole analysis to a knowledgeable broker (who will ultimately be the one who gets paid for the conversation one way or another).
The one potential exception, though, is when the advisor is able to get the client access to a better interest rate on their mortgage than they would otherwise be able to find on the retail market. Because in a mostly commoditized mortgage market, the interest rate for a given mortgage term will in all likelihood be the deciding factor in choosing one mortgage over another. However, it's rare for an advisor to actually be able to connect a client with a better mortgage rate than they could find from a knowledgeable broker, because mortgage rates are for the most part set by forces outside of the broker's control – e.g., 10-year Treasury rates, plus the various spreads collected by those who originate the loan, service it, and package it into a mortgage-backed security for investors.
It's notable, then, that Flourish – a technology company that has specialized in building advisor-facing marketplaces for financial products, starting with cash management accounts and later adding annuities – has now launched Flourish Lending, a platform where advisors can help clients review potential mortgage options and then work with one of Flourish's in-house loan officers to originate the loan.
The new platform's launch is the culmination of Flourish's acquisition in April 2025 of the “liability management as a service” platform Sora Finance. While Sora also allowed advisors to help clients compare rates, monitor for refinancing opportunities, and apply for and close mortgages within the software, it struggled to gain traction with advisors because at the end of the day it was simply comparing market interest rates – which could also be accomplished by referring the client to a mortgage broker without the need for the advisor to get involved at all. And so the question was whether Flourish would be able to achieve better rates than what could be found on the retail market, which would actually drive advisors to use it as a tangible value-add.
The launch of Flourish Lending in March appears to answer that question in the affirmative, with one of the platform's key features being interest rates that average around 0.5% below the national average, giving advisors on the Flourish Lending platform (and their clients by extension) access to below-market interest rates. It appears that Flourish can achieve this by bypassing the “retail” layer of mortgage lending and working directly with the capital markets providers that are traditionally the secondary buyers of mortgages after they've been originated by the primary lender – effectively removing the layer of fees collected by originators from the retail interest rate.
What's interesting is that Flourish Lending's launch comes soon after the emergence of other 'synthetic' lending platforms like SyntheticFi and Vest Synthetic Borrow, which allow individuals to take out portfolio-backed loans via box spreads that have even lower effective interest rates than what's on the Flourish platform. Notably, these products might not compete with each other directly: box spread loans tend to have terms of five years or less compared to the traditional 15- or 30-year mortgage, and it might even possible to combine the two, e.g., by taking out a box spread loan to cover the down payment while taking out a traditional mortgage via Flourish lending to finance the remainder of the purchase price. But they do represent a growing trend of technology providers starting to recognize that it isn't always enough for technology to facilitate comparing or analyzing different products or strategies to help clients come up with the 'best' choice – particularly when the planning area in question isn't one that's central to the advisor's focus. Instead, the winning formula might just be what the technology can do to help the advisor get the client the best rates – either on cash management or annuities such as in Flourish's previous offerings, or on loan interest as in Flourish Lending or the growing number of synthetic loan options.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-june2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
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