Conquest opens AI planning engine to independent advisors

Conquest opens AI planning engine to independent advisors
Self-serve access to Strategic Advice Manager promises onboarding in days, as RIAs weigh how deep to take AI adoption.
SEP 14, 2026

Conquest, the Winnipeg-based fintech behind the Strategic Advice Manager (SAM) planning engine, is opening its platform directly to independent advisors and registered investment advisors for the first time.

The move announced Monday ends a model that had largely confined the technology to firms large enough to negotiate custom enterprise deals.

Following the update, firms with 10 advisors or fewer can now buy a subscription directly through its website or start a free trial, with digital onboarding designed to take days rather than the weeks or months typical of an enterprise rollout. The self-serve tier is already in testing with a select group of independent advisors and is expected to widen in the coming months, initially catering to practices in the United States only.

Ken Lotocki, Conquest's chief product officer, said the shift was a response to sustained inbound interest from smaller firms that "was too consistent to ignore.

"Advisors want access to verifiable AI so they can provide personalized, compliant financial guidance in a fraction of the time," Lotocki said of the new independent RIA offering.

At launch, the self-serve offering connects with a small circle of partners, including Jump, Morningstar, Schwab Advisor Services, TradePMR by Robinhood and Zocks.

Tim Chaves, president and chief operating officer of Jump, said the pairing was meant to reduce friction for smaller shops. "Independent advisors should have access to the same sophisticated technology as the industry's largest firms, without lengthy implementation cycles or added operational complexity," Chaves said.

Once onboarded, advisors may use SAM to rank financial strategies, model life events and answer client questions, with each recommendation tied to what the company describes as a deterministic, auditable calculation trail rather than a black-box output.

The self-serve launch comes on the heels of Conquest's rebrand from Conquest Planning, which the firm said is meant to signal a philosophical expansion beyond traditional plan-building software. The Canada-based fintech was moving in that direction as early as July, when it integrated with Shaping Wealth's behavioral intelligence agent, Lydia, to bring behavioral coaching directly into its planning platform 

"Financial advice was never meant to be static," Conquest chief executive Brad Joudrie said of the rebrand. "Clients' lives change constantly, and the advice they receive should be able to keep pace."

Earlier this year, it struck a deal with Advisor360 struck a deal to embed Conquest's engine directly into its own platform without requiring advisors to secure a separate license.

The rush to own turf within RIAs' tech stacks is set to heat up, as Schwab's latest RIA Benchmarking Study found 83% of independent firms with at least $250 million in AUM now use some form of AI, most commonly for administrative tasks (cited by 65% of firms) followed by developing client correspondence (49 percent) and generating marketing content (48%). Nearly two-thirds (63%) of RIAs now use AI in some capacity, more than double the share reported two years earlier, even though most firms remain in the early stages of implementation.

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