Wealthtech vendors embed AI agents deeper into advisor workflows

Amid a barrage of fintech announcements in the lead-up to the hotly anticipated Future Proof Festival next week, Vanilla, SS&C and FinTurk rolled out a raft of AI-driven upgrades aimed at reducing the manual work advisors do to spot problems in client accounts and portfolios.

The announcements, which cover a range of capabilities from autonomous monitoring agents to AI-assisted analytics, underscore how quickly agentic AI systems, which act on an advisor's behalf rather than simply answering questions, is moving from pilot projects into core platform features.

On the user side, firms are still grappling with how to translate their AI spend into measurable returns. Firms are spending more on the technology, but proving the payoff has been harder than expected, according to a recent report from F2 Strategy. Meanwhile, a separate benchmark study released this week by Cerulli Associates and Vista Equity Partners found that AI spending is projected to roughly double as a share of technology budgets in 2026, climbing from approximately 8% to approximately 15%.

Vanilla bills AI as coach, not decision-maker

Estate planning platform Vanilla announced the next phase of its AI assistant, VAI, which will scan an advisor's entire client roster rather than just the largest accounts, flagging issues such as unfunded trusts, outdated beneficiary designations and insurance gaps relative to a client's estate tax exposure.

The move builds on a partnership the company struck earlier this year with Carson Group, which brought Vanilla's estate planning tools to more than 600 advisors across the firm's nationwide network, and follows a March deal that added AI-native tax intelligence provider Worthy to Vanilla's growing roster of integration partners.

"We're evolving the platform to be agentic so AI can do the work advisors actually need done," said Gene Farrell, chief executive of Vanilla.

He said the system is designed to catch issues across an advisor's full book of business and hand back the underlying reasoning so the advisor can act with confidence, adding that "the advisor decides what to do about it, because they're the one with the relationship and the license."

Read more: The legal fine print behind estate planning tech: What RIAs need to know

The company said its extraction engine has already processed more than 60,000 estate documents and modeled more than 32,000 estates, and that the deterministic calculations behind those models remain unchanged even as AI agents extend the platform's reach.

Vanilla also said client-identifying data never reaches a language model, a point the company frames as central to its compliance posture, and one that echoes the firm's own patent-protected de-identification approach going back to its original VAI launch in 2023.

SS&C leans on governance for Black Diamond AI pitch

SS&C Technologies released Black Diamond AI, a set of AI features for its Black Diamond Wealth Solutions platform that includes an agentic assistant alongside more conventional natural-language data queries and proactive account summaries.

The suite runs on top of SS&C's existing AI Gateway governance platform, which anchors security, transparency and responsible-AI oversight across the company's broader AI portfolio. It's also built to work with the SS&C WorkHQ used by advisors and operations teams on the platform.

The rollout includes a feature the company calls Black Diamond Insights, which surfaces account summaries and trade analysis automatically, along with a natural-language query tool that lets users ask questions about client data in plain English – a convenience layer distinct from the platform's more autonomous assistant.

SS&C also introduced a Model Context Protocol server for Black Diamond, letting advisors pull the platform's data into whatever AI system their firm already uses rather than being confined to SS&C's own interface. 

Sean Hendler, director of performance reporting at HB Wealth, said the new server "fits perfectly into our broader AI strategy, allowing advisors to seamlessly integrate quality Black Diamond data with information from other key sources."

FinTurk targets portfolio construction and practice monitoring

FinTurk, the startup CRM built by advisors for advisors, launched two tools targeting a narrower slice of the advisor's workday: portfolio construction and task monitoring.

PortfolioSolver lets advisors describe constraints – tax considerations, cash needs, securities they don't want sold – in ordinary language, which the system converts into rules for a deterministic optimizer to build proposed trades against; the optimizer itself, notably, runs on fixed logic rather than autonomous reasoning. Each trade the system proposes comes with an explanation of its rationale, and the client's constraints stay attached to their record so they carry over into future rebalancing.

On the more agentic side of the stack, Vigil runs continuously in the background to flag failed data syncs, cash thresholds, stalled workflows and unanswered client emails without being prompted.

The dual launch announcement builds on a busy year of product expansion for the company, which took of with its advisor-built CRM in May before adding form-filling and cash-sweep automation tools in July.

Read more: Frustrated former advisor launches AI-powered CRM with $8B RIA client

"Having worked as an advisor myself, I know how much of the job is keeping track of what needs to happen next for every client, account and workflow," said Mitchell Bratina, FinTurk's founder and chief executive.

He said the goal is for the CRM to move beyond acting as a system of record toward one that helps advisors complete work directly, adding that the launch is meant to help registered investment advisors "operate more efficiently" and "increase revenue without adding headcount."