With the multi-trillion-dollar intergenerational wealth transfer underway, advisors who want to expand their estate planning offering now have a new platform.
FreeWill has launched Estately, a software solution to give advisors access to full-service estate planning services and both digital self-drafted and attorney drafted documents on one unified platform.
The firm, which has around one million Americans using its solution to create estate plans, has found that many advisors find challenges in offering estate planning services and often relying on multiple third-party software solutions.
“It is no surprise that estate planning has become the fastest growing software category for advisors,” said Jenny Xia Spradling, co-CEO, FreeWill, who said her firm is just getting started with its advisor-focused product.
Just 32% of Americans have an estate plan, according to Caring.com, while FreeWill’s own research from earlier this year revealed that while 69% of Americans agreed that estate planning is at least somewhat crucial, only 26% have taken steps to formulate a plan.
Estately enables a streamlined user journey with improved oversight and visibility into clients’ workflows and alignment with other elements of financial planning, and the ability for clients to complete and update their estate planning easily. It offers attorney coverage in all 50 states.
“As we’ve scaled FreeWill from an idea to the most popular online estate planning platform in the country, we continue to constantly receive inbounds from financial advisors who love our platform and want to use it with their clients,” added Spradling. “We began to recognize that existing solutions for estate planning don’t offer a drafting experience that covers all clients. We took the big leap to develop attorney drafting software in order to provide a scalable, consistent experience between attorneys and clients. We married that with our top-rated self-directed drafting technology to create the first truly integrated estate planning drafting platform.”
While the service is aimed at advisors to offer to clients, a recent report found that a quarter of advisors don't have their own estate plans.
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