FP Alpha adds AI agent for future tax scenario planning

FP Alpha has upgraded its Tax Projector tool so advisors can generate tax insights based on potential future client scenarios, plus a new AI chat interface that helps optimize those scenarios beyond limiting analysis to past-year tax returns. 

The Tax Projector Scenario Insights feature generates tax implications on future what-if client decisions, such as Roth conversions, selling a house or other major asset, income changes, or moving between states. Advisors can build out these scenarios and receive projected outcomes through prompting FP Alpha’s new Tax Projector Agent, an AI chat function. 

“Instead of just running analysis and insights based off the past tax return year 2025, you can take custom 2026 scenarios,” Rachel Schwab, head of product at FP Alpha, told InvestmentNews. “Maybe you combined selling a house, charitable giving, a child. How is one person supposed to keep all that straight? But the insights run through everything for you — deductions, credits, retirement contribution.” 

The AI analysis includes calculating projections on long‑term versus short‑term capital gains, and optimizing client strategies, such as sizing Roth conversions and adjusting contribution levels to make use of space within targeted tax brackets. Advisors can use Tax Projector for other obscure scenarios, like projecting the tax earnings impacts of an athlete client winning a medal at the Olympics.  

“We do have a full lifetime analysis Roth conversion simulator, so I always suggest that people use that,” said Schwab, who was a product manager at Vanguard before joining FP Alpha. “At the end of the day, the Roth conversion makes this [tax] number red. A lot of times, advisors don’t like to make that number red because clients don’t like to see that number red. But that's part of tax planning. It's not always about lowering your taxes year after year. It's about managing your taxes throughout your lifetime.” 

Tax planning software surges

According to the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, advisor use of tax planning software climbed to 52.53% this year, up more than 11 percentage points over three years. That survey pinned Holistiplan as the market share leader in tax planning software, followed by Tax Status and FP Alpha. Other fintechs with AI tax-planning products include Worthy, April, and Hazel from Altruist, which Vanguard just acquired for $4.6 billion.  

“CPAs use a totally different set of software, like Drake and other software that absolutely require you have in-depth tax form knowledge and filing knowledge to use. Our tool was built for financial advisors and meant to be used by financial advisors,” said Schwab.  

FP Alpha’s founder and CEO is Andrew Altfest, who runs the startup alongside being president of his family’s New York-based RIA Altfest Personal Wealth Management. 

Schwab says that, “right now, there's not going to be an extra cost or a pay block” for advisors to access FP Alpha’s upgraded tax features but admitted that pricing models remain fluid as large-language model providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google’s Gemini tinker with their own pricing and usage rates. 

“Everyone is trying to figure out how to price their AI moving forward because it relies on these baseline large-language models to operate, and they haven't figured out their pricing models,” said Schwab. “One model is more expensive than the other because it uses more credits. This is like a mind game that all these companies using these models now need to play when they're figuring out how much to charge, or if to charge users to use the features that rely on those models.”