Baseline financial planning isn’t simplistic, but it is replicable.elenabs/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
The wealth management industry has spent years talking about financial planning as the anchor of the client relationship and its importance is now understood broadly among advisors and their clients. But at the same time, the definition of great financial planning is shifting.
Roughly four in 10 Canadians have a financial plan in place, according to a recent Ipsos survey of Canadians between the ages of 30 and 85 conducted for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. But the survey is mostly counting breadth rather than depth: goal-based, projection-oriented financial planning done well and at scale. Less than one-third of Canadians have an estate plan.
Meanwhile, according to Fidelity Investments Canada ULC’s 2026 Fidelity Retirement Report, only 8 per cent of pre-retirees have a detailed, written decumulation plan and less than half of retirees have any decumulation strategy at all (that they know of).
That means the closer planning gets to the parts of life that are genuinely complicated, the less of it there is, whether it’s decumulation, longevity and health span, business succession, tax planning, detailed estate decisions, family support and intergenerational wealth transfer.
Although baseline financial planning isn’t simplistic, it is replicable. Canadian financial planning software company Conquest Planning Inc. says it supports more than 60,000 advisors at 1,000 institutions and has produced more than 2.5-million financial plans.
It’s fair to say nobody is skipping financial planning in their strategy. The question is whether that’s enough to keep up with what the best wealth platforms will build.
In the U.S., the next version of financial planning is emerging with real capital behind it. Vanguard Group Inc. entered into an agreement in August to buy wealthtech and custody platform Altruist Corp. for a reported US$4-billion, the asset manager’s largest-ever acquisition.
There was little doubt Vanguard was paying a premium for Altruist’s Hazel AI financial planning tool; weeks later, Hazel AI shipped a financial planning agent covering retirement, cash flow, estate, taxes, insurance and investment optimization.
At the Future Proof conference in Huntington Beach, Calif., last month, you could hear a pin drop when Anthropic AI launched a tool for financial advisors that connects its Claude chatbot to wealth management software from Charles Schwab Corp. and other firms. (No Canadian custodian was on the list yet.) Another U.S. firm, Savvy Wealth Management LLC, built financial planning data into its system of record rather than bolting it on.
Meanwhile, Conquest rebranded last month around verifiable AI advice, backed by deterministic calculation and an auditable trail.
The new brand and positioning matter more than they may seem. Clients are arriving at meetings with fully formed financial plans for their advisor to review. That’s unsettling because the assumptions and the data behind those plans, built with a general-purpose AI such as ChatGPT or Claude, can’t be checked easily. (Notice the language used in Conquest’s rebrand: verifiable.) A financial plan you can’t explain in detail becomes a liability; and in a regulated Canadian channel, that isn’t a technical footnote. It may end up being the most important part of the value proposition.
If a client can get a competent financial plan from a general-purpose AI, the tools that firms equip their advisors with to prepare financial plans for their clients must be better than competent. The financial plans these tools produce must be traceable and reflect the client’s actual life. Financial planning technology will keep improving, but what matters is whether people can see themselves – their specific circumstances – in the financial plan in front of them.
The value of financial planning isn’t changing, but managing the data and what advisors do with a financial plan once it’s live are becoming more important. Every firm has felt the constraint of too many forms, too many questions, too many inputs and too much of it going stale between meetings.
A wealth management executive once described that as putting boulders in advisors’ backpacks. The integration projects of the past decade were largely attempts to move client data into a discrete application without breaking it. And we know advisors struggle to use the technology they have today, let alone keep pace with what’s arriving around them.
So, as basic financial planning on its own no longer sets advisors apart, personalized financial planning matters more. That should be exciting for advisors as long as they’re equipped with the appropriate tech stack. The differentiator moves from having a financial plan to what you can do with it: how personal it is, how often it comes into the conversation and whether it truly helps when the client is facing decisions without an obvious answer.
Kendra Thompson is founder and principal of Epok Advice, a Toronto-based consulting firm for the wealth management industry.