Bento Engine, the proactive and predictive events startup serving advisors announced Friday the launch of a Children & Wealth program, which will be demonstrated during a webinar with CRM provider Wealthbox on Nov. 22.
The new tool was built to address both a mega-trend and business opportunity for advisors that has been discussed for years—The Great Wealth Transfer—and a distressing societal fact, a near complete lack of financial education for kids.
Backing up, Bento, launched in 2021, is meant to provide advisors with automated and proactive advice and in turn generate pre-approved client-specific content for advice-driven RIA firms.
It already integrates with several popular customer relationship management applications commonly used by advisors, including Microsoft Dynamics, Practifi, Redtail, Salesforce (and the Salesforce overlay XLR8) and Wealthbox.
Simply put, with the new Children & Wealth program, pre-built, age-appropriate educational content intended for both parents and their kids (ages 4 to 18) is triggered by age- and event-related dates in an advisor’s CRM.
The Children & Wealth content was created with Susan Doty, a fellow of the University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers who serves as director of the Center for Economic Education & Financial Literacy at University of Texas at Tyler, and Mac Gardner, CEO of financial literacy platform FinLit Tech.
To date, Bento has launched two other milestone-related toolsets, Life in Numbers and Life Events, that deliver relevant, timely and actionable information based on life milestones and age markers (again, pulled from an advisor’s CRM system).
Bento announced an initial seed round of $1 million in June that included a who’s who roster from within the RIA, technology and consultancy sectors—from industry consultant Gavin Spitzner, to Marty Bicknell and Shannon Eusey, CEOs of Mariner Wealth and Beacon Pointe Advisors, to Anton Honikman, CEO of MyVest, and Kelly Waltrich, former CMO of Orion Advisor Solutions.
In August Bento lost one of its co-founders, longtime financial services executive Gregory Quental, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 62.
LPL Adds Holistiplan
Tax planning software provider Holistiplan announced it joined LPL’s Vendor Affinity Program, providing the independent broker/dealer’s just over 20,000 advisors with discounted access to the technology.
From conversations about tax brackets and potential penalties to Roth conversions and Medicare premium surcharges, the tax software was built to help systematize and automate the process of reviewing a client’s tax return to find potential planning opportunities.
Holistiplan, which launched in July 2019, competed in and won XY Planning Network’s 2019 XY Planning Network’s fintech competition. Since that time the planning software has added thousands of users and counts Carson Wealth among many its customers.
While the discounted pricing was not disclosed in the announcement, the tax planning software’s regular listed pricing starts at $450 annually for its “Standard” offering up to $999 annually for its Premium offering and beyond for larger firms in need of its Premium Plus features.
LPL’s Vendor Affinity Program, which is a centralized repository of vendors that have agreed to provide their products and services to LPL advisors at discounted prices, launched in 2015. It now includes over 70 third-party technology applications, tools and platforms with varying degrees of integration to the IBD’s core ClientWorks platform and other technology.
UHNW at UBS get Addepar
UBS announced the launch of a new offering for their ultra-high-net-worth clients in collaboration with Addepar and Mirador.
With the new partnership, UBS advisors will be able to get a more holistic view of UHNW client holdings, from illiquid assets and alternatives to the more mundane stocks and bonds within their portfolios.
Addepar’s technology will help advisors both analyze and visualize a client’s portfolio performance, along with cash flows and assess risk.
It has been a big couple of weeks for Addepar, which also added HSBC as a customer for their consolidated client performance reporting platform.
Addepar added RBC Wealth Management-U.S. as a client earlier this year and acquired the independent rebalancing and trading technology platform AdvisorPeak in October 2021.