Financial Advisory Firms
Your clients can get portfolio management from an app. The planning relationship is yours.
Sell comprehensive planning as a flat subscription. Facet and Domain Money already sell it directly to consumers.
The pressure financial advisory firms are facing right now.
Fee Compression
AUM-based fees are under pressure as robo-advisors and direct indexing platforms deliver portfolio management at a fraction of the cost.
Planning Commoditization
AI planning tools give clients 80% of basic financial planning at no cost, compressing the value of your planning engagement.
Client Consolidation
Clients are consolidating advisors and comparing fees as aggregation platforms make switching easy.
$1.97T
in assets is now managed by robo-advisors.
Statista, 2025
0.30%
is Vanguard’s advisory fee, roughly a third of the industry’s 1%.
Vanguard / NerdWallet
82%
of Gen Z and millennial AI users have sought AI financial advice.
Intuit Credit Karma, 2025
Assessment
See how your firm compares.
Eight minutes. You get an assessment showing where your firm has real commercial gaps, how you compare to peers in your vertical, and a report you can take to your next partner meeting.
See where you standWhat firms like yours are designing in the Workshop.
Most firms feel the itch and start experimenting: a few tools, a pilot, a project that looked promising on paper. The expensive version is finding out a year in that clients won’t pay for it. Whether you’re still deciding where to start or already two pilots in, the Workshop narrows what you take to your clients before you commit more budget to building it.
Every engagement is different. Your team’s domain expertise is the input. These are the kinds of offerings financial advisory firms leave with, specified and priced. Your team tests them with named clients, then builds what earns it.
Subscription comprehensive planning
A flat monthly or annual fee for comprehensive planning with AI in the workflow, sold separately from portfolio management.
Tax-aware investment management
Direct indexing plus a structured annual tax-planning cycle, priced as a discrete service tied to client-realized tax outcomes rather than bundled into the investment management fee.
AI-augmented estate planning advisory
Document intake and AI summarization, advisor-led strategy and beneficiary review, attorney coordination, priced per engagement or as a planning retainer.
Related reading
Your Clients Are Building What You Sell
When your client builds the work you used to sell them, you can’t out-invest them or compete on price. You change what you sell, or you lose the account.
Outcome Pricing Captures the Upside. Hourly Pricing Doesn’t.
Clients expect AI to cut your costs. But 100% would pay more for advisory that generates more value. The question is which side of that equation you’re on.
Questions
AUM-fee compression is now in advisors’ own forecasts. Cerulli reports 83% of advisors will charge less than 1% for $5M+ clients by 2026. Global robo-advisor AUM reached $1.97 trillion in 2025 (Statista). Vanguard charges 0.30%, less than one-third of the industry average, and manages $312 billion in advisory assets.
Subscription comprehensive planning, priced separately from AUM. Facet and Domain Money already sell this directly to consumers. Tax-aware wealth transition for multi-generational families. Business-owner liquidity event advisory priced on complexity, not assets. Executive compensation optimization on a subscription. Niche advisors earn $660,000 versus $395,000 for generalists at the 90th percentile (Kitces Research).
Robo-advisors unbundled portfolio management at 0.20–0.30%. Most RIAs still charge ~1% AUM for a bundle of portfolio management and planning. Firms that have unbundled and priced planning as a standalone offering earn 40% more at the 90th percentile (Kitces). The bundle is the constraint.
82% of Gen Z and millennial GenAI users have already sought AI financial advice (Intuit Credit Karma, September 2025). Vanguard moved 0.30% advisory to scale. Facet and Domain Money sell flat-fee subscription planning directly to consumers. Relationships stay; portfolios move to whoever charges less for the same thing.
322 RIA M&A deals closed in 2025, a record. 49% of acquirers are PE-backed consolidators, up from 39% in 2024 (DeVoe & Company). Acquirers are buying for AUM, not advisory relationships. Firms that have productized advisory have a story acquirers don’t yet know how to price.
Only 38% of legal, financial, and tax/accounting professionals use specialized GenAI tools; 60%+ don’t (BCG, 2025). 54% of financial services respondents expect to use GenAI for quantitative analysis, three times the cross-industry average. Adoption has moved on the analysis side; repricing hasn’t followed.
$15,000
A full day with your senior team, then 2–3 offering briefs. Test what clients will pay for before you build.
Book a conversation30 minutes with Shawn Yeager. No pitch.