Noah Hankin | CPA, CFP^®, TPCP^®

For advisors: this is what a prospect expects before they ever sit down with you, in the words of a CFP® professional talking to people deciding whether to hire one. Use it to check your own first-meeting process, or send it to a prospect before discovery. What it means for your firm is at the end.

You might have hit a different point in your life where you think, "I need some help with my financial picture, my whole plan. I need to reach out to a financial planner." Maybe they're a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, a CFP® professional.

I've been in lots of calls lately where the issue advisors are having is that they are asking a prompt to do things that they're not really saying in the prompt.

The quality of AI depends on the instructions you give it, the boundaries, and the information you're using. It's not a mind reader, and the same model can either give a really generic answer or be the best financial planner ever, depending on how well you structure that prompt.

Prompting really matters when it comes to these tools.

Most firms know their processes. They just don't have them written down anywhere except in the head of whoever has been there longest. That works until the day that person is on vacation and a wire request comes in.

The gap between a firm that runs well and one that runs on memory is rarely talent. It's whether the fifteen things that happen over and over — onboarding, reviews, money movement, a client's spouse dying — have a fixed set of steps attached, or get improvised by whoever picks up the phone.

Most "RIA tech stack" guides are a list of categories with no vendors, no numbers, and no opinion. That is a table of contents, not a buying guide.

This one uses the 2025 Kitces Research AdvisorTech Study, which surveyed 706 independent advisors on 45 business functions and nearly 200 vendors, to answer the questions a firm actually has: which tools matter, which vendors advisors rate highly, what to skip, and how to tell before you sign whether two systems will really talk to each other.