FP Alpha has spent the past few years building out its own AI-powered large language model to help advisors quickly read and analyze complex documents including estate planning, insurance and tax plans — then develop action plans within minutes.
Now, the popular advisory platform has spent the greater part of this year training its AI for a great unknown: potential tax law changes that could come about as key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act sunsets in 2025.
"With the [Presidential] elections coming up, this is becoming more in the news, more on the radar of clients and advisors," said Andrew Altfest, founder and CEO of FP Alpha. "We have some great enhancements that we've made to our Estate [Planning] Lab to best address that."
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Altfest, an advisor himself as president of Altfest Wealth Management, said much of the technology built at FP Alpha since launching in 2020 has been centered on feedback from advisors. Namely, streamlining the time it takes to read and analyze technical legal documents.
"We listen very carefully to our customers and what they're asking for," he said. "We've had a very clear vision to take advanced planning that's only been available to the wealthy in a manual format, and then use technology to make it accessible to everyone and bring it into the mainstream."
FP Alpha recently won Financial Planning's Innovation Award for
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Name: FP Alpha
Website: FPAlpha.com
Size of FP Alpha: Altfest declined to give details of the company's size saying, "it is something we've always kept close to the vest." But the firm does have partnerships with some of the largest wealthtech and tech platforms including Orion, Salesforce and Envestnet.
Products and services offered: FP Alpha offers an AI-based platform that can upload and read documents like tax returns, wills, trusts and insurance policies. It can provide summaries and help advisors identify where the financial discussion needs to occur with clients, such as what to do in a liquidity event.
Who FP Alpha aims to serve: Individual advisors as well as large enterprises.
What kind of problems FP Alpha is trying to solve: FP Alpha primarily focuses on saving advisors time when it comes to going through complex documents of clients.
"We created a way for advisors to save an incredible amount of time if they're already working within estate planning, by reading documents and visualizing them and finding opportunities to improve," Altfest said. "And then also, modeling different scenarios and pulling in data from their other tools to make their lives easier and have more robust analysis."
How FP Alpha is different from competitors: There are a growing number of tech companies creating AI that can read certain types of documents that advisors most often handle. But Altfest claims that FP Alpha is a "pioneer" in offering advisor's this specific type of technology since it started in 2020.
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But Rachel Schwab, director of product at FP Alpha, said it is also the speed at which they are automating their platform that make it distinct.
"We are already automating over 30 different types of provisions or clauses that AI is pulling out of hundreds of pages of trust documents," Schwab said. "We just summarize it for you. It's almost like that moment when you first use ChatGPT. It's a 'wow' moment. You can't believe that this is possible. And we believe we're doing it faster than competitors, too."
What does it cost: FP Alpha has a starting
What's next in development: FP Alpha spent a greater part of this year building out a more autonomous AI reader that Schwab said they are continuing to work on so advisors can capture more clients, particularly those outside of the often-sought-after high net worth clients.
"We have plans in the next six to 12 months to automate so much of it and connect the data that we have now on this platform to really . . . save advisors time, allow them to scale these services and provide more insights," said Schwab, who was a former product manager of advice technology at Vanguard.
"It's not just about the time," she added, "but also the functionality within our tool is better suited for mass affluent clients and some of our competitors, they're really just focused on high net worth."
