Canadian fintech Conquest boosts AI-powered financial planning platform

The wealth tech firm’s updates will help advisors on the Pershing X platform gain deeper insights and navigate plans more easily.

Conquest Planning, a Canadian financial planning software company and one of Pershing X’s fintech partners, has announced crucial updates to its artificial intelligence-based technology for advisors.

The firm announced that its AI-driven strategic advice manager, SAM, now includes new SAM INSIGHTS and Ask SAM features, aimed at improving the quality and depth of financial plans for advisors.

The SAM INSIGHTS feature leverages AI to identify specific problems, opportunities, and achievements within financial plans. This tool helps advisors create more efficient and effective plans by providing proactive warnings when plans go off track and highlighting planning opportunities such as insufficient insurance coverage or new strategy considerations.

According to Conquest, INSIGHTS allows advisors to delve deeper into estate planning, education planning, retirement planning, and more.

“Our mission from day one has been centered on providing advisors with a scalable solution to efficiently build adaptable, personalized plans that evolve with end clients’ changing life circumstances, goals and risk tolerances,” Ken Lotocki, chief product officer at Conquest Planning, said in a statement.

“With SAM INSIGHTS, we’re taking that one step further by empowering advisors to identify gaps and opportunities in clients’ plans to provide an even more robust client experience,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Ask SAM Command and Query feature enables users to navigate the application, ask questions about a plan, and search for reports or strategies via voice and text commands.

These new enhancements have been rolled out and incorporated into Pershing X’s Wove platform, an open-architecture, multicustodial wealth tech platform unveiled at BNY Mellon Pershing’s Insite conference last year.

This week, BNY Mellon also announced a new unified offering that packages capabilities from across its leading technology platforms, including Pershing X Wove and its managed accounts platform.

“Advisors want to spend less time managing planning applications and technology, and more time serving clients and solving their complex financial challenges,” Ainslie Simmonds, president of Pershing X, said of the new enhancements to the Conquest financial planning platform.

“‘Hands-free planning’ and navigation within the Wove platform is just the latest example of Conquest Planning’s ability to design offerings that increase advisor efficiency,” Simmonds said.

Conquest Planning and Pershing X began their partnership with a deal announced in 2022, which included an equity investment in Conquest and an agreement to have its financial planning software go live on the Pershing X platform in 2023.

“Our collaboration with Pershing X demonstrates how the combined power of the human connection and technology can provide greater access to financial advice for all,” said Dr. Mark Evans, president and CEO of Conquest Planning.