On Wednesday, M1 turned on a registered investment adviser with no human advisors in it, which is one way to solve the succession planning problem.
A day later, WealthManagement.com reported that Orion is now billing its tech partners every month for the data they pull from its platform. And in the planning software world, two AI-native tools made a play for the solo advisor who has always been told to call sales first.
Three stories from this week that matter for your practice.
M1 Just Turned On an RIA With No Human Advisors.
On Wednesday, WealthManagement.com reported that M1 launched M1 Advisor, an AI financial advisor built into its investing platform. M1 reactivated its registered investment advisory entity, M1 Advisory Services, to offer it, and the service has no human advisors at all.
M1 Advisor can answer questions and give advice across M1's investing, cash and borrowing accounts, and it can pull in outside accounts like a 401(k), IRA or mortgage through Plaid. It can't act on its own, so the client still decides what to do. It's free for M1 clients through 2027, and it runs on models from third parties including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon.
Because the entity is an SEC-registered adviser, it carries a fiduciary duty and has to disclose its conflicts. M1 had $14 billion in client assets and more than 400,000 clients as of September, according to the article.
Why you should care: This is different from the chatbots we've covered the last few weeks. M1 Advisor comes from a registered adviser with a fiduciary duty, and it costs nothing.
For a solo practice, the honest takeaway is that advice built on a client's actual accounts is no longer something only a human can offer. What a free AI adviser can't offer is the stuff that happens off the accounts, like knowing your client's daughter just got engaged, walking a widow through her first tax season, or talking someone out of a bad decision at 4 pm on a red day.
It's worth making sure your website and your first meeting say that clearly. If a prospect compares you to M1 on account analysis alone, you're competing on M1's terms.
Source: WealthManagement.com
Orion Just Put a Price on the Data Your Tech Tools Pull.
On Thursday, WealthManagement.com reported that Orion Advisor Solutions introduced a monthly Connected Ecosystem Support Fee for the third-party tech vendors that connect to its platform. Orion says the fee will help fund continued investment in the security, reliability and scale of its systems.
Each vendor got a letter with a flat monthly amount based on how much data it pulls from Orion, without the data volumes or the formula behind it. Fees reported to the publication ran from about $2,000 to $20,000 a month. The first invoices go out later in October, and Orion plans to move to a support fee plus usage-based pricing in the first quarter of 2027.
Orion's Reed Colley explained the thinking in one line. "AI is only as good as the data behind it."
Why you should care: The fee is billed to vendors, not to advisors, and Michael Roth of Singularity Financial Partners told the publication AI is increasing the traffic on these connections. He also said large vendors will likely pass the cost along at renewal, and smaller ones may drop their Orion integrations entirely.
For a small RIA, that's the part to watch. Many of the AI tools aimed at solo advisors are small companies, and a $2,000 monthly bill could change their math in a hurry.
If you run on Orion, it's worth asking each connected vendor two questions before your next renewal. Will this fee show up in my price, and are you keeping the integration? The author expects more fees like this across the industry, so the same questions will probably come up with other platforms too.
Source: WealthManagement.com
AI Planning Software Just Opened Its Doors to Solo Advisors.
On Monday, Kitces published its October AdvisorTech roundup, and the planning software section is the one solo advisors should read closely.
Altruist launched a financial planning agent inside Hazel, packaged with its AI notetaker and tax planning agent. Conquest, the planning platform from the founder of NaviPlan, has been sold mostly to enterprise firms in the U.S. since 2022 and now opens to smaller firms and individual advisors on a self-serve basis, so you can sign up online without a sales call. RightCapital recently launched its own AI planning agent called Iris.
Kitces points out a detail worth knowing before you demo any of them. Both Hazel and Conquest use AI for data entry, analyzing client data and suggesting strategies, while the actual planning calculations are handled by deterministic, non-AI calculators.
Why you should care: The math still comes from a calculator, not a chatbot, and that's good news for your compliance file. The AI part is doing the data entry and the first pass at strategy, which is the slow, unbillable part of building a plan.
Kitces is also honest that it could take years to know whether these challengers actually unseat eMoney, RightCapital and MoneyGuidePro, and that advisors have historically been unwilling to trade plan depth for time savings.
So I wouldn't switch platforms on a headline. But if your renewal is coming up, it's a pretty good year to book a demo and time how long it takes to build one plan from a real (anonymized) fact finder.
Source: Kitces.com
Watt, the Amplify for Advisors Agent
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M1 can now give account-based advice for free. That makes the parts of your work a free AI adviser can't do the most important thing on your website. This week, set up a value checker that reads anything you send prospects and shows you where it sounds like something M1 could say.
Step 1. In Claude, create a Project called "Value check" (in ChatGPT, a custom GPT works the same way). Open its instructions and paste this.
You help me, a financial advisor running a small practice, make sure my marketing explains what people get from working with me that a free AI financial adviser can't give them. AI advisers can now analyze someone's accounts, answer money questions any hour and suggest what to do, at no cost. Each time I paste something, like my website's about or services page, an intro email, a prospect follow-up or my first-meeting talking points, do four things. First, mark every sentence that describes something a free AI adviser could also claim, like portfolio analysis, retirement projections or answering questions. Second, list what the piece says, or should say, about the human parts of my work, like knowing a family over years, coordinating with their CPA and attorney, staying with them through a hard decision, and being the person they call when something changes. Third, suggest specific rewrites in plain, warm language, using only details I give you and never inventing client stories, results or credentials. Fourth, flag anything that could raise a compliance concern under the SEC Marketing Rule or FINRA Rule 2210, like promises, guarantees or testimonials, so my compliance review can check it. Keep it to one page.
Step 2. Start with your website's home or about page. Paste the text, read the marked sentences, and pick the two rewrites that sound most like you.
Step 3. Run your standard intro email and your first-meeting outline through it next. Send any changes through your normal compliance review, and run it again whenever you update your website.
A free AI adviser can read the accounts. Your website should make it obvious who reads the room.
Sam is the creator of Amplify for Advisors and Watt, the Amplify for Advisors Agent. A former RIA owner whose work has been featured in Forbes, NerdWallet, Nasdaq, and more, he teaches financial advisors to use AI in their own voice while staying compliant.