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Rafael Loureiro

Financial Planning > Trusts and Estates

Wealth.com Brings Estate Planning to the AI Age

By Jane Wollman Rusoff

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With an aging population and the ongoing great wealth transfer by baby boomers, now is surely the time to tackle estate planning. 

Clients may procrastinate, but financial advisors should view this important task through a positive lens.

“If advisors don’t do estate planning, they’re leaving a lot on the table. Help with estate plans [is] … part of wealth management,” Rafael Loureiro, CEO and co-founder of the tech-led estate planning platform Wealth.com, argues in an interview with ThinkAdvisor. “You provide the information; we provide the intelligence.”

That’s a succinct way of framing just how Wealth.com helps financial advisors. The platform uses advanced technology — including artificial intelligence — to make estate planning easier, faster and up to date.

The process, paperless since the docs reside online, connects all the client’s assets — from bank accounts to baseball card collections. Each advisor is paired with a dedicated “partner success manager.”

Wealth.com, which has an in-house legal team as well as partner attorneys to provide input, is connected to 40,000 financial institutions. In the interview, Loureiro explains why that’s one of its key advantages.

Before co-founding Wealth.com, which went live in 2022, Loureiro, a native of France who was raised in Brazil, was chief technology officer at Emailage and group manager at Avanade. In total, he has 20-plus years of tech leadership experience.

In the recent phone interview with Loureiro, who was in Phoenix, where Wealth.com is based, he explains how the firm’s online process deepens client-advisor relationships and reveals the prime function of the platform’s AI “legal assistant,” dubbed “Extraction Esther.”

Here are highlights of our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: What sets your service apart?

RAFAEL LOUREIRO: The traditional way of doing estate planning documents is so old school: with pen and paper.

We created a solution that makes the process easier and dynamic.

Our technology connects all your assets instantly. But it’s not one-and-done. It’s always kept up to date.

Most people avoid estate planning, partly because they need to consult a lawyer to prepare the documents. Right?

You got it! Ours is a web-based service that we can provide to the client [through advisors] in the comfort of their home.

The information is shared with the advisor so they can be part of the conversation without making decisions in the estate plan on the client’s behalf.

They’re made by the client, not the advisor.

Do you ever work directly with the end client?

No. We aren’t direct-to-consumer. That’s the difference between us and other solutions.

And the client doesn’t have to go to a lawyer [to do the documents]. It’s all done online. The documents you get at the end of the process are the same high-quality ones you’d get from a lawyer.

[However], at the end of the process, you still need to [visit] a lawyer.

What do advisors like best about your service?

One of the chief benefits is that you can set up all client assets on Wealth.com: bank accounts, property, jewelry, a baseball card collection, crypto.

The advisors can see everything, including, for instance, the fact that you want to leave a legacy to your stepson.

This deepens the relationship, and it’s one of the things advisors like most.

How else does your process help financial advisors?

It lets them provide more [services] to their clients. Help with estate plans, along with tax planning [and so forth], are all part of wealth management.

If advisors don’t do estate planning, they’re leaving a lot on the table.

How are your fees structured?

We don’t charge per document. We usually charge [advisors] a flat fee. It’s up to the advisor whether they want to charge for this service.

What’s another difference that wealth.com has compared with other services?

If you move out of state, we automatically know and update your documents without your needing to go to a lawyer.

How do you know I’ve moved?

As part of the process, you connect all your assets. We’re connected to 40,000 financial institutions, like Zillow and Coinbase.

If we get a notification from Zillow, let’s say, that you just sold your house, we’re going to prompt you to [confirm] and ask if you’re moving. And if so, where are you moving to?

So in that way, we update your documentation.

This sort of information just comes in to you, and then you act on it?

One hundred percent.

Just what is “Extraction by Esther,” a feature you highlight on your website? Who’s Esther?

We introduced Esther, an AI legal assistant, to work with people that already have an estate plan in place.

Each state has a different way of writing the documentation.

If you move to a different state, you can upload the documents that weren’t created by wealth.com, and we extract all the entities: your birthday, nationality, location [and so on].

Now the data is available at wealth.com, and you can see a visualization of your documents in a beautiful flowchart that explains your entire plan.

Why do you need AI to do that, rather than tech that isn’t so advanced?

You need AI to read the documents and extract all the information.

Ultra-high-net-worth financial advisors at Goldman Sachs and UBS spend an average of 20 hours reading a document and creating a flowchart.

We’ve completely streamlined the process. It takes only minutes.

Suppose an advisor’s client wants to update an adult child’s contact information on an estate plan. That information won’t just come to you as a notification. So how does the client proceed?

In that case, you go to the website and update the information.

You provide the information; we provide the intelligence.

What if the financial advisor has a question for you during the process?

We have lawyers they can reach out to.

We’ve noticed that 97% of the people go through the entire process without having to speak with a lawyer. We made the documents super-easy.

Are many other companies competing with you?

There are competitors but not one that does everything we’re doing.

Jane Wollman Rusoff

@jrusoff2

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