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Wealth.com Names Jamie Hopkins as Strategic Advisor

By John Manganaro

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Jamie Hopkins, the financial planning expert and attorney heading Bryn Mawr Trust’s private wealth management business, has taken on a new role as a strategic advisor at Wealth.com, a provider of digital estate planning technology for financial advisors and consumers.

Hopkins’ appointment comes about three months after Wealth.com’s leadership team formed a new advisory council that, in the words of co-founder Tim White, would be “dedicated to helping more financial professionals access the educational resources and planning solutions they need to deliver sophisticated legacy planning services to clients.”

Speaking with ThinkAdvisor about the announcement, Hopkins says the world of financial planning continues to grow more demanding and sophisticated, and clients are expecting support with much more than just the investment portfolio. In fact, with the impending expiration of key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Hopkins expects estate planning matters will become a major client touchpoint in the next 12 to 18 months.

Hopkins said he would draw on his financial planning and legal experience as he collaborates closely with the company’s legal and product development teams to drive further innovation.

“I’ve been getting to know the team for a year or so now, and I’ve been very impressed,” Hopkins said. “One thing I can say is that their document creation process is one in which their AI tech not only cuts down on the time required to do this planning, but it also delivers a superior result to what you could do by hand. That’s really impressive.”

According to Hopkins, there are a number of peer organizations that can do some of what Wealth.com does for financial advisors and consumers, but he sees Wealth.com as the current estate planning service market leader. To that end, Hopkins himself has previously invested in the company.

Hopkins adds that Wealth.com’s development in the marketplace and its success in collaborating with financial advisors underscores a broader trend in the wealth management industry: More advisory firms, asset managers and other financial services providers are willing to plug their technologies into one another and allow the freer flow of data.

“This is something that has changed a lot over the past five years or so, and my view has actually changed as well,” Hopkins explains. “Back then, myself and others thought the core planning software was becoming your home base for everything, and that we should be pulling all the piecemeal tech pieces together into the core planning software. Today, the market is embracing more of a hub and spoke approach.”

That is, advisors are still relying on their core platform for the heavy lifting of their daily planning work, but firms are also complementing their core planning capabilities with third-party technologies and solutions. Hopkins says Wealth.com will be taking full advantage of this reality in the months and years ahead, and its focus will continue to be on serving both advisors and mass affluent consumers alike.

“One big reason why the viewpoint has shifted is just the realization that keeping up with all of the different areas of technology development is just really hard,” Hopkins says. “Firms are also much more willing to build their technologies in an open manner that makes building two-way data flows and APIs much more approachable, even for smaller organizations.”

Pictured: Jamie Hopkins 

John Manganaro

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