As our correspondent notes when looking at T3's report, although artificial intelligence was surprisingly absent at last year’s conference, it came on strong this year and was included in the survey for the first time.

Advyzon, artificial intelligence and shifts in fintech market share took center stage at the latest T3 Advisor conference, the wealth management industry’s largest fintech showcase.

Rising software company Advyzon quadrupled its CRM market share, emerging as the leader in the “All-In-One” product category. It achieved one of the highest user satisfaction ratings among portfolio management products, as reflected in the annual T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey of more than 2,000 financial advisors.

T3 principal and fintech consultant Joel Bruckenstein pointed to Advyzon’s “outstanding” user rating from advisors and the fact that its products, unlike many of its legacy competitors, are fully integrated and “built from the ground up.”

“It allows them to be very efficient,” Bruckenstein said, following the conclusion of the Dallas conference, T3’s 21st. “They have automated workflows and data in portfolio management and CRM software pull together.”

Advyzon jumped to a second-place 12 per cent market share among CRM users, up from just 3 per cent last year. Redtail remained the market leader, but its market share fell spectacularly from 45 per cent in 2024 to 26 per cent this year.

Salesforce, Tamarac and AdvisorEngine were the most popular CRM  products for larger wealth management firms, while Wealthbox was highly rated by smaller firms.

In the “All-In-One Platform” category, Advyzon tripled its market share to 10 per cent, edging out industry giant Orion, which has a 9 per cent share.

(Last year, FWR covered the T3 conference for wealth managers in Los Vegas, taking the temperature of the industry. See a related article here.)

AI: product or feature?
Although artificial intelligence was surprisingly absent at last year’s conference, it came on strong this year and was included in the survey for the first time.

“We had been debating whether AI was a product or a feature,” Bruckenstein said. “We decided it was both.”

AI is now being used by 41 per cent of advisors who were surveyed and ChatGPT had the most market share at 36 per cent, followed by Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude.

The most popular use cases for AI to date have been note taking apps that summarize client meets, led by Jump; organizing automated input data and optical character recognition (OCR).

The big question this year will be how new AI capabilities will be included into existing software tools, said Bob Veres, co-producer of the survey and publisher of Inside Information newsletter.

Although advisory firms and software companies have so far shied away from applying artificial intelligence to client-facing asset management, including market analysis and portfolio recommendations, Bruckenstein thinks that will change under the Trump administration.

“Just about everybody believes the SEC will allow more innovation and experimentation,” he said. “You’re going to see companies release more client-facing  products and features that layer AI over portfolios.”

Overall, fintech companies are getting smarter about AI and “will bring products to market faster, be able to upgrade faster and integrate faster,” Bruckenstein said. “There’s a tsunami coming, and there’s going to be a fundamental change in the way advisors do business.”

Market share battle
In the fintech product market, several categories achieved market penetration over 50 per cent for the first time: estate and tax planning tools, which also saw the highest rise in user satisfaction; as well as  social security analysis and college planning products.

In the financial planning category, eMoney became the market share leader among surveyed advisors, passing MoneyGuidePro for the first time. RightCapital showed impressive gains, and Conquest Wealth and Libretto were “notable newcomers” in the market.

Portfolio management remained a “very competitive” category, according to the survey. Orion Advisor Services and Envestnet | Tamarac vied for the market share lead with Advyzon close behind. Panoramix Pro, Advyzon, Altruist and YourStake received the highest user satisfaction ratings.

While Schwab far outpaced rivals Fidelity and Pershing in the custodial category, a “higher than usual” number of survey respondents indicated that they were open to changing vendors. “User ratings are what matter in this category,” the report stated.

Altruist, SEIA and TradePMR secured the highest satisfaction ratings, prompting the report to ask “Will that translate to new competition for market share?” 

Advyzon, FP Alpha, Jump, Orion and SEI provided financial support for the survey.

Next year’s conference is scheduled for March 9 to 12 in New Orleans.