Vanilla Advisor Experience: Empowering Collaborative Estate Planning

Background

Vanilla started as an MVP for a digital presentation for Steve Lockshin, AdvicePeriod, to use with their UHNW clients to explain the impact of their planning around estate planning, showing who will get what, how, and how AdvicePeriod's planning will effectively allow their clients to use their net worth. I designed the MVP with Sam Trapkin, and a working prototype was built by Kei Yasui, a founding member, along with our founder, Steve Lockshin. The MVP led to the creation of Vanilla.

After Vanilla's establishment, we strategically decided to address a significant market pain point. We identified the need for advisors to create their own estate documents, which was often outsourced. This not only resolved a problem but also created a new revenue stream for advisors. This strategic move propelled us into the realm of legal SaaS. This journey was came with valuable learning experiences, culminating in the launch of the Vanilla Document Builder last year.

In 2021, after seeing little traction with our first iteration of the document builder, we returned to building software that helps attorneys connect with their customers and better demonstrate their value. We started by creating a PDF presentation deliverable that allows an advisor to show a client the current state of their estate. This includes their family tree, balance sheet, waterfall and tax liability, estate structure, fiduciaries, beneficiaries, and estate planning document details and provision notes.

We received an overwhelmingly positive response. One of our biggest proponents was Morgan Stanley's Family Wealth team, who saw the immediate value of this and used to prepare a similar touchpoint but stopped due to the difficulty of wrangling all the data and information together to create the manually produced reports.

Vanilla 1.0: MVP

We immediately began building an MVP allowing advisors to submit a client's estate planning documents to Vanilla. These documents would be abstracted and turned into a PDF deliverable that could be used as the focal point in advisor-client conversations about financial planning. The first iteration was an MVP that allowed an advisor to upload documents to us, which a paralegal would read through to extract pertinent information. The abstracted document data was passed on to a designer to create the report in Figma, which was then uploaded back to Vanilla for the advisor. This allowed us to identify edge cases and hone in on what data points we needed to design and build this as software. During this time, I acted as product manager in addition to creating the original report and experience, with Tiffany Chung coming on board to help produce the PDF reports.

Vanilla 2.0: Automation

The success of the MVP helped us secure our Series A round of funding. Our next goal was to transform the MVP and all the data points into a fully-fledged SaaS solution. This solution would enable advisors to input client information and financial data and upload documents to produce a beautiful PDF deliverable for their clients. We also began developing the Estate Builder experience, which allowed our Estate Planning Specialists and those at other institutions to perform their own document abstractions. By the end of 2022, we successfully transitioned from all manual design work, creating software that accurately represents a family's estate and visualizes it based on the original PDF report.

Challenges in Building the Vanilla Platform

Developing a comprehensive estate planning platform came with unique challenges. One significant hurdle was ensuring compliance with Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) regulations. This required careful collaboration with legal experts to ensure that our software provided valuable estate planning tools without crossing into the domain of legal advice, which can only be offered by licensed attorneys. Additionally, we had to navigate SEC regulations to ensure our platform met all necessary financial compliance standards. These regulatory challenges required meticulous attention to detail and constant updates to align with evolving laws.

Another challenge was integrating complex tax calculations and legal provisions into an intuitive user interface. Estate planning involves numerous variables and potential scenarios, and our software needed to simplify this complexity without sacrificing accuracy or compliance. This required sophisticated backend algorithms and a seamless front-end experience.

Today: Estate Advisor Platform

In 2023, we officially released several critical features of Vanilla, including the Document Builder and Scenarios. With these features, we realized our goal of creating an end-to-end estate planning platform. This platform allows financial advisors to transform their entire practice from automated asset management to becoming an integral part of a family's financial picture, helping them do more with their money, control their legacy, and, more importantly, care for their loved ones.

Today, our product is centered around four pillars:

• Assess
• Visualize
• Strategize
• Execute

A significant recent addition is the creation of a collaborative Profile Builder, which allows advisors to invite clients to onboard themselves to Vanilla, and an Estate Health Check enables advisors and their clients to quickly assess the health of their current financial and estate planning. This innovation has led to Vanilla being recognized and winning numerous awards from financial news organizations, including the Best Financial Planning Award from WealthTech Americas.

We continue to work closely with advisors and planners, conducting hundreds of user tests, prototypes, research sessions, and customer feedback sessions. Our next major milestone is to enhance this experience to be more collaborative, involving advisors, their clients, client's families, and other key figures in the client's network, such as CPAs and attorneys.

Through collaboration, innovative design, and a user-centric approach, we have built a platform that empowers advisors and their clients and sets new standards in the estate planning industry.

Key Results

• Series A and B Funding: Successfully secured $12M in Series A funding, followed by an additional $30M in Series B funding, enabling the transformation from an MVP to a fully automated SaaS platform and supporting the continued expansion and enhancement of Vanilla's capabilities.
• Platform Adoption: Achieved significant adoption from major financial institutions like Morgan Stanley, leading to widespread use of the Vanilla platform.
• Automation Success: Transitioned from manual design processes to a fully automated system by the end of 2022, significantly increasing efficiency and scalability.
• User-Centric Enhancements: Implemented user feedback and research to enhance the platform's usability, resulting in a higher adoption rate and improved customer satisfaction (NPS Score 60).
• Awards and Recognition: Received the Best Financial Planning Award from WealthTech Americas, highlighting the platform's innovation and impact in the financial planning industry.
• Regulatory Compliance: Successfully navigated complex UPL and SEC regulations, ensuring the platform's compliance with legal and financial standards.
• Collaborative Features: Developed and released the Profile Builder and Estate Health Check, enabling more collaborative and comprehensive estate planning.
• User Engagement: Conducted hundreds of user tests, prototypes, research sessions, and customer feedback sessions to improve the platform continuously.

Current Team

This work was done in collaboration with many people over the years, including different PMs, designers, engineers, and SMEs. The current team and some key contributors include:

Product Manager: Mark Welsh

Product Designer: Joel Speasmaker

Engineering Lead: Robert Lopez

Product Counsel: Patrick Carlson, Jenny Raess