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You’ve heard it before.

“The future of wealth management is holistic. ”

We nod along on panels. We add it to strategy decks. Firms tell clients they can “do it all. ”

But how many of us are actually building toward it — with experiences that make clients feel seen across investments, taxes, healthcare & LTC, banking, estate, and giving?

The industry data says the pressure to integrate is real — and growing.

  • Technology’s first key trend is the “battle for the desktop”: best-of-breed point tools vs. all-in-one wealth platforms.
  • Advisors rank CRM and account aggregation & planning as the most valuable tech strategies — the very pipes that make holistic work possible.

A Lesson from Shopify

A few years ago Shopify rolled out the Shop app. It started as a utility — pull order confirmations from your email and show everything you’ve bought in one place, with real-time tracking. Then it did something subtle but profound: it unified your whole post-purchase life, even outside Shopify merchants.

It didn’t just make checkout easier; it made the after part obvious, transparent, and habit-forming.

That’s the mindset shift we need in wealth: stop optimizing isolated touchpoints; build the connective tissue that makes the client’s whole financial life visible and manageable — even where we don’t directly bill.

Where “Holistic” Shows Up in the Data (and Why It Matters)

Banking belongs inside advice.

Half of wirehouse advisors offer banking services; only 7% of independents do. That’s a glaring integration gap — and an opportunity to win everyday relevance (cash, credit, lending) inside the advisory relationship.

Healthcare & long-term care planning isn’t optional.

Over half of 65-year-old adults will need long-term care, and more than a quarter will need it for over two years — planning and insurance coordination must live inside the wealth experience, not on the sidelines.

Related: Individual sales now account for 21% of health insurance sales, up from 10% in 2005 — a reminder that clients are already navigating more personal coverage choices.

Estate planning is a national blind spot.

Less than one-third of consumers have estate plans — a huge delta between client need and delivered experience.

Giving is surging and should be productized inside advice.

Donor-advised fund contributions reached $59. 4B, up from $6. 9B in 2009. Clients want structured, tax-aware generosity; we should orchestrate it.

The tooling landscape demands a platform posture.

There are 538 wealth management technology & outsourcing firms, up from 505 in 2020 — fragmentation that amplifies the need to integrate client-facing workflows.

Inside that stack, Redtail leads CRM usage, and eMoney / MoneyGuide lead planning usage — helpful anchors as you pick your “connective tissue. ”

Translating the Shopify Playbook Into Practice

1) Aggregate first, monetize later

Start by giving clients a single pane of glass across what you manage and what you don’t: held-away accounts, banking, insurance, estate docs, giving (Shop started with tracking; everything else followed).

2) Build the “after” experience

Automate nudges that fire after life events: equity comp vests → tax/charitable prompts; new mortgage → cash flow & insurance review; business distribution → entity & estate review (Shop’s magic lived after checkout).

3) Productize the holistic layers

  • Banking inside advice (cash, HYSA, lines, cards).
  • LTC/health navigation as a standard planning module.
  • Estate “always-on” status (beneficiaries, titling, POAs) with renewal reminders.
  • Giving rails (DAF workflows) tied to tax-aware funding and impact reporting.

4) Win the desktop

Choose CRM + planning + aggregation as your “core” and integrate other modules around them — exactly where advisors say the value is.

5) Measure what matters

Track “% of client financial life visible,” “% of clients with active estate plan,” “% with banking connected,” and “% with LTC plan. ” These are the holistic equivalents of Shopify’s engagement metrics.

The Call

Shopify didn’t fix fragmented commerce by guarding its lane. It built a connective layer that made everything clearer about the end user — and only then layered in discovery, payments, and incentives.

We can do the same.

Start building like we are — aggregating the whole picture, orchestrating across domains, and giving clients the clarity they already expect.

I get to do this every day. Its a blast.