New AI Tool Helps Advisors Offer Estate Planning

Digital estate planning platform Wealth.com launched Ester, a legal assistant that it said uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable financial advisors to make estate planning more accessible, cost effective and scalable for their clients.

The new digital tool automates “tedious and laborious tasks traditionally handled by financial analysts and in-house paralegals, empowering financial advisors to efficiently deliver customized wills, trusts and other estate planning documents,” the company said.

Ester introduces two significant features: the ability to understand specific client goals and the intricacies of existing estate plans; and short- and long-term memory, allowing it to incorporate a client’s prior actions into its responses, Wealth.com pointed out.

Among Wealth.com’s current customers are about 1,000 of the top U.S. advisors, including Keebeck Wealth Management, MarketCounsel and Farther.

Ester developers included Eduardo Fontes, senior vice president of data science at Wealth.com, who the firm said has more than three decades of experience in financial services machine learning. He previously served as managing director and head of data Intelligence at TIAA and made significant contributions as head of data science and machine learning at Vanguard.

“The truth is, no financial plan is complete without an estate plan and Ester will empower financial advisors to onboard clients efficiently, and enable those clients to build the estate plan that suits their needs,” Fontes said in a statement.