Meet the Future of Financial Tech: Winners of the 2025 AdviceTech Competition of XYPN LIVE

"XYPN has been at the forefront of fee-for-service financial planning since we were founded 10 years ago, and we knew that supporting new business models in financial planning to serve new clientele meant also supporting new technology that didn't yet exist in the industry. So we founded our AdviceTech competition specifically to help create a space for new up-and-coming tech vendors to get seen and noticed by our XYPN membership for the AdviceTech they're building,"

Michael Kitces

XYPN Executive Chairman Michael Kitces

Each year, the XYPN LIVE AdviceTech Competition showcases the leading tech solutions of tomorrow in a live, 7-minute pitch-style competition. For 2025, XYPN stuck with the theme of recognizing innovative built to support real financial Advicers in:

• Serving their clients
• Running more efficient and profitable practices, OR
• Growing their reach

To participate, companies had to have been launched within the past 12 months or have an annual recurring revenue of less than $1 million (or the company or its new offering must still meet this criterion). 

Michael Kitces, Director of Partnerships for XYPN, David Bowman, and a committee of XYPN members evaluated more than two dozen initial submissions to determine the six finalists who offered the most promising and dynamic new tools to enhance advisors’ practices. Given AdviceTech's pace of innovation in the past 12 months, the field was packed with exciting new solutions, and competition was fierce.

At XYPN LIVE 2025, a panel of notable industry experts selected the AdviceTech Competition's Best in Show, and the Advicer’s Choice was chosen by the actual financial planners in attendance, who evaluated new solutions for their own firms.

The judges' panel consisted of:

• Michael Kitces, XYPN Executive Chairman
• Craig Iskowitz, Founder and CEO of Ezra Group
• Amy DeTolla, Founder and CEO of Aureus Advantage
• Davis Janowski, Senior Technology Editor of WealthManagement.com

WealthTech expert and commentator Bill Winterberg served as the event’s distinguished master of ceremonies, keeping the action rolling.

Competition Sweep! Waterlily Takes both Best in Show and Advicer’s Choice Awards

This year’s competition saw a range of exciting new platforms and solutions emerge, but the choice was clear. Waterlily, a long-term care insurance selection, optimization, and placement tool, carried the day. Both the industry-expert judges and the financial planning practitioners in the audience agreed that this planning tool reimagines the way planners can give long-term cafe advice. 

“It’s one of those cool moments that occasionally happens at the AdviceTech competition, where you can see the profession evolving right in front of you on stage. That’s why we do this each year. We’re hoping to showcase at least one quantum leap forward in an area of the industry,” said Dave Bowman, CFP®, XYPN’s Director of Partnerships. “It doesn’t always happen, but you could say Holstiplan, Altruist, IncomeLab — these were all companies that showed us for the first time from the AdviceTech stage how advisors would serve clients in the future. And now Waterlily is a part of that tradition. I think when we look back years from now, we may well think about the long-term care planning space in terms of before Waterlily and after.”

Waterlily enables advisors to guide clients through a discovery process, then utilizes AI to systematically analyze tens of thousands of available LTC insurance policies in seconds, including every available permutation of riders and policy features. It then displays a rank-order list of the available policies with the best projected ROI for that particular client. Advisors and clients can take their policy selection to a licensed broker to place the insurance, or purchase the policy directly through the platform, leveraging Waterlily’s insurance-licensed subsidiary. 

Waterlily notes that the LTC paraplanners supporting policy execution on-platform are all salaried employees, a step toward reducing conflicts of interest and better aligning their model with that of fee-only planners. The entire process provides fee-only advisors, in particular, with the ability to educate, advise, and support the implementation of long-term care planning in a manner previously not possible. 

“When you take a step towards optimizing any market of this size, that’s when the really big and fun questions start to bubble up. At scaled adoption, would the LTC industry have to adjust? Will Waterlily’s data insights lead to new and better products in the space? Could rate-action risk decline if risk pools become more predictable for carriers? 

I don’t think this encroaches on the value of LTC experts and their roles in helping clients understand and navigate their choices. To me, it’s another example of technology being applied to an inefficient market, in this case, one that has struggled particularly to match product design and placement with client needs, ultimately making it better for everyone. I think the Waterlily team’s choice to make this an advisor and enterprise solution rather than taking it directly to consumers shows remarkable awareness of the value those professionals bring to client decision making.”

Co-Founders Lily Vittayarukskul (CEO) and Evan Ehrenberg (COO) presented their solution together during XYPN LIVE’s Exhibit Hall Day. 

“This was our first XYPN event, and we couldn't be more thankful for the opportunity to present our work at the AdviceTech Competition. We know that the best financial planners are intensely focused on their clients and building their business, making it a challenge for any new technology to cut through the noise. That's why the chance to present Waterlily, our solution for solving the complexity of long-term care planning, was an opportunity and responsibility we took very seriously,” said Evan. 

Lily opened the presentation with a personal family story that led her to study the LTC space in depth, in search of a better way. After the event, she shared, “To be recognized with both the Advicer's Choice and [Best in Show] awards is profoundly validating. It's a powerful confirmation from the community that the problem we're solving is real and that our approach is the right one. This honor belongs to our entire team for their relentless dedication, and it fuels our mission to empower more planners to have this critical conversation with their clients.”

Honorable Mention Goes to FINNY

XYPN also took the opportunity to recognize the runner-up in both categories, FINNY. This AI-powered, multi-channel prospecting tool has been making waves in the industry all year. Of particular interest to niche-focused advisors in the audience, FINNY enables advisors to delve deeper, describing themselves, their firm, and their ideal clients through thoughtful guided intake and natural language prompting. A far cry from targeting prospects solely based on their level of investible assets, as some other platforms focus, this deep discovery enables intelligent prospect matching with incredible granularity. 

“The XYPN conference was a great way to hear firsthand from independent advisors about what’s top of mind, and what tools they are most excited about. FINNY’s mission is to empower independent advisors with the tools they need to grow their business in a sustainable way, and it was amazing to see how much this resonated with the group.” Said FINNY Co-Founder, Eden Ovadia. 

“Hearing Michael Kitces share growth trends from the XYPN member survey made it clear that this is an outlier cohort among the industry. This group of advisors far outpaces the industry growth rates while also maintaining an incredibly high level of care for their clients. We are excited to continue working with them and helping them grow their businesses, which is why, for the first time ever, FINNY is offering a discounted fee exclusively to XYPN members. “

The 2025 Finalists 

• Waterlily - Best in Show
• FINNY - Honorable Mention
• Vitals AI
• FinDash
• YourStake (IntelligentAdvisor)
• Impruve

The field featured various applications of AI for improving the businesses of planning-forward advisors. Notably, Vitals AI and YourStake’s IntelligentAdvisor solution both included features for identifying data-integrity issues across advisors’ tech stacks, supporting better data maintenance and, in turn, allowing them to make reliable use of the AI tools that function on top of that data. This highlights a fundamental problem in most advisors’ practices that could be the next necessary frontier of AI in financial advice - data management. As advisors increasingly rely on intelligent models to consume their data and create value in the form of actionable insights, the quality of that data has perhaps become more important than ever. 

Vitals AI, a platform that only launched within the past four months, set out to create a business intelligence and KPI management tool for advisors, powered by their firm’s data for real-time plug-and-play practice-management dashboards. While this would be a novel contribution with far-reaching application of promise for the profession, Vitals quickly realized it had to solve the firm’s data problems first, quickly pivoting to develop data-quality management tools in addition to its initial version of the KPI reporting dashboard. 

“It’s been an interesting journey over the past couple of years seeing the different applications and evolutions of existing and emerging tech platforms as they incorporate AI and LLM capabilities to meet the market’s needs,” said Bowman. “We’re still a long way from realizing the ultimate promise we expect to emerge from these fundamental changes in tech. 

In my conversations over the past few days with competition judges, founders, and advisors, data management—and, in turn, output accuracy—were themes that kept coming up. I didn’t get the sense that the best practices for advisors or their vendors are clearly emerging yet, and so I expect we’ll be hearing a lot about different approaches to data storage, transfer, structure, and maintenance throughout 2026. Maybe next year’s AdviceTech Competition winner will be the company that solves this problem, more fully unlocking the potential of AI for every other tool.”