Estate planning technology provider Vanilla and prospecting platform WealthFeed have each secured new distribution agreements with prominent RIA networks, signaling continued momentum in wealthtech partnerships. The deals, announced this week, highlight how vendors are targeting both boutique family offices and large national RIAs to expand their reach.
Salt Lake City-based Vanilla announced that Callan Family Office has become its latest RIA partner, with Callan also making a strategic investment in the firm. The collaboration focuses on addressing planning complexities common among ultra-high-net-worth families, including layered trust structures, multigenerational transfers, and intricate ownership reporting. Under the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop consolidated multigenerational planning visualizations, tools for handling complex entity and asset ownership structures, and tighter data integrations between Vanilla and other systems used by family offices.
Gene Farrell, Vanilla's president and chief executive, said the company was designed from inception to serve the most complex estate planning needs. Jack Ginter, chief executive of Callan Family Office, described the partnership as a way to combine his firm's decades of experience with ultra-high-net-worth investors and Vanilla's planning technology to help families preserve wealth across generations. The arrangement also includes a coordinated go-to-market push involving joint thought leadership, events, and distribution efforts targeting wealth management firms and family offices in the UHNW segment.
This deal follows Vanilla's May announcement that it would extend its estate planning platform to more than 600 advisors across Carson Group's network of over 165 partner offices. Carson Group manages more than $58 billion in assets under management and serves over 60,000 client families nationally. Vanilla also counts Osaic, Cetera, Mariner Wealth Advisors, and Vanguard among its existing enterprise partners.
Separately, WealthFeed, an AI-powered prospecting platform based in New York, has entered into an exclusive partnership with The Mather Group (TMG), a Chicago-headquartered national RIA managing approximately $17 billion in client assets. The deal gives roughly 100 advisors across TMG's 14 offices access to WealthFeed's platform, which leverages money-in-motion intelligence—data signals tied to life events such as inheritances, business sales, promotions, and retirements that indicate a client's assets may soon be in flux.
The platform also supports warm introduction pathways, a capability enhanced several months ago via an update to its Discover feature, along with data enrichment, compliant outreach, and inbound web lead capture. Deana Lewis, TMG's chief marketing officer, said the deployment provides the firm's advisors with a standardized process for identifying prospects across all offices.
Founded in 2011, TMG has completed more than 20 acquisitions since 2018. The WealthFeed deal represents the latest positive turn for the platform, which last year secured a strategic partnership and minority investment from Broadridge Financial Solutions. It also comes as RIAs face what the industry describes as a broader squeeze on referral-driven organic growth at independent firms. While referrals remain a driver of business, a recent survey by Ficomm Partners in partnership with Absolute Engagement suggests that the steady rise of digital adoption—including prospective clients vetting firms and advisors online—has diminished some of the premium traditionally placed on face-to-face connections.
For advisors seeking to navigate these trends, understanding how technology can complement traditional relationship-building is increasingly important. As the wealth management landscape evolves, tools like those from Vanilla and WealthFeed are becoming integral to serving complex client needs and driving organic growth.
