2026 New Year letter from CEO Max Lane

January 6, 2026
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Dear Advisors,

Happy New Year. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are refreshed and recharged for 2026. Before recapping 2025 and laying out our plans for the year ahead, I want to first thank you again for granting us the honor of serving your clients. It’s a privilege we hold sacred, and we work tirelessly to ensure our offerings consistently improve your clients’ financial lives and strengthen the advisory relationship. Thank you for your trust.

Our mission at Flourish is to help advisors pair holistic advice with true holistic implementation, allowing advisors to succeed in a Wealth 3.0 world by delivering solutions for every aspect of their clients’ financial lives.

Events in 2025 illustrated that the shift towards Wealth 3.0 is well underway, bringing into focus the urgency with which RIAs need to adopt new solutions to continue to add client value, attract new clients, and defend against competitors.

Custody: Robinhood completed its acquisition of TradePMR to enter the RIA custody market and has rolled out an aggressive asset match program to gather new assets. Soon, Robinhood will be integrating its modern interface, trading technology, and growing suite of products into its RIA custody offering.

Banking services: Wealthfront, Robinhood, and LPL all announced expanded deposit and lending capabilities to fully meet clients’ banking needs. Cash accounts and mortgage solutions are already default offerings for high net worth clients of banks and wirehouses and are now becoming table stakes for mass affluent clients.

Lead generation: Schwab revised its referral program to keep more clients for its in-house advisors, while Robinhood previewed a new referral program between Robinhood customers and TradePMR advisors.

These events signal two important and related learnings for RIAs. First, the bar for a competitive, holistic wealth management offering is quickly and dramatically being raised. Modern technology, best-in-class cash accounts, integrated mortgage solutions, and more are no longer nice-to-haves, but are now core to a competitive wealth management offering. Second, the pipeline of custodian referrals that are so critical to the organic growth of many leading RIAs are clearly under threat. Unless RIAs are willing to switch to Robinhood’s yet unproven custody platform while taking on potential brand risk, it appears they will need to find new channels and strategies to drive organic growth in the future.

Flourish is committed to helping RIAs solve both of these challenges. 

We remain laser focused on expanding advisor-centric banking and insurance services to add more client value, defend against competitors, and drive organic growth — both via increased wallet share of existing clients and by generating high quality leads for RIAs. Looking ahead to 2026, we have ambitious plans to make Flourish Cash^† the best cash account for advisory clients, revamp our referral program, expand capabilities for your clients’ existing annuity policies, and launch our new mortgage offering. These plans will build on the progress we made in 2025 and, in partnership with you, the value we delivered for your clients.

Thanks to your partnership, 2025 was an incredible year. We made continuous improvements to our core products through new features, capabilities, and enhancements, setting the stage for an amazing year. Highlights include:^||

Expanding Flourish Cash with checking capabilities 

We are on a journey to evolve Flourish Cash from a supercharged savings account replacement to simply “the best cash account for advisory clients.”

For decades, there has been little to no innovation in the core checking account that is the critical transit center for managing your clients’ cashflows. Clients have simply come to accept that a checking account will pay close to zero in interest, transfers will take 2-3 days to process, HNW and business owner clients will only get $250k in FDIC insurance, and that the user experience will be dated and stale. If that set of features wasn’t compelling enough, the banks offering these checking accounts will market their own wealth management services to your highly desired clients. This doesn’t seem like a great deal for RIAs.

In 2026, we are taking steps to provide a better alternative. The traditional lines between checking and savings accounts are blurring and there is an exciting opportunity to raise the bar of what a leading cash account should be for advisory clients. Throughout this year we will add capabilities to help your clients do more with their Flourish Cash account and, over time, replace their primary checking account. We’ll make it even easier to pay bills, fund investments, make deposits, automate cashflows, and generally access funds how and when clients want. Of course, we’ll do all that while still offering a highly competitive rate,^§ further expanding FDIC insurance through our Program Banks, and delivering an intuitive, elegant experience.

We are confident that bringing more of your clients’ primary checking account activity to Flourish Cash can unlock value for advisors. Expanded capabilities will increase client wallet share and create planning opportunities to move more funds into the portfolio — to date, we’ve sent more than $800M from Flourish Cash to RIA portfolios on a net basis. Further, leveraging Flourish Cash for more primary cash account activity will help defend against banks and wirehouses who openly use banking services to identify valuable wealth management prospects. 

In fact, we plan to use that same bank and wirehouse playbook for RIAs’ benefit by leveraging Flourish Cash as a high quality lead generation channel to further drive organic growth. To date, your existing clients have consistently generated thousands of referrals for you every year via Flourish Cash — but we know we can do more. In 2026, we plan to invest in this capability even further to deliver more value for your clients and simultaneously turn Flourish Cash into a reliable source of prospects for your firms. 

We are excited to bring these new capabilities to market and redefine what a cash account can be for you and your clients.

Delivering increased capabilities for your clients’ existing annuities

For Flourish Annuities,^∫ we will build upon our leading transaction platform to give advisors more robust aggregation and intelligence capabilities to improve client outcomes and drive organic growth.

In response to advisor feedback, we dramatically expanded our transaction platform last year to cover the majority of fee-based annuity needs: we now support MYGA, FIA, RILA, VA, all with income riders from leading carriers. On the back of those enhancements, we received glowing feedback from advisors on the simplicity of our experience, the speed of issuance, and the quality of our premium service from our licensed team. While we have a growing number of firms consistently using our leading transaction platform, we’ve also heard from many advisors who are less familiar with annuities that they need help identifying, aggregating, and analyzing the annuities their clients already own. RIA clients own hundreds of billions, if not over a trillion, in existing annuity policies — our data shows this is true even amongst RIAs who do not sell annuities themselves. These existing policies represent a largely untapped opportunity for advisors to improve client outcomes while simultaneously growing AUM.

To help advisors capture this opportunity, we will be adding critical aggregation and intelligence capabilities over the course of this year. We’ll add functionality to ingest existing policy data — as one-offs or in bulk — analyze those policies, and quickly determine which policies may be good candidates for replacement to a fee-based offering. Further, we’ll add the ability for Flourish to become Agent of Record on policies that should remain in-force to help RIAs consolidate policy data in one, easy-to-use platform. From the in-force data we have analyzed to date, it is worryingly common to discover legacy annuities that are not only not fit for purpose, but are outright bad for clients. I strongly believe that RIAs have both an opportunity to add value and a duty of care to ensure they are not ignoring existing annuities — Flourish is committed to making this easy for RIAs.

Beyond the opportunity to add client value, these new capabilities will help drive organic growth for advisors. While the innovation of fee-based or advisory annuities came to market about a decade ago, the overwhelming majority of in-force annuities are still commissioned-based. That means that millions of policies owned by RIA clients are essentially “dead assets” to RIA advisors who don't hold insurance licenses. Given many of these policies are no longer fit for purpose, this creates a magical opportunity to do right by your client while at the same time, increasing your billable AUM. This opportunity is particularly ripe for the larger, more acquisitive firms who are inheriting tens to hundreds of millions of commissioned annuities each year as advisors migrate from broker-dealer models to full RIA models.

I am optimistic that these new capabilities will help change how RIAs think about the role of annuities in their practice and turn an asset class that is often avoided into one that is actively embraced to the benefit of both you and your clients.

Putting advisors in the driver’s seat on mortgages

In addition to our existing product lines, we will be launching our mortgage and mortgage refinancing solution this year. Our new offering will empower advisors to directly help their clients secure great financing on arguably the most important asset on their balance sheet: their home.

For years, advisors have been asking us to expand into lending with mortgage being the most requested loan type. Advisors shared with us that the lack of a scalable, RIA-centric offering meant this was one of the few areas where RIAs lose assets as clients transfer funds to banks and wirehouses to secure relationship pricing. In fact, a C-suite executive at one of the largest, most well known RIAs in the country revealed that she transferred hundreds of thousands in assets away from her RIA advisor to a wirehouse to secure relationship pricing on her mortgage. If an RIA executive is willing to move assets away for better pricing, what is keeping regular RIA clients from doing the same?

To fill this RIA need and close this gap, we have been quietly working to implement a more efficient, innovative design that cuts significant costs out of the typical mortgage process. Those cost savings mean we are often able to price loans 50 bps or better than the national average. And that is not just in theory — we are actively closing live loans now via a pilot program where we are seeing our rates consistently beat offers from other lenders. We are thrilled with the early results.

Outside of rates, our lending solution will be delivered via the same elegant, intuitive experience that you have come to expect from Flourish. Mortgage applications can be highly involved, but we are confident our offering, which blends simple, easy-to-use technology with premium service via Flourish’s own loan officers, will help streamline the process for you and your clients. We also will be introducing functionality to help advisors track and identify refinance opportunities to create next best action optimization opportunities for when your client is “in the money” on a refi. I am confident mortgages will be a powerful new way for advisors to add value, win new clients, and compete against the Robinhoods and Wealthfronts of the world looking to move up market.

We will share more on Flourish Lending soon and we cannot wait to get this new, much-needed tool into your hands.

We have ambitious plans for 2026 to empower advisors to deliver true, holistic implementation of financial advice across a client’s entire financial life and thrive in an increasingly competitive wealth landscape. Ensuring fiduciary advice actually gets implemented is a critical step in maximizing the positive impact of wealth management and we are dedicated to broadening that impact for the betterment of clients. 

We are eager to deliver on these initiatives this year to deliver more value to your clients, strengthen your advisory relationships, defend against formidable competitors, and help drive organic growth for your firms. Should you have any feedback on the initiatives outlined in this letter, please do not hesitate to share it with me at ceo@flourish.com. Our roadmap and priorities are heavily influenced by input from our trusted RIA partners and I love hearing from you.

Thank you again for the tremendous trust you have placed in us to serve you and your clients. Like every year, we will work tirelessly in 2026 to earn that trust everyday.

I wish each of you a prosperous, healthy, joyous, and laughter-filled 2026. Happy New Year. 

Best,
Max Lane 
CEO, Flourish