Dear Advisors,

Today, I am thrilled to announce that Flourish has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Sora Finance, a leading lending platform that serves advisors. In this letter, I’d like to outline why we purchased Sora, share my observations of the evolution of wealth management and WealthTech, and paint a broader vision for the future of Flourish.

As always, that vision is shaped by you, our partners. If you have any thoughts or feedback on what I’ve shared, I’d love to hear from you at ceo@flourish.com.

Our acquisition of Sora reflects our view of the future of wealth management and the corresponding technology that will support that shift: WealthTech 3.0

Decades ago, advisors began as sellers of financial products (Wealth 1.0) and later evolved into comprehensive financial planners and portfolio managers (Wealth 2.0), which is how most RIAs operate today. We believe advisors are moving toward a new phase of wealth management, driven by evolving consumer preferences, new competitive dynamics, fee pressure, and more. In “Wealth 3.0,” we believe that advisors will be pushed beyond the portfolio to assist clients with all aspects of their financial lives, including banking, insurance, healthcare, taxes, estate, financial wellness, and more.

This view is not unique; to learn more about this shift I’d encourage you to read this great analysis from Michael Kitces, this comprehensive McKinsey report, and listen to this conversation with Mark Bruno of Emigrant Partners.

Where our views are sharpest, however, is that Wealth 3.0 will only be possible with the emergence of “WealthTech 3.0.”

We foresee a future where advisors can offer solutions for every aspect of their clients' lives and will serve as their sole financial relationship. Rather than having multiple relationships with an advisor, a banker, an insurance agent, a CPA, and more, clients will get everything they need from their single advisory relationship. Fulfilling that vision will require dramatic evolution from the technology platforms of today, which we believe will be characterized by three burgeoning trends:

1. Holistic Advice → Holistic Implementation
2. Point Solution Consolidation
3. Dynamic Financial Planning
   
   

From Holistic Advice to Holistic Implementation

In Wealth 2.0, advisors deliver holistic financial advice — but remain limited in their ability to implement that advice for anything other than portfolio management, relying on client execution for everything from banking to estate planning. It’s a familiar struggle, repeated across planning meetings: “Did you open that high-yield savings account?” “Did you update your will?” “Did you refinance your mortgage?”

As advisors know, advice is only half the battle. Getting clients to implement that advice is often the real struggle.

At Flourish, we believe enabling advisor-centric implementation is a core challenge for platforms that serve advisors. While it is still early, we have seen success in our own sphere. To take just one example, with our eMoney Cash Management Optimization integration, advisors can help clients visualize the impact of optimizing low-yielding held-away cash — and then invite clients to Flourish Cash, directly from within eMoney.

With Flourish Cash, Flourish Annuities,^* and a new Flourish lending solution coming in 2026, we will empower advisors to seamlessly deliver both holistic advice and holistic implementation.

Point Solution Consolidation

At this point, most advisors are familiar with Michael Kitces’ Financial Advisor Technology Map, which has grown to include hundreds of entries. In recent years, we’ve seen an increase in M&A activity across “core” RIA systems, from Orion’s acquisition of Redtail to Schwab’s acquisition of TD Ameritrade. We believe the next wave of consolidation will impact “beyond the portfolio” solutions; RIAs simply cannot adopt dozens of new point solutions to cover all aspects of their clients’ financial lives.

Flourish’s acquisition of Sora fits neatly within this trend, allowing advisors to access cash management, annuities, and lending from within one, consolidated platform.

We believe advisors of the future will pair a traditional custodian, such as Schwab or Fidelity, with a multi-product, holistic implementation platform, like Flourish, in order to fully execute every part of a client’s financial plan.

Dynamic Financial Planning

We believe that these new “implementation-centric” platforms will leverage Generative AI to usher in the final ingredient of WealthTech 3.0: dynamic financial planning.

Today, financial planning often has two critical flaws:

1. It is manual, cumbersome, error prone, and time consuming for both clients and advisors
2. Financial plans quickly become stale, particularly as they rely heavily on client reported information

These hurdles impact both client adoption and advisor scalability, leaving clients worse off.

Utilizing WealthTech 3.0, advisors will deliver on the promise of Wealth 3.0: financial planning that is truly holistic and delivers data, insights, and opportunities in real time — without the need for self-reported changes. On an ongoing basis, new tools will monitor changes in cash holdings, lending data, insurance policies, and client lifecycle events to dynamically identify planning opportunities while putting advisors at the center.

By eliminating manual data collection and pairing intelligence with execution, this coming age of dynamic financial planning will lead to improved client outcomes, and ultimately, more satisfied clients, all while requiring less time from advisors and clients alike.

At Flourish, we are incredibly excited about this shift to Wealth 3.0 because we believe it will result in clients feeling more confident and secure in their financial lives, freeing them to focus on what truly matters in life: family, friends, careers, and passions. This is our why.

Consequently, we are orienting our entire company towards WealthTech 3.0. By helping advisors move from holistic advice to holistic implementation, by launching new solutions and consolidating existing businesses, and by focusing on dynamic financial planning, we believe we have a critical role to play in the industry.

Today, we are laser focused on two areas desperate for better advisor solutions: banking services and insurance.

Banking Services

With our acquisition of Sora, we have taken a giant step towards empowering advisors to bring services traditionally offered by banks to their clients. While Flourish is not exactly creating the “Bank for RIAs” (because we are not a bank), we are creating something very similar. And we’ll be doing it all via beautiful, delightful, just works technology — something that is very un-bank like.

Flourish Cash is already the leading cash-management solution in the advisory community, named the top-rated solution for the past six years in the T3 Advisor Software Survey. While primarily a savings solution today, we have been quietly investing in functionality that blurs the lines between checking and savings, and will continue on this journey until Flourish Cash becomes the only cash account your clients need.

With the acquisition of Sora, we will tackle the other side of the balance sheet. We will start with residential lending, then expand to commercial loans, personal lines of credit, and more — potentially even adding credit or debit cards — all of which will be integrated within advisor workflows.

These initiatives will uncover increasingly rich data on your clients, from cashflows to liabilities, which in turn will allow us to surface opportunities to advisors. A change in cashflow could represent an opportunity for an advisor to engage around savings rates, while a change in interest rates may introduce a refinancing opportunity. Critically, these opportunities will be uncovered without client self-reporting — dynamically and in real time.

While this journey will be years in the making, we see a world in which advisors will say to clients, “You no longer need to maintain a bank relationship. We can do everything your bank can do — and do it better — using Flourish.”

Insurance

Early last year, we launched Flourish Annuities in order to address two major opportunities:

• Modern fee-based annuity products compare favorably to many products used by RIAs today, and can be used to meaningfully improve client outcomes
• Countless RIA clients already own annuities that are often stale, expensive, and no longer fit for purpose

We launched what will become the premier, RIA-centric annuity platform — allowing advisors to incorporate annuities into their offering while driving organic growth. We could not be more bullish on this product line and will unveil the next phase of Flourish Annuities in the coming months – a significant expansion to encompass almost all major fee-based annuity types, as a next step to building the best annuity platform for RIAs.

We’ve also uncovered an even bigger opportunity, which will require Flourish Annuities to evolve and expand into the definitive “Insurance Platform for RIAs.” In the coming years, this platform will unlock:

• Aggregation of all existing client insurance policies, from annuities to term life, serving as a central repository of insurance information for RIAs
• Intelligence, combining cutting-edge, AI-driven technology with human expertise, allowing advisors to quickly analyze existing policies, see how they fit within financial plans, and create actionable recommendations — from adjusting life insurance coverage following major life events to surfacing annuity replacement opportunities
• Transaction, allowing advisors and clients to act on these recommendations by purchasing, replacing, or updating policies — with a delightful digital experience that we believe can be almost as simple as purchasing a mutual fund

Building this platform will take time, but we are already well on our way. We will embark on this journey together with advisors, recognizing that radical change is required in order to flip insurance from a pain point to a differentiator, while opening up new opportunities for advisors and clients alike.

While the transition to Wealth 3.0 will require change and adaptation, we believe the opportunities are immense — for advisors, clients, and WealthTech firms alike.

Critically, we can collectively help fulfill the promise of the wealth management industry: to help more people feel more secure and confident in their financial lives so they can spend more time doing the things they love. 

I’m incredibly excited about the future of our industry and all the good we can do together and I hope you are too.

Thank you for being our partners and for trusting us to deliver great experiences for your clients. As always, I deeply value your views, thoughts, and opinions. Please reach out to share any feedback on this letter or how Flourish can better serve your clients, I’d love to hear from you at ceo@flourish.com.

Max
CEO, Flourish