Discover Vanilla’s Latest Enhancements: VAI Chat, Estate Health Check, GST Capabilities, and More

As we embrace the vibrant spring season, Vanilla is excited to unveil even more new features and enhancements designed to simplify complex processes, provide intuitive planning tools, and foster deeper advisor-client conversations:

• Get estate planning answers fast with the full launch of VAI Chat, now generally available. VAI chat offers immediate AI-driven answers and insights, enabling users to efficiently navigate the complexities of estate planning.
• Streamline client assessments with the Estate Health Check, a quick and effective way for advisors to gather critical insights about a client’s current estate situation without the need for exhaustive document reviews.
• Optimize wealth transfer strategies with new Third Party Settled Trusts, focusing on GST exemptions. This feature assists in planning and visualizing long-term estate impacts, especially for generational wealth transfers, enhancing strategic advisory capabilities.
• Improve distribution clarity and organization in Estate Builder with the redesigned Distribution Details interface, making it easier for users to manage and customize trust distributions, thus increasing the accuracy and efficacy of estate planning.
• Faster importing of financial data with the new Balance Sheet Import, simplifying the process of entering client financial information and ensuring more accurate estate financial overviews with reduced manual input.

VAI Chat: Officially launched

We’re delighted to announce the official launch of VAI Chat, previously in beta and now available to all users! VAI Chat is an advanced chatbot designed to answer your questions about Vanilla, general estate planning and our product features. Starting next week, you can engage with VAI Chat to get quick answers, learn about product functionality, or even test fun queries.

Estate Health Check: Your planning pulse

The new Estate Health Check is here—a simple yet insightful client relationship tool that allows advisors to gauge the health of a prospect’s or client’s estate planning. Use it periodically or at the start of client relationships to gather essential information without needing your clients to dig up documents. The output provides educational content and recommended discussion points for your next client meeting, fostering stronger advisor-client relationships.

Third Party Settled Trusts: Enhancing GST capabilities

We are excited to announce Vanilla now supports Third Party Settled Trusts, an integral part of our broader Generation-Skipping Transfers (GST) feature rollout. This week, we are introducing functionality that allows all Vanilla users to add third party settled trusts to their systems, preparing for the comprehensive GST feature set to launch next month. Additionally, users can now update existing trusts to accurately reflect the correct settlor, addressing any previous workarounds.

While the full suite of GST capabilities, including advanced management of Generation-Skipping Transfer Taxes (GSTT) through inputs and visualization of GST exemptions and statuses, remains in limited release, we encourage those interested in early access to reach out to your account team. This phased approach ensures that we gather valuable feedback and refine our features, aiming for a broader release in June.

Redesigned distribution details in Estate Builder

We’ve made significant improvements to the Distribution Details workflow within the Estate Builder. The new streamlined abstraction process helps you add and organize distributions to trusts such as Marital Trust, Disclaimer Trust, and others, with enhanced efficiency and clarity. This update to the Estate Builder flow makes the setup of complex estates more intuitive and manageable.

Importing financial data: Easier than ever with new spreadsheet upload

In response to your feedback, we have simplified the process of importing financial data into Vanilla. In addition to using our integrations, you can easily import financial data with the new Balance Sheet import feature, currently in beta. Using a spreadsheet template, you can quickly upload financial information reducing the time spent on data entry.

For a closer look at these features or to schedule a demo, please contact our sales team.