Vanilla

Apr 14, 2021

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Estate planning platform Vanilla launches “Vanilla 2.0”

April 14, 2021. Steve Lockshin’s Vanilla, a comprehensive estate planning platform, announces the release of “Vanilla 2.0” now available for new and existing users.

Vanilla 2.0 is the latest version of Vanilla’s product offering designed to proactively manage the estate planning of an advisor’s entire client base. Vanilla is the first comprehensive estate planning solution that allows advisors to proactively monitor all of their clients, visualize existing planning, and take action through document creation.

‘Because estate planning can be so difficult to understand even with an experienced eye, Vanilla creates a way for us to bring simplicity to an experience that is traditionally very complex. This allows us a scalable way to add value across our entire clientbase and take action on a client’s planning where necessary.’

— TYLER GRAY FROM SAGEOAK FINANCIAL

Over the last several months, Vanilla gathered feedback from early adopters and partners to develop what is now “Vanilla 2.0”. The most notable updates include an all-new advisor dashboard, a new client onboarding flow, proactive estate planning opportunities and reminders, and ongoing monitoring of a client’s estate.

The new advisor dashboard serves as the home for any advisor to gain new visibility into all of their clients’ estate planning and activity. This gives advisors real-time updates on the status of their clients’ documents, reports, and opportunities. Vanilla’s new client onboarding flow makes it easy for advisors to add all of their clients into the platform and helps perform an initial assessment of a client’s existing planning. By gathering basic information through this onboarding process, Vanilla is able to identify opportunities tailored specifically to an advisor’s client. Advisors receive reminders based on existing planning, changes in law, or changes in life circumstances that prompt them to check-in on clients to provide ongoing value. For managing other functions of a client’s estate like inviting them to create documents or just updating information, each client has their own estate profile where advisors can easily make changes accordingly.

Since launching their initial version in 2020, it’s become clear that Vanilla allows advisors to provide differentiating value. For instance, advisors have been using Vanilla to deepen relationships with existing clients by helping them understand their existing planning in a new light. Some advisors have also found success by treating Estate Reports as a prospecting tool and winning some of their biggest clients to date.

‘I had a client with over a million dollars at a competing firm. I uploaded his estate docs to your Reporting service and presented that to him as why he should come to my firm. And it worked.’

— ALLEN GIBSON FROM GIBSON WEALTH ADVISORS

Vanilla has reinvented the estate planning experience by creating a platform where advisors can help all of their clients protect their wealth and legacy at a fraction of the cost, all while building relationships that go deeper than money and helping clients actually understand the impact of their planning.

To learn more about Vanilla 2.0 visit https://www.justvanilla.com/vanilla-20

About Vanilla

Founded in 2019 by AdvicePeriod’s Steve Lockshin, Vanilla is a Wealth and Estate Intelligence platform that helps advisors bring clarity to the most important planning a client will ever do.

Vanilla has built a platform with the goal of reinventing the estate planning experience, end-to-end. From efficient document preparation free from the risk of unauthorized practice of law (UPL), robust and easy-to-understand visualizations of complex estates, detailed diagrams of how assets transfer to future generations, to ongoing estate administration and sophisticated opportunity generation, Vanilla empowers advisors to differentiate through estate planning and deliver an experience to their clients unlike any other estate planning solution.

Using Vanilla allows advisors to deepen relationships with their clients and help them see the total picture of their wealth and legacy.