With meeting prep consuming up to 20 percent of an advisor’s week, integrated platforms and automation tools are redefining how planning gets done
This article was produced in partnership with Objectway
Financial planning is shifting in noticeable but steady ways. Advisors are meeting clients who arrive with broader questions, more overlapping priorities, and a stronger expectation of clarity. Boomers want support as they enter decumulation, millennials are balancing mortgages, childcare and long-term savings, and many investors who once felt outside the industry’s core audience now expect regular planning support.
A conversation with Objectway’s Geoff Parslow, Head of Sales and Business Development, and Mike Howe, Customer Success Manager, helped clarify what this shift looks like. Their observations point to a planning model that is becoming broader, more practical and more closely connected to the technology advisors rely on every day.
A wider planning audience and a clearer sense of what clients need
The demographic backdrop is hard to ignore. Howe notes that advisors are now dealing with two large client groups whose needs overlap more than ever. Boomers are thinking about sustainable withdrawals and income longevity, while younger households are trying to keep up with competing priorities. As he puts it, planners today must address “budgeting, borrowing, saving, investing, everything like that,” often in a single meeting.
At the same time, many households with moderate assets have historically been underserved because traditional planning required extensive preparation time. Parslow points out that clients with assets “between $250,000 and $750,000 are likely get left behind the financial planning curve,” not because their needs were simple, but because advisors lacked the capacity to build full plans for them.
New tools are shifting that boundary. Advisors no longer need to produce long, complex reports to provide meaningful support. Howe emphasizes that clients engage best with information that is “simple, easy to understand,” even when the underlying calculations are sophisticated. This clarity helps clients understand their position and what actions matter, without being overwhelmed by detail.
Planning also plays a stabilizing role in volatile markets. When portfolios are down, clients naturally focus on the short term. Howe notes that having an up-to-date plan in front of them reduces anxiety because they can see how the long-term path holds together even through market dips. It gives advisors an anchor for the conversation, and clients a stronger sense of direction.
Technology becomes the backbone of the client experience
The role of technology in this shift is difficult to separate from the planning conversation. Parslow has seen how deeply an advisor’s tech stack affects both productivity and client trust. As he puts it, many systems in the past were built around the wrong assumptions. “Everyone was building client portals and mobile apps,” he says, “but very few solutions were built around advisors’ real business challenges.”
Those challenges typically surface not in client-facing tools, but in the day-to-day friction of running a practice.
That friction adds up quickly. Parslow notes that one of the biggest constraints advisors face is time: meeting preparation alone can absorb nearly 20 percent of a 45-hour workweek. Traditional planning requires gathering data, entering it manually, recalculating projections and rerunning reports before every meeting. As he explains, most advisors do the plan once, then tuck it away until the next major update, simply because the process is too repetitive to maintain.
This is where integration becomes essential. Howe points to financial planning software as an example of how technology can reduce this burden. When it is integrated directly into the client book of record and potentially the investment book as well, the plan updates automatically each day as new data flows in. Advisors are no longer rebuilding reports or refreshing projections manually. Instead, they enter client meetings with up-to-date numbers already in place.
Parslow sees even more potential as systems become better connected. In an ideal setup, onboarding, KYC, planning tools and portfolio management would operate within an integrated environment. A change in one area would automatically trigger updates in the others, turning every client interaction into an opportunity to reinforce or adjust the plan.
After decades working with advisors, Parslow observes that the practices that function best are those where planning is continuously supported by the technology behind it, not rebuilt piece by piece.
A practical future that is already taking shape
Client experience is shaped by these choices too. Because the digital environment is often the main place clients engage with their advisor, if tools are intuitive and easy to navigate, they lift both client satisfaction and advisor confidence. If they are clunky, the friction is felt on both sides.
One of the clearest needs heading into 2026 is seamless integration. Advisors are using more technology than ever, but most of it sits in separate corners of the workflow. Tools record meetings. Others store planning data. Others hold investment notes or compliance reminders. The pieces rarely speak to one another. Even tools that capture rich context, such as AI note-taking apps, “often end up stranded,” Parslow says -- disconnected from the rest of the client’s profile. Until these tools feed into a single environment, advisors will continue stitching together information that should already be unified.
Both Parslow and Howe see planning in 2026 moving toward something steadier and more usable. Simpler workflows. Rather than reinventing planning, the industry is finding ways to make it more straightforward and more widely accessible. That kind of practical improvement often proves the most durable.
