EncorEstate Plans launches standalone special needs trust offering for financial advisors. March 9, 2026 Streamlining the creation of customized strategies for families with special needs planning. EncorEstate Plans (Encore), the most comprehensive and customizable estate planning and trust funding solution for advisors, today announced the launch of its standalone special needs trust (SNT) offering. The new SNT offering - available as a standalone purchase later this year - enables financial advisors to facilitate the creation of fully customizable special needs trusts for their clients as part of Encore's pay-as-you-go offerings. With approximately 57 million Americans (nearly one in five) living with a disability, the need for proper special needs planning is significant and growing. Yet, research indicates that roughly 80% of families with special needs dependents have not established a SNT to preserve eligibility for critical government benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid. Until now, advisors seeking to address this gap have been forced to refer clients out to specialized attorneys at significant cost, or rely on rigid, generic templates that fail to account for each family's unique circumstances - an approach that is neither comprehensive nor aligned with the goals of holistic financial planning. "Advisors tell us all the time that special needs planning is one of the most important and most underserved areas in their practice," said Matt Morris, CEO and Co-Founder of EncorEstate Plans. "By offering a standalone special needs trust, we're removing the barriers that have prevented advisors from serving these families directly. We believe it will fundamentally change how advisors approach truly comprehensive financial planning for clients with special needs dependents." TRULY COMPREHENSIVE AND CUSTOMIZABLE SPECIAL NEEDS PLANNING Encore's special needs trust offering is designed to address the full spectrum of special needs planning scenarios advisors encounter. The SNT supports both third-party special needs trusts (funded by parents, grandparents, or other family members) and first-party special needs trusts, which are funded with the disabled individual's own assets, such as an inheritance or legal settlement. This flexibility allows advisors to serve clients across a wide range of situations, from parents planning for a child with Down syndrome or autism to adults managing assets for a family member who became disabled later in life. Critically, Encore's SNT is not a one-size-fits-all template. Each state has variations based on its particular set of laws. Encore enables advisors and their clients to tailor various aspects of the SNT to the beneficiary's specific needs and the ultimate desires to provide for other family members upon the death of the initial beneficiary. All of this is being done while preserving eligibility for needs-based programs like SSI and Medicaid. "Special needs trusts are among the most basic irrevocable and non-controversial estate planning documents. They have one overriding purpose - allowing the beneficiary to live a better version of their life with resources that will supplement any state or federal needs-based public benefit," said Mike Bennett, COO, Co-Founder, and Head of Estate Planning at EncorEstate Plans. "Our platform combines the deep legal expertise of our estate planning team with technology that makes this accessible to every advisor. The result is a special needs trust that is tailored to each client's family and helps limit risk exposure to families." STANDALONE ACCESS REMOVES BARRIERS FOR ADVISORS As part of Encore's comprehensive back-office estate planning platform, the new SNT offering will be available as a standalone purchase. This means advisors can facilitate the creation of an SNT for their clients on a case-by-case basis without committing to a platform subscription - significantly lowering the barrier to entry and making it practical for any advisor to serve clients with special needs planning requirements. The standalone SNT offering is available now in a Beta version and will be available within the software later this year. Advisors interested in learning more or joining the waitlist can visit www.EncorEstatePlans.com. ABOUT ENCORESTATE PLANS EncorEstate Plans is the #1 estate planning software for RIAs by market share according to the 2025 Kitces AdvisorTech Survey. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Seattle, EncorEstate Plans is the most comprehensive and customizable estate planning and trust funding platform for advisors. The company's technology and industry-leading support team empower advisors to efficiently facilitate the creation, updating, and funding of estate plans, all under the advisor's brand. All of this is reflected in EncorEstate Plans having the lowest customer churn (<1%) and highest momentum (11%) in the last 12 months according to the latest Kitces AdvisorTech Survey. The Encore platform has been named an "All Star" for the second consecutive year by the 2025 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, earning the highest average user rating (8.47 out of 10). Encore has been consistently recognized by industry analysts and customers for its focus on leveraging its human estate planners, paralegals, and attorneys to be advisors' estate planning back office, and placing value on higher service touch over pure technology solutions. Advisors who want white glove service, high-touch estate planning software should use EncorEstate Plans and its human estate planner review and unlimited support that comes at no cost. For more information, visit www.EncorEstatePlans.com.

New Jump report delivers advisor-client insights never seen before. From top client fears to the reasons for estate planning hesitancy, Jump analyzed 12,000 anonymized advisor-client conversations. The team at AI notetaker and meeting automation platform Jump has analyzed a veritable mountain of unstructured data from over 12,000 advisor-client meetings to develop its inaugural 2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report. The report, released Thursday, takes anonymized data from those meetings held across the U.S. between November 2024 and October 2025 to create actionable insights. "For this report, we analyzed the conversations themselves, how long things were discussed when in the call, whether the client brought it up or the advisor, and we were able to see how that affects specific recommendations," said Liam Hanlon, head of insights at Jump. "On average advisors are giving more than three recommendations in any one call, clients accept on average only one to at most two of those," Hanlon said. Extracting the why or most likely reasons behind those findings and many others through conversation analysis using natural language processing and a more in the way of methodology is at the heart of the study. This effort has gone beyond basic metrics like meeting volume or duration and measures client sentiment, fears, life events, key discussion topics, objections and advisor behaviors within the conversation context. The report is filled with charts, "Share of Meetings Containing Select Fears, by Month," for example, illustrating an obvious peak in fear of market losses or volatility erupting into conversation during late March into April. And because the data and analysis are based on actual client-advisor conversations, (albeit anonymized) it lacks the bias often inherent in survey-based research. A prime example, revealed early in the report, is the finding that advisors do, in fact, speak far more than most think they do (at least in the case of Jump-using advisors over the time period studied). Their analysis revealed that advisors spoke more than clients in 84% of cases. While the advisor technology industry has seen a tremendous increase in interest and adoption of estate planning technology, Bogart Wealth, LLC has to date seen little beyond surveys regarding the trend. In its study, Jump found that 46% of client conversations included an estate planning discussion and were able to assess and quantify the eight most common client reasons for not pursuing creation of or re-visiting an existing estate plan. Topping that list was clients stating they wanted to consult an attorney first, followed by the client expressing they needed more information before making a decision. While only 26% of clients agree to move forward with an estate plan, only about 2% outright decline, but 72% express interest yet defer acting (hence the analysis of reasons why). Lest advisors conclude that Jump interpreted some of the more technical areas all on their own in a vacuum, the company partnered with several established firms or institutions on key areas. In estate planning, Jump partnered with technology provider EncoreEstate Plans, which contributed subject-matter expertise and collaborated on question formulation, and provided commentary on findings. Similarly, Holistiplan assisted on the tax planning section, as did The American College of Financial Services on a section regarding annuities. This brief overview can only begin to unpack the findings within this 54-page report, which is free for download, requiring only a short registration. In addition to a one-page summary on methodology, there is a 15-page appendix that dives into the taxonomies, sampling design, validation procedures and index construction and other underpinnings of this mammoth data analysis effort. Davis Janowski is a New York-based technology journalist whose work spans consumer, business and the FinTech sectors. Prior to his six years with WM, Janowski worked for Forrester Research as an analyst covering Digital Wealth Management. In edition, he has worked for two FinTech startups, Wealthfront and New York-based FeeX, Inc. (now Pontera). His work covering the advisor tech space began in 2007 when he joined InvestmentNews as the advisor industry's first dedicated technology reporter. His start in tech journalism began as an editor with PC Magazine in 1999 where he later served as an analyst and reviewer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wealth Management., Financial Planning, RIABiz, InvestmentNews, PC Magazine, numerous blogs and several books, including Technology Tools for Today's High Margin Practice. He has also been a speaker and moderator at numerous industry conferences. Outside his day-to-day he is a senior guide for Manhattan Kayak Company in New York City.