While 2020 was the year that the pandemic disrupted everything, 2021 seems to have been the year where we all collectively tried to adapt to a more virtual working world and return to some semblance of normal. Which, in the financial advisor world, that benefitted from the dual tailwinds of rising markets and increased demand from consumers for financial advice, meant a new wave of growth for most advisory firms. Here at Kitces.com, we too adapted to the more virtual world of advisor education in 2021, culminating in what ultimately was a near-doubling of the platform and Kitces team, and the opportunity to reinvest even more into both our Members Section, and the broader Financial Advicer community that reads the Nerd’s Eye View blog.
And as a result of these reinvestments, I’m excited to announce the launch of our new Kitces AdvisorTech Directory. The Directory was built as an extension of our popular AdvisorTech Solutions Map, which originally started out as a way to categorize the breadth of advisor technology tools to make it easier to find and select what an advisory firm needed, but over the past 4 years has grown so much that now it has a nearly overwhelming number of solutions! Now, with the Directory, advisors will be able to search directly by category, see both the primary and ‘secondary’ categories that a software solution can address, and even build (and save and share) their own hypothetical tech stack. In the coming year, we expect to add even more to the Kitces AdvisorTech Directory, including pricing and major feature details of vendors, ratings on AdvisorTech integrations, and data on advisor adoption and satisfaction ratings from our recent Kitces Research study on AdvisorTech usage!
In the meantime, we’re also rolling out a number of new features for both our Members Section, and our broader readership, including the most-requested “Save Favorite Articles” feature (and a process to create a Reader account so you can come back to your saved articles later!), a new “Suggest Topics” area of the Members Section to request what you’d like us to Nerd Out on for you with a future Nerd’s Eye View blog post, and the upcoming rollout of Kitces CE credits for the new state IAR CE requirements that are beginning for some RIAs in 2022.
Ultimately, though, we are still just getting going with the ongoing growth of the Kitces platform. In fact, in 2021 alone, our team working behind the scenes to make it all happen nearly doubled (from 11 to 21!), and there are now 3 new openings to join the Kitces Team of Nerds (an Education Systems Manager, an Associate Curriculum DesigNerd, and a new Director of Advisor Research opportunity!), as we continue to execute on our four strategic pillars of Navigational resources for advisors, Education for advisors, Research on advisors, and skills training for the Development of advisors (and yes, our organizational strategy really does spell out N-E-R-D!).
All in pursuit of our mission: Making Financial Advicers Better, And More Successful. I hope you’ll continue the journey along with us in 2022 and beyond!
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