Vanilla adds specialist estate support as planning complexity rises

Vanilla, an estate planning platform for wealth management firms, announced the launch of Vanilla Concierge, a professional services offering that gives advisory firms direct access to the company's trust and estate specialists alongside its software platform.

Vanilla's experienced team of trust and estate professionals have been reading and abstracting estate documents and turning them into complete visual plans since the company's founding in 2019. Vanilla Concierge puts that depth front and centre, making it a resource every customer can draw on directly, including new, more hands-on ways to work with Vanilla Concierge.

Vanilla Concierge’s first category is abstraction services, the document abstraction work Vanilla's in-house team has done since 2019, now expanded with two new ways to engage them directly: guided sessions where Vanilla walks an adviser through a client's plan and multi-session training for firms building profiles themselves. It's the first of several categories planned under the Concierge umbrella as Vanilla continues to expand the ways firms can work with its team.

"Advisors have always been able to call on our team, not just our software," said Gene Farrell, CEO of Vanilla. "Vanilla Concierge gives that a name and makes it easier to access. As more firms bring us more complex work, we're building out the ways we can provide them with the support they need."

Vanilla has been abstracting client documents and building estate profiles since 2019, led by Julia Santullano, J.D., LL.M., who has served as the director of abstraction services for the past two years. Santullano brings more than two decades of trust and estate experience to the role, including more than a decade as a practising attorney and five years directing estate and tax planning for a national broker-dealer's advanced planning team. This abstraction work has produced more than 10,000 client profiles representing more than $140 billion in client assets across every US jurisdiction and the full wealth spectrum. It also feeds directly back into the platform, shaping how Vanilla's product team builds and refines the tools advisers use every day.

"Vanilla has spent years in the details of estate documents, the provisions, the structures, the edge cases that make this work hard to do well," said Julia Santullano, director of abstraction services at Vanilla. "Vanilla Concierge means every firm on the platform can bring that depth into their client conversations, in whatever way fits how they practice."

Estate planning is a specialised, complicated discipline, and Vanilla has always treated deep trust and estate knowledge as core to what it offers, not an accessory to the software, but a strength in its own right. Vanilla employs 15+ trust and estate professionals, including 10 non-practising attorneys, who bring a combined 190+ years of experience. Vanilla Concierge makes these resources directly available to advisors, helping them deliver more value in client conversations, grow their practice, and build deeper client relationships. That includes support on a single complex, high-stakes case, or handing off abstraction and profile-building entirely so an in-house planning team can focus on client relationships.

Re-disseminated by Wealth and Society