At this year’s annual WealthStack Demo competition, the judges awarded the Best of Show Award to bQuest, a longevity planning and support platform for advisors, which launched last year (and won a Wealth Management Industry Award in September).
The competition has become a fan favorite among attendees of the Wealth Management EDGE conference, held at The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla., this week.
This year’s Audience Choice Award went to Vestmark and its artificial intelligence-driven Pulse tool, which provides continuous monitoring and querying of client portfolios for advisors who use the popular turnkey asset management platform.
At the conclusion of the real-time voting for the Audience Choice Award, Pulse held a commanding lead at 28% of the audience vote, with bQuest in second place at 15%, and participants Subatomic and Marloo tied at 9% each.
Held on day two of the conference, 12 competing wealthtech firms each had five minutes to pitch their wares before three judges: Woodgate Financial’s Jason Pereira, Nexus Strategy’s Tim Welsh, and Versoft Consulting’s Verity Larsen.
Competitors this year included AcquireUp, Agilno, bQuest, Deepvest, Feathery, Marloo, Poseidon, Practifi, Ridgeline, Socialive, Subatomic and Vestmark.
bQuest CEO Lauren Clough (right) presenting her Wealthstack demo.
In discussing Best-in-Show winner bQuest, which was presented by founder and CEO Lauren Clough, the judges agreed that the platform provided immediate assistance to advisors confronting many different types of client end-of-life or health support issues, from help in identifying long-term in-home assistance specific to their client’s location to funeral-related services, to many others. The judges liked that it not only provided numerous resources but was building out a national footprint of vetted providers for the multitude of services described on the platform. bQuest also launched a lead generation tool in May.
Judge Tim Welsh abstained from the final voting for the Best of Show Award to avoid suggestions of impropriety, as bQuest has been a client of his consultancy since its launch. The other two judges, however, were unanimous in awarding bQuest Best in Show.
Freedom Dumlao, CTO and Chief AI Officer of Vestmark, which won the Audience Choice Award.
Freedom Dumlao, Vestmark CTO and Chief AI Officer, demonstrated Audience favorite Pulse. During the demo, the application brought up as a scenario an alert on possible tax alpha on a loss, and then automatically prepared information on the tax loss harvesting carried out by the system and provided notes and talking points on it for the advisor who anticipated a call from the client.
Subatomic’s Karl Simon started off the demos. “Stop Buying Tools. Start Hiring AI Co-Workers,” read the tag line on the demo screen. Subatomic connects a wealth management firm’s existing tools and builds AI co-workers on top, teammates that are trained on the firm’s unique processes and internal knowledge and that are meant to be ready to work across departments from day one.
Competitor Practifi’s Oscar Husselbee demonstrated the CRM system’s (built on top of Salesforce) new Smart Notes meeting center, which, among other things, is meant to provide AI-driven meeting prep, record meetings and then bring those notes into the CRM, analyze them, and assign mentioned tasks to the appropriate staff.
Ara Coutts of Feathery demonstrated its automated advisor transitioning tool, meant to simplify a traditionally fragmented, clunky and time-consuming process. The demo experienced a hiccup early on while attempting to showcase its AI chatbot, Robin. Judges Tim Welsh and Verity Larsen noted that they liked the platform’s voice-activated workflow functionality, which is a fairly new trend among advisor technology.
Nick Schmidt presented advisor seminar marketing services and technology provider AcquireUp’s new data-led tools. The judges especially liked the tool’s data map and geography visuals.
Marloo co-founder and co-CEO Shakeel Lala demonstrated one of the many abilities of the AI-driven platform: generating a client investment proposal from a combination of client meeting notes and unstructured data across the hypothetical advisor’s systems. The technology relies on what it calls the client intelligence layer. The judges admired the application’s user-friendliness and were impressed by Marloo’s automated form-filling capabilities.
Toby Wade, CEO and co-founder of Deepvest, who has a PhD and is a former Wall Street quant, uploaded two model portfolios and demonstrated the platform’s immediate performance comparison between them, generating charts on the fly. Welsh noted how well-designed the presentation layer was and the technology’s ability to easily allow advisors to create guardrails, while Pereira complimented how readily accessible important data appeared to be on the application.
David Moricca, founder and CEO of Socialive, a video creation platform for financial services firms, demonstrated the tool, intended for both a firm’s marketing team and its advisors. The judges liked the apparent ease of use through a text editor, which is also linked directly to both the audio and video. And all three judges noted how intuitive the turnkey the video creation and editing appeared to be and how the platform had been tailored specifically for the advisor industry.
Agilno’s Petar Vukasinovic, the company’s CEO and founder, demonstrated how the platform’s AlphaRail agent builder could be used to quickly create a “Beneficiary Update Manager” agent for an advisory firm as an example. “This is a very simple workflow meant to work with all of your tools,” he said. The judges commented on the prominence and ease of keeping a human in the loop, as well as the platform’s permissioning controls.
Ash Bhoopathy, founder and CEO of Poseidon, noted that his startup served as a “growth partner” to the tech-forward, fast-growing RIA Farther. “Clients don’t know what they don’t know,” he said. All three judges were impressed by the look and feel of the demo and tool, as well as its focus on the unsolved organic growth problem most advisors face.
Finally, Ridgeline’s Sterling Perkins, director of solutions at the firm, demonstrated the company’s technology, which could be thought of either as client management technology or in the frame of a traditional CRM platform, but one that is AI-driven and manages a firm’s data. Cloud-based and meant to perform equally when rendered on a traditional desktop, tablet or mobile device that is meant to provide a data-driven visualization of any client’s “engagement experience” on the fly.
“The agent is always monitoring and analyzing communications with the client,” he said.
Judges noted how seemingly well thought-out and intuitive the application’s user interface appeared, especially compared to those of many startups using AI and chatbots.
Fynancial, founded in 2022, won Best in Show at the 2025 competition. Referring to itself as a digital experience platform, the mobile-first application combines traditional wealth management tools with modern social engagement features.
