With the rising cost of living, many more Canadians are now trying to prepare for the future through proper financial planning. Recent studies show that Canadians are not only game planning for their retirement, but also designing shorter-term financial goals to prepare themselves for life’s unexpected journeys. However, according to the 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey, most retiring Canadians are anxious about the new phase of their life due to having a lack of a financial plan in place. Owen Winkelmolen, Founder and CEO of adviice.ca is here to revolutionize that.  
 
Led by the vision of making financial planning ‘a norm’ in the average Canadian household, adviice.ca is a SaaS platform that delivers adaptable, collaborative, and easy-to-use financial planning for all. The platform is made for clients, advisors and clients seeking fee-only advisors, and it empowers Canadians to take the ropes of financial planning in their own hands using Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Up to this point, financial planning was restricted to high net-worth, high-income individuals, which is ironic, because I believe that the lower, moderate, and moderately higher income Canadians would benefit a lot more from financial planning,” shares Winkelmolen.  

From numbers to personal finance

Determined to democratize financial planning now, Winkelmolen realized his passion for numbers and personal finance early on through his extensive career at Canada’s leading brewery, Labatt Brewing Company. Starting from supply chain, moving into sales and pricing, and eventually finance and cash flow, Winkelmolen developed an interest in the world of numbers and decided to pursue his Financial Planning Certificate from the, now, Toronto Metropolitan University. Reflecting on his journey, Winkelmolen says, “Financial planning is so interesting, because it is a unique mix of personal finance and human psychology. Even when I was in undergrad, I always wondered if there was a job that would allow me to mix both fields because I genuinely enjoy that.” Trying to make this dream a reality, Winkelmolen set on a path to discovering something similar for himself after his Financial Planning Certificate, only to find just a few opportunities in the advice-only advisors’ market. This led him to create Planeasy.ca, a B2C platform designed for individuals, couples, young families, and retired individuals to provide them with unbiased financial advice, free from any sales pressure.

Scaling for impact 

Like many other innovative ventures tackling nationwide issues, Winkelmolen soon realized that the next phase of Planeasy.ca, achieving economies of scale and truly making financial planning a commonplace for all Canadians lies in leveraging technology. This would open pathways to new target audiences, markets, and product offerings. “We started strictly as a B2C platform, but a huge focus for us has always been efficiency, scale and how can we offer this easily, making it widely accessible and inexpensive. This is where technology comes in,” shares Winkelmolen.  
 
With three core product offerings, adviice.ca offers its AI-powered SaaS platform to advisors with capabilities of white-labelling, lead generation, referrals to engage with more clients and to customers who get direct access to create a strong financial plan for themselves, with the option of talking to a fee-only advisor, if needed. The platform is offered to customers for only $9 per month, with a special focus on retirement planning to help individuals easily transition into this new phase of their lives. “It’s the simple things of how you can minimize tax, how you can decumulate your assets, when to start your Canadian pension plan, your old age security, RSP, TSFA and the AI strategy on our platform automatically does that for them,” shares Winkelmolen. Looking to soon expand their offerings to young families, individuals, innovative ventures, the adviice.ca team has seen rapid growth since they launched their powerful tool for direct use by customers. Winkelmolen credits this to their tedious and years-long platform development process.  

Building a robust platform

Having a solid foundation of their model through Planeasy.ca, this platform was built organically through multiple beta testing, fast client onboarding and weekly new feature additions. “We already had our B2C model to engage customers directly through Planeasy.ca, and so with adviice, we started looking into the financial planner marketplace too. To have a platform ready quickly, we started onboarding one or two new clients every week and kept introducing them to an updated version of the platform. Since we began our venture right before the pandemic, we were well-positioned for the shift to online financial advice. We constantly made iterations, added new functionalities on a weekly basis which helped us in creating a great platform,” shares Winkelmolen. 

The future of financial planning with AI 

What makes the adviice platform incredibly powerful, does not lie only in the collaboration, transparent and easy-to-use capability, but also in its AI-powered technology. Recognizing the importance of having human touch regardless of technology, robot, or AI in place, Winkelmolen leverages AI on his platform to help financial planners create different financial strategies based on client data, helping planners to fully focus on building strong client relationships. “We have to understand that everyone has their own behavioral biases and personal experience with financial planning. That’s where the advisor will come in. The platform identifies the best strategies for a client, and the planners help execute those strategies with the client. This includes following up with them and providing more like a coaching service than doing the detailed technical financial planning,” says Winkelmolen. For Owen, this is what the future of AI looks like in the FinTech industry. With similar platforms coming into the picture, Owen believes that AI will initially be leveraged to empower financial planners with the technical aspect – the math and the numbers. This will help planners focus on assessing every unique client situation and finding the best path forward for them based on the client’s goals and values.  

Growing and seeking investment 

From raising funds organically through a pool of well-established industry advisors who believed in their idea to getting investment through the 519 Growth Fund and being a recipient of TechAlliance’s i.d.e.a. Fund™, adviice.ca had a clear uptick in the demand for their product which led them to seek investment. Winkelmolen shares, “We had a strong pull from the market which was a very clear indication that if we provided this as a software solution to other advisors, we could help scale up this sort of financial advice and provide more financial planning in Canada.” Aiming to create hundreds and thousands of financial plans for Canadians every year, adviice.ca is rapidly growing, currently raising a seed round. 
 
Their ultimate goal?