The 'buyer's guide' to tech

FINTECH: Joel Bruckenstein and Bob Veres took the stage at the Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas to unveil the much-awaited results of their annual software survey Tuesday night.?

The 78-page "2024 T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey" compares data across the past three years and includes statistics on market penetration and user satisfaction ratings — stats that Veres noted have both "gone up incrementally, which tells me that the people in the exhibit hall are doing a great job."?

Among the more notable findings was a jump in market penetration for estate planning tools, more than tripling since 2022, from 10.95% to 39.32%. The explanation, Bruckenstein said, was simple — software developers, aware that 2017 estate tax breaks are set to sunset in 2026, built tools to help advisors manage that change. That's a clear sign that technologists were paying attention to advisors and responding to their needs, he said.?

Read: A 'buyer's guide' for advisor tools and tech

TAX PLANNING: Shohei Ohtani's giant new contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers carries interesting financial planning and tax questions alongside its unprecedented impact on Major League Baseball.

The 29-year-old superstar designated hitter and pitcher smashed the previous record deal among professional baseball players by hundreds of millions of dollars when he agreed last month to a 10-year contract worth $700 million to wear the Dodger blue rather than remaining with the team's cross-freeway rival, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.?

Ohtani's contract is "remarkable and, as a result, the planning considerations are abundant," Matthew Bacchiochi, the president of Toronto-based Gavin Hockey Wealth Specialists, said in an email. After said income taxes, the yearly payments to Ohtani from the Dodgers will likely come down closer to $950,000, and the endorsement deals necessitate "a strategy to optimize the tax-efficiency of that business income," Bacchiochi said.

Read: Shohei Ohtani's deferred $680M drives home tax and planning lessons for financial advisors

VOICE: The wealth management sector is experiencing remarkable expansion, particularly in the United States; in 2023, client assets under management were expected to hit $58 trillion, according to Statista. But the wealth management industry has yet to overcome a very basic but pertinent challenge to future growth — the gender gap.

Wealth management remains a highly male-dominated space. At the beginning of 2023, only 12.5% of fund managers, for instance, in the U.S. were women, according to Morningstar. Astonishingly, this number has hardly budged since 2013. Furthermore, by the end of last year, only about 26% of the funds in the country were managed by a team that had one or more women as a member.

This imbalance, which reflects the underrepresentation of women in the wider wealth management industry, is especially striking given a Goldman Sachs study that found in 2020 that funds led by female or mixed teams performed better for the first time than funds led entirely by men.

Read: The future of wealth management is female, so why isn't the present?