Vanilla Wins 2026 Wealthies Award in Estate Planning – Technology

BELLEVUE, Wash., September 11, 2026 — Vanilla, the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors, today announced it was named a winner in the Estate Planning – Technology category at the 2026 Wealth Management Industry Awards (the “Wealthies”). The 12th annual awards were held on September 10, 2026 at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City.

The category award recognizes Vanilla’s constant innovation in a part of the financial plan that had gone untouched for decades. Estate planning sat at the edge of the advisor relationship because the documents were too dense to discuss and too slow to analyze. Vanilla has spent years making that work fast, visual, and repeatable, and the platform has kept changing as advisors have shown the company what the next problem is.

The recognition came the same day Vanilla announced its next chapter, with agentic AI at the core. Through specialized agents, VAI®, Vanilla’s AI, reads documents to onboard new clients, builds the client profile alongside the advisor, catches discrepancies as they surface, and flags the planning opportunities worth acting on for advisor approval. The work covers an advisor’s entire client base rather than the largest twenty relationships, and what surfaces is the work that changes an outcome for a family. The advisor decides what to act on.

VAI runs on top of Vanilla’s extraction engine rather than in place of it. That engine has read and structured more than 60,000 estate documents and modeled more than 32,000 estates, work that began before generative AI was available and that keeps the core planning calculations deterministic. Vanilla is the only patent-protected platform in the category with built-in de-identification, so client identifying data never reaches a language model, and the company does not use client data to train any underlying model. The expertise came before the software, shaped by an in-house trust and estate team of 15 professionals with more than 190 years of combined experience, alongside co-founder Steve Lockshin, who built one of the country’s largest independent advisory firms on estate planning.

“We have been the first to innovate in this category at every turn, from abstracting estate documents to modeling what a plan actually does for a family,” said Gene Farrell, CEO of Vanilla. “This award recognizes that record, and the next chapter continues it. We’re evolving the platform to be agentic so AI can do the work advisors actually need done, with VAI catching what matters across the whole book and handing back the reasoning so they can walk into the room looking like an expert.”

Now in its 12th year, the Wealthies program recognizes the companies, organizations, and individuals supporting financial advisor success. This year’s program drew a record 1,392 nominations from 508 unique companies.

About Vanilla

Vanilla is the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors. By transforming complex legal documents into clear, interactive visuals, Vanilla enables advisors to deliver more personal, impactful conversations around legacy, wealth transfer, and generational planning. With deep integrations, intuitive workflows, and expert support, Vanilla helps advisors bring estate planning into the heart of holistic financial advice. Learn more at www.justvanilla.com.

Media contact

Rocco Aloe, Gregory Agency
vanilla@gregoryagency.com