Driving Growth, Trust, and Efficiency Through Estate Planning: How Coastal Bridge Advisors is Leveraging Vanilla Across the Client Lifecycle

Challenge

Like many modern firms, Coastal Bridge Advisors saw estate planning as essential—but time-consuming, complex, and often underleveraged across advisors. Matt Marini, a senior advisor at the firm, recognized an opportunity to change that. The team needed a solution that could:

• Serve a wide range of clients, from mass affluent to ultra-high-net-worth
• Drive meaningful planning conversations earlier in the client lifecycle
• Improve meeting preparation, operational accuracy, and advisor capacity
• Turn estate planning into a scalable, repeatable growth strategy

Solution

Partnering with Vanilla gave Coastal Bridge Advisors a single platform that could meet all those needs and more.

1. Prospecting & Data Gathering with Sample Reports

Using Vanilla’s sample estate reports, Matt and his team have created a simple but powerful entry point for prospects. Whether showcasing planning opportunities for clients with $3M or $20M+, the sample reports generate urgency and open the door to deeper engagement.

2. Operational Efficiency at Scale

With V/AI Estate Summaries and Estate Builder, the team is saving hours of manual work while gaining accuracy and confidence.

The team is also excited to scale this across more advisors, bringing AI-powered prep into every meeting and letting each advisor do more without needing to be an estate expert.

3. Wallet Share Wins Through Strategic Planning

Our team collaborated with a client who split their assets between Coastal Bridge Advisors and another RIA. In a discussion about gifting to their children, we used Vanilla’s platform to illustrate the estate tax consequences of inaction and showcased alternative gifting strategies that could preserve their control while potentially saving millions.

4. Advanced Scenario Planning That Closes the Gap

For a business owner expecting a $100M sale, Vanilla’s Scenarios tool helped Coastal Bridge model baseline and advanced strategies—including gifting and income tax implications.

5. Multi-Generational Planning That Builds Relationships

We assisted a multigenerational family with a complex network of trusts and entities. Using Vanilla’s visualizations, we clarified their situation, transforming a previously overwhelming and disorganized setup into a manageable, well-organized structure.

Using Vanilla’s visualizations, the team walked the family through each trust, showed who the key parties and fiduciaries are, and clarified which beneficiaries received what and when. The planning was also layered with deeper complexities: one child had received more in past gifts, and the family wanted to equalize this moving forward. The house—worth $8 million—needed to be split while carving out an additional $1 million to create parity among the heirs.

To model this properly, the team consulted Vanilla’s in-house team to ensure the model accurately reflected the family’s goals.

This meeting helped turn legal complexity into clear visuals, sparking a powerful family conversation that included all three generations for the first time. What could have remained a confusing, emotionally charged situation became a moment of clarity, alignment, and trust. The clarity created in that meeting not only reinforced trust—it also expanded the advisor’s relationship with the entire next generation.

6. Accuracy That Builds Confidence

In a recent case involving a $600–$700M UHNW client with properties and business interests across multiple states, the Coastal Bridge team relied on Vanilla to model highly complex estate and tax scenarios—factoring in California residency, New York estate tax exposure, and other advanced planning considerations.

Vanilla’s ability to accommodate the full complexity of this client’s holdings—and update the plan as their life evolved—has turned the platform into a critical part of ongoing planning reviews.

Why Vanilla

Coastal Bridge chose Vanilla not just for the tools today—but for the partnership. The team values:

• Unmatched depth and accuracy across wealth tiers 
• A fast-moving product and tech team that responds to nuanced planning questions
• Integrations that make existing tools (like eMoney and Salesforce) more valuable
• Clean, co-branded client deliverables that elevate the advisor’s presence
• Responsive support and educational enablement across the team 

Looking Ahead

As Coastal Bridge continues to expand their use of Vanilla, the team is excited to onboard more advisors, bring estate planning into every client conversation, and turn trust-building into a scalable, repeatable growth engine.

All opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes and constitutes the judgment of the author(s) as of the date of the article. These opinions are subject to change without notice and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security. The material has been gathered from sources believed to be reliable, however Coastal Bridge Advisors cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of such information. Coastal Bridge Advisors does not provide tax or legal or accounting advice, and nothing contained in these materials should be taken as such. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. As always please remember investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital and past performance does not guarantee future returns; please seek advice from a licensed professional.