Driving Results: How Matter Family Office Embraces AI and Integrated Tech

Key takeaways

• Matter Family Office, a multifamily office serving about 90 core families across roughly 30 states, centralizes estate-plan review under three in-house attorneys who use Vanilla to issue-spot before work is handed to individual client teams.
• Running an existing client’s plan through Vanilla surfaced an overlooked Illinois death-tax exposure tied to how assets were titled; catching it in time let the family’s estate attorney fix the plan before the client passed away.
• Vanilla’s eMoney integration pulls updated balance-sheet data automatically once accounts are mapped, cutting what used to be hours of manual spreadsheet work down to minutes and turning full estate-diagram rebuilds into edits that take, in Raycraft’s words, “a couple of minutes.”

A multi-family office built to go deep, not just wide (0:00–5:44)

Matter Family Office is a multifamily office founded thirty-five years ago in St. Louis, with additional offices now in Dallas and Denver. Marlys Raycraft, a managing director who works out of the Denver office, described a firm that serves about ninety core families spread across roughly thirty states, most with a net worth of $100 million or more.

Those clients tend to be multigenerational families, business owners, and families navigating a transition, along with what Raycraft called Matter’s fastest-growing client base: single family offices that need extra scale as the families they serve keep growing. Matter organizes its work around four pillars: investment management, financial skill building and next-generation empowerment, bill pay and tax advisory, and estate and business succession planning.

What ties those pillars together is a values-first onboarding process. Matter starts by codifying a family’s values, then works with a client’s broader advisory team to make sure every piece of planning stays aligned with those values and with the purpose behind the wealth itself. The problem, Raycraft said, is that none of that stays static. “You work with somebody today and five years from now, circumstances look different,” she said, pointing to growing balance sheets, new family members, and shifting tax law. That need to stay proactive without adding headcount for every possibility, she said, is what pushed Matter to lean harder on technology, eventually leading to Matter’s work with Vanilla’s estate planning software built for ultra-high net worth families.

Why credibility is the real competitive battleground (5:44–8:52)

Laura Jogani, who leads sales at Vanilla, pointed out that the term “family office” gets used so loosely that it has lost some of its meaning. Raycraft agreed. “Family office is a term that’s thrown around very loosely and doesn’t have a lot of meaning,” she said, since it gets applied to any number of different financial services.

That makes credibility the actual currency Matter is competing on, whether the comparison is to other family offices, traditional RIAs, or private banks. Raycraft said what wins and retains clients, and deepens relationships with other professionals like attorneys and CPAs, is what she called Matter’s bench strength: demonstrated expertise, not just a title on a business card.

That expertise matters just as much to outside advisors as it does to clients. Attorneys and CPAs are, in Raycraft’s words, counting on partners like family offices to stay proactive and to keep planning work aligned with a client’s actual balance sheet, so that what made sense when a plan was drafted still makes sense years later. Raycraft said Matter has leaned on its relationship with Vanilla specifically to showcase that kind of bench strength on the estate planning side, and that in the roughly six months since adopting the tool, several concrete examples have already come up.

Catching a six-figure tax exposure before it was too late (8:52–13:14)

The clearest example Raycraft shared involved a longtime client who had received a terminal cancer diagnosis about a year earlier and was, by the time of the webinar, nearing the end of his life. His client team asked Raycraft to run his estate plan through Vanilla to confirm the plan was in good shape, check that his assets were titled correctly, and produce a simple summary the family could use to understand what would happen when he passed.

The client lived in Illinois, a state with an aggressive estate tax, and his balance sheet was well above the state’s exemption. Once Raycraft entered his information into Vanilla, the software surfaced a death tax that would come due at his passing, the result of a second marriage where specific planning had been done to protect his children from a prior marriage while also providing for his spouse, but where the actual titling of assets did not line up with that intent.

Raycraft independently verified the calculation herself, then went to the client team directly: “You got a problem here. You need to talk to the estate attorney, bring them in, work together to find a solution to make this estate tax go away.” The client’s team brought the issue to the estate attorney immediately, who Raycraft said was “elated that it was raised as an issue” before it was too late. Quick changes eliminated the tax that would otherwise have been owed at the first spouse’s passing, and the episode built real credibility with the attorney, who, as Raycraft put it, “never would have known this without us bringing it to their attention.”

A collaboration tool for attorneys, not a substitute for them (13:14–16:12)

Raycraft was direct about why this works: “The power of Vanilla is the integration with the balance sheet.” Estate planning attorneys are, understandably, focused on the structure of a plan itself, but what an attorney intends on paper does not always match what actually happens once real assets and their titling are accounted for. Closing that gap, Raycraft said, “is a huge collaboration tool, and it drives more meaningful work for lawyers as well,” since a family office can now spot opportunities to bring an attorney or CPA back in to do more of the planning work a client actually needs.

Jogani made a similar point about why firms adopt the tool in the first place: “You buy Vanilla because you want to be more efficient. That’s why anyone really buys Vanilla.” Matter has put that efficiency to work in prospect meetings too. Raycraft said her team brings Vanilla’s pre-scrubbed sample reports into meetings with prospects who clearly have complex balance sheets or unfinished planning, and that prospects consistently respond well to the depth on display, making the reports a genuinely effective sales tool alongside their use with existing clients.

Making the eMoney integration actually save time (16:12–19:34)

Much of that speed comes from Vanilla’s integration with eMoney, which Raycraft, by her own admission, did not expect to find easy. “I am not the most tech savvy person on the planet, and even I have found the integration to be quite simple to navigate,” she said. Setup is a one-time step of mapping which accounts belong to which entities; after that, every time Matter’s team logs into Vanilla, the platform pulls updated data from eMoney automatically.

Matter uses a portfolio reporting platform called Tamarack, which feeds eMoney every night, so account balances refresh daily without any manual work on Raycraft’s part. “It’s automatic,” she said. The upfront investment is still real: Raycraft jokes with Matter’s board of managers that they had better renew the license every year, given how much time goes into building out a client’s data in the eMoney integration the first time. But that time, she said, pays off the moment a plan needs updating rather than rebuilding from scratch.

Centralizing expertise instead of duplicating it on every team (19:34–22:13)

Before Vanilla, Raycraft said, “the old school way of doing things was Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Visio,” and every estate health check meant a manual process of confirming summaries and manually adding up account balances, an enormous lift for complex clients. With the eMoney integration in place, analysts who used to spend hours preparing for meetings no longer have to.

That efficiency also let Matter centralize its expertise rather than trying to staff every client team with every specialty. Three attorneys at Matter now review all the estate plans that flow through Vanilla, issue-spotting across the firm, and can parachute in to help any client team that needs their specific expertise without a heavy lift, catching up quickly using what the software has already flagged. Jogani noted there’s more than one way to structure this: some firms build an internal centralized planning team the way Matter has, while others choose to outsource the document abstraction work entirely to Vanilla’s own in-house team of estate attorneys. Raycraft said Matter is now considering testing that outsourced option for its more complex cases, since even a dedicated internal team does not always have a full day to devote to one plan.

Where AI speeds things up, and where a human still checks the work (22:13–30:00)

Jogani walked through the different places AI shows up inside Vanilla: the estate builder tool Raycraft’s team uses to abstract documents into diagrams, a newer VAI summary feature that can generate a full summary and diagram straight from an upload with no manual abstraction required, and a Copilot feature that lets a user ask direct questions of an uploaded document. Raycraft said she treats the VAI summaries as detailed internal cheat sheets her team can pull up the moment a client calls with a specific question, precisely because they hold more detail than the simplified diagrams built for clients themselves.

That said, Raycraft is candid about where AI still needs a human backstop. “I don’t trust AI yet, so I always double check what AI tells me that the document says,” she said, adding that accuracy tends to track with document complexity: simple plans summarize cleanly, while irrevocable trusts with several layered triggering provisions are where she most often has to step in and make edits herself.

Q&A highlights

How accurate is Vanilla’s AI when it summarizes estate planning documents?

Raycraft says accuracy is generally strong, especially on straightforward documents, but generally she never treats AI output as final. Both the newer VAI summary tool and Vanilla’s Copilot query feature have been, in Jogani’s words, some of the most accurate AI tools their customers have seen in the industry.

Should a family office build an internal team to abstract estate documents, or outsource that work to Vanilla?

Matter currently keeps this work in-house, with three attorneys reviewing every plan that flows through Vanilla and flagging issues before handing cases to individual client teams. Raycraft said Matter is now considering testing Vanilla’s outsourced document-abstraction team for its more complex cases, since even a dedicated internal team doesn’t always have a full day to devote to one plan.

Can showing clients projections help convince them to make gifts before an estate tax law changes?

Raycraft said running what-if scenarios in Vanilla, comparing the cost of acting now against waiting, was effective at moving hesitant clients toward gifting, because the dollar figures involved were concrete rather than abstract. That said, this discussion centered on the federal estate tax exemption sunset originally expected at the end of 2025; the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has since made a permanent $15 million per-person exemption law instead, so the specific scenario referenced here no longer applies as described.

About the speakers

Laura Jogani, Head of HNW and Family Office Sales, Vanilla
Laura Jogani leads sales at Vanilla. Before joining, she spent most of her career at JPMorgan’s private bank advising ultra-high-net-worth clients.

Marlys Raycraft, JD, Managing Director, Matter Family Office
Marlys Raycraft is a managing director at Matter Family Office. She began her career as a trust and estate attorney and has spent roughly a decade working in the family office space, joining Matter in 2022. Raycraft holds a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and serves as board president of the Denver Estate Planning Council.

The information provided here does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice. It is provided for general informational purposes only. This information may not be updated or reflect changes in law. Please consult with an estate attorney, financial advisor, or tax professional who can advise as to your particular situation.