Simplify estate planning by integrating Addepar with Vanilla

Key takeaways

• Now, a family’s full balance sheet, aggregated and normalized inside Addepar, flows directly into Vanilla’s estate planning platform, refreshing regularly instead of being re-entered by hand.
• The integration runs on Addepar’s query API, so advisors don’t have to manually build or maintain a custom view inside Addepar. Authenticating with Addepar credentials inside Vanilla automatically brings over every client the advisor has access to.
• Addepar’s platform now underpins more than $4 trillion in aggregate assets across over 900 clients in roughly 40 countries, giving Vanilla a single structured source for the account, asset, and liability data behind each estate plan.
• Inside Vanilla, that data powers a complete ownership hierarchy and waterfall calculations showing how assets pass between generations.

How the Addepar and Vanilla integration helps advisors dive deeper with their clients (2:17–03:26)

Vanilla frames its integration with Addepar around what it calls the “total wealth advisor,” a role built on two data sets that rarely live in the same system. The first is estate plan data, the wills, trusts, and beneficiary structures that Vanilla organizes and analyzes. The second is a family’s full balance sheet, the holistic view of assets and liabilities that mostly resides in Addepar today.

Michael Schwoerer explained that connecting the two turns Addepar’s account aggregation and verification work into something advisors can act on directly inside their estate planning process. “The result is a super accurate, transparent, and efficient way to stay up to date on all of your clients’ total wealth plans,” Schwoerer said.

The Addepar advantage: from disparate accounts to one source of truth (03:26–11:00)

Blake Rose at Addepar, opened his portion of the session by naming the problem Addepar was built to solve. Client information for any given estate is scattered across custody banks, fund administrators, and a long list of other sources, and pulling it together by hand eats into the time advisors could spend serving clients. “There is a big disconnect between being a fiduciary and serving a client and the amount of time that it actually takes to structure information to perform that task,” Rose said.

Addepar’s core product has worked to close that gap by creating what Rose called a nucleus, or source of truth, for that scattered data. The platform structures information into a financial graph, a patented model that can represent ownership through trusts and other vehicles rather than just flat accounts, and calculates performance metrics like internal and time-weighted rate of return on top of it. That structured data is what other applications, including Vanilla, then draw on. As Rose put it, “Vanilla can iterate and move much faster if they’re able to ingest that information in one place and not have to go build the tentacles and the pipes to actually build upon that.”

The scale behind that data layer is substantial. Addepar reports more than four trillion dollars in aggregate assets on its system, serving over 900 clients across roughly 40 countries and more than 100,000 active users, spanning RIAs, multi-family and single-family offices, private banks, and institutions. The company has also expanded well beyond its original aggregation and reporting roots, adding trading capability and cash flow and liquidity modeling for family offices. Vanilla now sits alongside more than 100 other vendors in Addepar’s public integration center, listed in the planning category as one of the partners Addepar considers fundamental to how advisors run their day-to-day business.

The estate advisory gap driving Vanilla’s platform (11:00–15:00)

Where Addepar’s story starts with data, Vanilla’s starts with a gap in service. Schwoerer described Vanilla’s mission as building “the complete platform for modern estate planning,” a category he argued has barely evolved even as tax strategies have grown more sophisticated. The typical result, in his words, is “a mix of confusion and frustration resulting in huge stacks of paper that ultimately get thrown into a file cabinet for the next few decades.”

Schwoerer opened this part of the discussion by pointing to the great wealth transfer set to unfold over the next decade, then turned to a statistic he called even more relevant to advisors day to day. A study by Spectrum found that 93% of clients expect to receive estate planning advice from their advisor, but only 22% report actually getting that advice in a satisfactory way. Vanilla calls this the estate advisory gap, and it’s the problem the platform is built to close. Demand for that kind of proactive planning conversation is only growing ahead of the 2026 estate tax exemption sunset.

Vanilla’s product organizes its functionality into four pillars: helping advisors organize, visualize, strategize, and execute on a client’s estate plan. As of this webinar, the platform’s build-out centered on the organize and visualize pillars, with strategy and execution features called out as the next wave of product investment for the year.

Benefits connecting Addepar and Vanilla (15:00–17:00)

Schwoerer pointed to three concrete benefits once Addepar and Vanilla are connected. First, because Addepar’s aggregation and normalization already unify a family’s balance sheet, Vanilla can use that same data to run simulations on wealth transfer implications rather than asking an advisor to re-key it. Second, the connected data refreshes regularly, so the estate plan an advisor is showing a client reflects current holdings rather than a static snapshot revisited every few years. Third, the integration shortens client onboarding inside Vanilla itself, since accounts, assets, and liabilities arrive already structured instead of being uploaded manually. “This integration allows for an enormous enhancement,” Schwoerer said, framing faster onboarding as a way to get advisors to time-to-value more quickly.

Building the client view in Addepar (17:00–26:00)

Rose demonstrated the workflow using a fictitious multi-family office, Blake Capital Partners, and a sample client, Adam Smith. From the advisor desktop, he showed how a portfolio view can be reorganized on the fly, switching a breakdown from asset class to custodian with a drag-and-drop, and how the platform recalculates performance and redraws its charts to match. He also showed how Addepar handles alternative investments, including the ability to build custom attributes, such as distributions to paid-in capital, when a metric isn’t available out of the box.

The last piece of the demo was the handoff itself. Because Vanilla’s engineering team built against Addepar’s query API, an advisor doesn’t need to construct or maintain any custom view inside Addepar for the integration to work. “The Vanilla integration just works as expected,” Rose said. Rose also noted there’s no separate API key or secret to manage. Connecting the two platforms works more like a single sign-on flow, where authenticating with Addepar credentials inside Vanilla automatically brings over every client the advisor already has permission to see. “No fat fingering, no Excel, nothing,” Rose said.

How that data comes to life in Vanilla (26:00–32:00)

Schwoerer picked up the same client record inside Vanilla to show what an advisor sees after that data lands. Because the connected accounts, assets, and liabilities come in fully structured, Vanilla can build what Schwoerer described as a complete ownership hierarchy, mapping who owns which asset across individuals, trusts, and other entities so the estate makes sense as a whole rather than as a list of disconnected accounts.

That structure is layered with the estate plan itself. Vanilla’s team, made up of former practicing estate attorneys, reads a client’s uploaded trust documents, including pour-over wills, powers of attorney, and health care directives, and uses the dispositive provisions in them to model how assets will actually flow between generations. In the demo, that showed up as a waterfall simulation projecting what happens as each spouse in the estate passes, down to the eventual beneficiaries, alongside an estimated estate tax calculation that accounts for the anticipated 2026 federal exemption sunset. “It’s this marriage between the financial data and then the estate planning data,” Schwoerer said, “and it results in a really interactive platform here at Vanilla that allows you to just glean more insight to your clients.”

Q&A highlights

Is there a cost to use the Addepar and Vanilla integration?

No. The integration itself is free, with no separate toll to connect the two platforms. Advisors do need an active subscription with both Addepar and Vanilla to use it, but linking the two carries no additional fee.

What if a client’s assets aren’t tracked in Addepar, like real estate or personal property such as jewelry?

Those assets can be added directly inside Vanilla through its balance sheet functionality, where an advisor can manually enter an asset or liability along with its asset class, market value, and when it was last valued. Manually entered assets sit alongside the data that flows in automatically from Addepar in the same Vanilla balance sheet.

About the speakers

Blake Rose, Partnerships at Addepar
Blake Rose leads partnership development for Addepar’s ecosystem of financial services integrations, connecting the platform’s data infrastructure with software providers like Vanilla. His background includes business development work focused on family offices, along with experience in sales, marketing, and management consulting. 

Michael Schwoerer, Partnerships at Vanilla
Michael Schwoerer now leads strategic partnerships and integrations at Vanilla, work he was leading as director of business development at the time of this webinar. His career spans business development and partnerships roles at JPMorgan Chase, Addepar, BNP Paribas, and the Milwaukee Bucks, giving him firsthand experience with Addepar’s platform from both sides of this integration. 

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.