April launches new platform for wealth management

April, generally known as an embedded tax solutions provider, has now launched a new tax platform for wealth managers and financial advisors that can be used as either a standalone product or embedded into existing workflows. It gives professionals a real-time view into client tax workflows, documents and insights for a more efficient filing process. 

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“Wealth management firms are looking for ways to deliver high-quality tax analysis without building or scaling a tax practice from scratch,” said Ben Borodach, co-founder and CEO of April, in a statement. “By making our AI-driven tax engine available to wealth management firms, we are giving advisors a way to offer high-touch tax services, while maintaining a clear line of sight into every calculation, and surfacing new planning conversations from that work.”

The platform provides an integrated dashboard that gives advisors real-time transparency, document visibility and post-preparation financial insights. It also has tools for advisors and tax professionals to run tax simulations for financial events, such as equity compensation, purchases or sales of concentrated stock positions, Roth conversions, and estimated payments. It also includes a practice management component that allows professionals, teams and administrators to assign, manage, monitor and execute tax preparation across the firm. 

The platform is built atop April’s AI-powered tax engine and was originally created to help financial advisors stay in the loop while offering clients a fully managed, hands-off tax filing experience in which April’s U.S.-based, credentialed tax professionals prepare and file the return. 

The release follows a series of new partnerships and integrations with companies like Acorns, Robinhood, Freedom Debt Relief and PayPal. These integrations were steps in a larger strategy outlined by Borodach in a recent interview with Accounting Today. 

Since its founding in 2022, the company has made it a point to grow deliberately and intentionally in service of its wider strategy of not pursuing a direct-to-consumer model like previous tax platforms but a business-to-business approach that gives companies tax capacities for their own customers. The overall idea is that people won’t be visiting a tax platform once a year but will instead handle taxes through their ongoing interactions with their various financial institutions and service providers. 

With this in mind, it might seem curious that April is now launching a platform that can stand alone. But Borodach, in an email, said he does not see a contradiction here. 

“Financial advisors don’t always own their own tech stack,” he said. “They need services that are integrated with their other systems (estate and financial planning). The notion of embedding tax is precisely the reason we are offering our services to financial firms that talk to their other systems and complete the full picture of their clients’ financials, and not CPAs, at least for now.”