XYPN AdviceTech judges press six finalists on fit with existing systems

Six finalists pitched products designed to become the place an advisor's work gets done at the XYPN AdviceTech Competition 2026. The judging panel spent most of its time on one question: how does each tool fit beside the systems a firm already pays for?

The competition ran Wednesday, September 30, at XYPN LIVE 2026 in San Diego. Each finalist had roughly seven minutes to demo before facing questions from judges Michael Kitces, Craig Iskowitz, Amy DeTolla and Davis Janowski, as listed on the competition page. WealthTech Today's account of the session, published October 9, comes from a seat on that panel.

One finalist wanted the back office, one the service calendar, one the financial plan, and three wanted some piece of the client relationship or marketing funnel, per WealthTech Today's account. Artificial intelligence was an assumption in all six products rather than a feature bolted on, a shift from the 2025 field that outlet covered. That pushed the judges' hard questions to data access, compliance review, report consistency and overlap with the CRM.

Caddi founder and CEO Alex opened with a golf metaphor, then described two products. Caddi Discover connects to a firm's systems, including Microsoft, Google, DocuSign, Salesforce and RIA tools, and reports where team time goes — new account onboarding, drafting emails, preparing tax forms and custodian paperwork among the examples Alex listed, along with counts of households onboarded. He described it as a business analyst that finds the bottlenecks keeping a firm from growing without another hire.

Caddi Automate handles the training: the user records their screen and narrates the process as they would for a new employee, rather than typing instructions or building a flowchart. The demo walked through pulling forms from DocuSign.

For a practice owner, the judges' through line is a budget question as much as a features question. A tool that wants to sit inside the workflow has to earn its place next to the CRM, planning and custody systems already licensed, and the WealthTech Today account notes that figures and results cited by presenters are the vendors' own numbers. This publication has reported that Schwab's Claude integration priced AI at $240 a seat, and cheaper model tokens keep raising advisory tech bills.