A Smarter Way to Approach High-Net-Worth Estate Planning with Luminary

High-net-worth clients are putting wealth management professionals on notice. 81% of the next generation's millionaires plan to replace their parents’ wealth management firms. Most cite inadequate digital experiences and limited service offerings as the reason why.

Traditional methods won’t retain tomorrow’s clients. To stay relevant, advisors need to offer tools that make planning more collaborative and transparent. AI-driven platforms like Luminary can help.

Luminary transforms dense documents into dynamic, client-ready visuals. It also creates a centralized system of record that makes collaboration across legal, tax, and advisory teams seamless. Keep reading to learn how advisors can face the challenges of high-net-worth estate planning and meet modern clients' expectations.

Key Challenges in High-Net-Worth Estate Planning

Estate planning for high-net-worth clients demands the highest level of precision. These clients often hold a mix of complex assets, including real estate, business entities, and trusts. Each asset class has its own set of reporting requirements and tax implications that advisors need to manage, including estate taxes, capital gains rules, and jurisdiction-specific compliance issues.

For example, if your client owns a privately held business, then you may need to assist in succession planning. Whether you're preparing heirs to take over a family business or aligning distributions across generations, you need to deliver strategies that are financially and legally sound.

That's why high-net-worth estates require multiple advisors, including financial planners, attorneys, and tax professionals. If they aren't all aligned, even the most strategic plans can suffer.

Disjointed systems make it easy to miss key dates or deliverables. Luminary gives every stakeholder — from business succession experts to tax counsel — access to the same up-to-date information, so complex plans stay on track.

Why Technology Is Essential for Estate Planning of High-Net-Worth Clients

Traditional estate planning methods weren’t built for the complexity of modern high-net-worth estates. Static documents slow reviews. Spreadsheets take too long to parse. Manual systems can't meet the speed and precision that clients expect. They also make it difficult to scale planning over time.

Tasks like modeling multiple hypothetical scenarios can take hours to complete manually. AI speeds up that process tenfold. Luminary extracts key data from dense documents and turns it into structured, searchable summaries. This automation saves time and helps you communicate strategies to clients with greater speed and accuracy.

Advisors can assess how shifting tax laws or changing liquidity needs affect their plan. AI makes those scenarios easier to model and explain.

By automating repetitive tasks, AI-driven technology gives advisors time to focus on high-level strategy and client relationships. If you can’t offer that to a high-net-worth client, they may leave your firm for someone who can.

How Luminary Solves These Challenges: Key Features Explained

Luminary offers wealth management professionals a powerful blend of features and accessibility. Here are five key features that can transform your work for high-net-worth clients.

1. AI-Driven Document Processing

Luminary uses AI for estate planning to turn static documents into dynamic digital records. Instead of manually searching hundreds of pages to find the information you need, you can use Luminary to find it in a few seconds.

This makes it easier to digitize client information, and makes paper documents a more powerful tool in your estate planning arsenal. After uploading them into your client’s household in Luminary, they become a more useful tool in your planning process. This can save you hours of time and help you do more for clients with the details you already have.

2. Visual Estate Planning & Scenario Modeling

Clients want to understand the reasoning behind your strategy. Visualizations make it easier to explain complex structures and decisions. Luminary enables advisors to build intuitive diagrams that show how assets move across entities, trusts, and beneficiaries over time. It helps clients find value hiding in plain sight, connecting strategy to outcomes they can actually see.

Scenario modeling takes that one step further. Advisors can test how strategies like GRATs, CRTs, or CLTs perform under different tax scenarios, liquidity demands, and time horizons. You can even illustrate hypothetical installment sales to help clients evaluate options that may be unfamiliar or overlooked. Visualizations make strategy visible and actionable.

These tools also help quantify the long-term impact of planning decisions. Advisors can clearly demonstrate the financial benefits of different approaches.  Powerful tools elevate client conversations and make your advice tangible. When clients can see and understand their estate plan, they engage more confidently in the decision-making process. That engagement leads to better outcomes and a stronger relationship.

3. Simplified Collaboration for Advisors

High-net-worth estates rarely involve a single decision-maker. Attorneys, tax professionals, and wealth managers all play a role, and everyone needs access to current and accurate information. But traditional systems weren’t designed for that level of cross-functional visibility.

Luminary offers a shared digital environment where every advisor works from the same source material. No version tracking. No misfiled attachments. Just a single, up-to-date source of truth that supports your entire advisory team.

Whether you're preparing documents for review, updating values, or modeling new strategies, Luminary ensures that every contributor stays aligned. And role-based permissions keep data secure.

When your client's needs evolve quickly, siloed systems can’t respond in time. Luminary makes your advisory process more coordinated and accurate.

4. Automated Balance Sheets & Asset Reporting

Luminary also simplifies tracking diverse client assets. It features a dynamic balance sheet and automated reporting that connects directly to the broader estate plan. This makes it easier to keep clients up-to-date with the critical details of their estate.

Our platform’s estate planning balance sheet provides a comprehensive overview of:

• Your client’s net worth
• Current assets and liabilities
• Customizable categories you can tailor around client conversations
• And more

This isn’t just good for your team; it’s helpful for the client. They’ll be able to see up-to-date examples of how their estate is evolving over time. That brings extra value to your services, helping you retain clients and improve relationships.

5. Integrated Suite of Wealth Tools

Luminary integrates with a wide array of other essential wealth management tools, including:

• Addepar
• Orion
• Black Diamond
• eMoney
• And soon to be more…

This keeps key estate details together in a single unified platform, unlocking more value for clients and winning your firm loyalty in the process.

Easily sync data between Luminary and our integration partners in a few clicks. This keeps client asset lists and account values up-to-date whenever you check them, enabling more timely and accurate advice.

By utilizing our integrations, you can quickly calculate and show clients the value of different estate strategies directly in Luminary, without double data entry or additional time spent updating account details. Balances update daily, helping advisors quantify the value of legacy strategies more precisely. This also turns "tax alpha" into a reportable metric, which can help you stand out from firms that can't model it effectively.

Why High-Net-Worth Advisors Choose Luminary

Advising high-net-worth clients can be challenging. The complexity of their estates — spanning multiple asset classes, planning entities, and advisory stakeholders — is often more than traditional tools can handle. Luminary is built for this level of complexity.

Our AI-powered platform turns static documents into structured, digital records that advisors can search, summarize, and model in minutes. You can use Luminary to design strategies and create visuals that make complex plans clear to your clients.

That clarity builds trust. It also deepens relationships and positions your team to retain high-value estates across generations when most successors plan to move on from their parents’ advisors.

Ready to see what’s possible? Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.

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