Below you'll find answers to the questions we hear most often about Conquest: What our platform does, who we serve, how we keep advice compliant and secure, and how to get started. If your question isn't answered below, get in touch and we'll be glad to help.
Platform & Product
Conquest Planning, or Conquest, is a leading financial planning software company, built to help firms deliver advice across the full spectrum, from digital to hybrid to traditional advisor-led engagements.
At the heart of our platform is our proprietary AI expert system, Strategic Advice Manager (SAM), which pairs an auditable, deterministic calculation engine with intelligent, AI-enhanced features so advisors can build better plans, serve more clients, and grow their practice.
SAM is Conquest's proprietary planning engine.
It is an AI expert system that analyzes each client's complete financial picture and surfaces ranked, actionable strategies. Unlike generative AI, SAM is a deterministic calculation engine: It produces auditable, repeatable results based on codified financial planning best practices.
Our primary differentiator is our deterministic, auditable AI engine. Every recommendation is traceable and defensible, unlike black-box generative AI.
Beyond that, we cut plan creation time from an industry average of 10 hours to roughly 15 minutes, help advisors produce 4x more plans per year, support all three delivery models (digital, collaborative, and traditional) on a single platform, and give leadership and compliance teams firm-wide analytics.
No. SAM is a proprietary deterministic calculation engine that does not contain or support an algorithm that learns and adapts.
SAM is an expert system under the broad category of “Artificial Intelligence,” but it is a deterministic calculation engine or AI expert system. It is not an LLM or generative AI like the models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others; gen AI models can produce a slightly different response every time.
Advisors using our platform create financial plans in about 15 minutes on average compared to the industry average of 10 hours.
That speed comes from SAM automatically surfacing relevant strategies, so advisors no longer build every plan from scratch. Firms also tell us they see a 4x increase in the number of plans their advisors create each year.
Deterministic means the same inputs always produce the same outputs; no randomness, no hallucination, no black-box generation.
For regulated financial institutions, that matters. You and your compliance team can always trace exactly why a strategy was recommended and confirm it was calculated correctly.
SAM is built leveraging a problem-solving architecture known as the “Blackboard System,” where each codified strategy is tested, ranked, and prioritized against a client’s current financial situation.
SAM also considers goals entered, financial planning best practices, risk tolerance and planning preferences in the ranking and prioritization.
Strategies are fully encapsulated financial planning opportunities, represented as data-driven changes that can be consistently applied and evaluated.
Each strategy is guard-railed based on the relevant jurisdiction’s income tax rules, regulatory compliance, and cash flow affordability and personal preferences.
No. Because SAM is a calculation engine, any error is systematic and discoverable and not random.
You can re-run the same inputs and get the same output every time. That’s fundamentally different from generative AI or popular LLMs, where errors are unpredictable and can appear in different forms each time.
We take an agnostic approach to product functionality and enhancements so that all regions benefit from our continual improvements through a monthly release lifecycle.
We pride ourselves on our ability to stay ahead of market needs.
Solutions & Use cases
We're trusted by 6 of the top 10 banks in North America, along with a wide range of wealth management firms, record keepers, pension providers, insurance companies, and credit unions.
Our customers include RBC, Sun Life, Manulife Wealth, IG Wealth Management, Desjardins, Wealthsimple, BNY Pershing, Canada Life, Raymond James, Fidelity Clearing Canada, and many others. Together, we've helped create over 2 million financial plans for families around the world.
We support three delivery models on a single platform: Digital (self-directed), Collaborative (advisor and client in real time), and Traditional (full-service, advisor-led).
That means you can serve digitally native clients through a self-service experience while supporting full-service advisors working with complex, high-net-worth clients, without switching platforms or duplicating data.
Yes. We designed Conquest to serve clients across the full wealth continuum, from mass-market retail clients to ultra-high-net-worth families.
For simpler situations, our digital self-service model makes planning accessible and scalable. For complex UHNW clients, we handle advanced needs including corporate planning, business succession, family trusts, philanthropy, and estate planning.
We support holistic financial planning, from personal goals to complex corporate and estate scenarios including retirement planning, investment strategy, insurance needs analysis, tax planning, business succession planning, estate planning, corporate planning, and family trust structures.
SAM evaluates each client's full financial picture: Assets, liabilities, goals, risk tolerance, and life events, to generate personalized, defensible advice.
There are many customizable elements across Conquest, including templates across brands and teams and digital stories, and PDFs.
Unlike Monte Carlo, Conquest leverages a “dynamic scenario approach.”
Monte Carlo analysis is typically built on normal distribution, but research has shown that investment returns do not typically reflect the bell curve in the real world. Rather than following the bell curve, our volatility analysis tool considers observable patterns in historical data, like risk and returns varying over the course of history and non-normal distributions. The output of the analysis isn’t “probability of success” like traditional Monte Carlo analysis but whether the plan would, with return rate instability, still meet the clients’ needs?
Integration & Technology
Conquest integrates across your tech stack and is a powerful platform that empowers your team far beyond financial planning.
Many customers leverage Conquest to consolidate into a single system for their advisor app, client portal, self-directed, and even lead generation needs.
Yes. We offer an open, two-way API that lets your firm integrate our calculation engine with your existing technology stack.
You can use our own app interface or connect the engine to a custom-built UX so our planning capabilities can live inside your existing advisor portals or client-facing digital experiences.
Yes, meaning you can benefit from the power of SAM and Conquest without keeping up with new logins and learning new systems.
Through our open two-way API, you can connect the SAM calculation engine directly to your existing advisor or client-facing platform. That lets you keep your own UX/UI standards and brand experience while running our planning engine under the hood.
We give leadership firm-wide analytics and a real-time view of plan quality, advisor activity, and client engagement.
Because the compliance trail is built into SAM's expert system, you can show regulators what's working and where. This data layer helps you spot coaching opportunities, track AUM growth by segment, and prove the business impact of your planning practice.
Compliance & security
Compliance is built into our architecture, not bolted on afterward.
SAM's deterministic engine creates a full, auditable compliance trail for every recommendation it generates, so you and your compliance team can always trace why a specific strategy was surfaced for a specific client. That makes our plans defensible to regulators across the jurisdictions we operate in, including the US, Canada, and the UK.
We hold ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, the internationally recognized standard for information security management.
It validates that we've implemented rigorous controls to protect sensitive client financial data, including risk management, access controls, and ongoing security monitoring. We also hold SOC 2 and WCAG certification.
Yes. And in today’s regulatory environment, that matters. Because it is an AI expert system, the deterministic calculation engine produces the same results every time, given the same inputs.
A regulator, compliance officer, advisor, or end client in self-directed planning could re-run a scenario and get the same answer using the same inputs. Financial Planning advice in Canada (CRM2/CRM3), the US (Best Interest, DOL Fiduciary) and globally (UK FCA Targeted Support) is subject to regulatory scrutiny. If an advisor presents a strategy, a projection or plan to a client, there needs to be defensible and traceable paths from input to output. Therefore, a calculation engine combined with a strategy algorithm (like SAM, where the human is expected to be involved) provide an auditable chain of logic where every rate, tax rule, calculation, and result can be inspected and validated.
SAM guardrails are built to support jurisdictional compliance across multiple regulatory frameworks, including CRM2/CRM3 (Canada), Best Interest and DOL Fiduciary standards (U.S.), and FCA Targeted Support (UK).
Yes, our UX adheres to WCAG (advisor and client) 2.1 A and AA.
No. SAM Guide does not store the conversational data, nor use it to train our models.
Furthermore, SAM Guide is closed and only accesses plan information stored in a client’s Conquest instance; it does not search the internet.
getting started
We provide onboarding, training, and ongoing support to help your firm get the most from our platform.
Details like implementation timelines, training formats, and advisor enablement resources are tailored to your firm's size and deployment model, which we walk through with you during onboarding. Additional resources customers find value in include Conquest University and our Knowledge Base.
Yes. We're available in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with interfaces in English (US), English (Canada), English (UK), Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified (Canada), Spanish (US), and French (Canada).
We've created over 2 million financial plans for families around the world, and we continue to expand our international footprint.
You can get in touch here, and a member of our team will follow up to discuss your firm's needs.
Onboarding conversations typically cover delivery model (digital, collaborative, or traditional), integration requirements, client segments, and implementation timeline. We work with financial institutions of all sizes across North America and the UK.
