Frequently asked questions
Below you'll find answers to the questions we hear most often about Conquest: What our engine does, how our platform works, who we serve, how we keep advice verifiable 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 is the company that built Strategic Advice Manager® (SAM), the leading verifiable AI financial advice engine. When you use Conquest applications, SAM is the engine powering the analysis and reviewing all of the possible scenarios in a fraction of the time: SAM reviews a client's full financial situation and surfaces the strategies that fit.
SAM is the deterministic engine that calculates plans and surfaces strategies; the same inputs always produce the same auditable result. SAM Guide is the AI agent inside the Conquest app.
Ask it about a client's plan or how to do something in the software, in plain language, and it answers in seconds or completes the task for you. SAM Guide works only from your Conquest data, never the open web. In short, SAM does the math, and SAM Guide helps you work faster, with a person in control of both.
By verifiable, we mean that SAM leaves an audit trail so you can always see how SAM got to an answer, and it can be easily replicated and traceable to any auditor.
For advisors and firms looking to generate more leads, Discovery & Insights allows you to send your prospect a link that helps you begin to build the right plan. They fill in their own information on their own time, before you even meet, so that both you and your client show up prepared.
A link counts only when someone uses it. If you send a link that never gets opened, it doesn’t count against your plan.
SAM is the verifiable engine that calculates plans and surfaces strategies. SAM Guide is the AI agent that helps you work faster inside the app. Any numbers SAM Guide reports are computed by SAM, not generated.
Lydia's behavioral coaching is delivered through SAM Guide.
Yes. SAM Guide does not store your conversations, or use them to train models. It is closed and only accesses plan information in your Conquest instance; it does not search the internet.
Conquest Planning, now Conquest, is a leading global fintech company, built to help firms deliver expert financial guidance in a fraction of the time with verifiable, compliant AI. Founded in 2018, Conquest built a verifiable financial advice engine, Strategic Advice Manager® (SAM), to help advisors build better plans, serve more clients and grow their practice.
Strategic Advice Manager® (SAM) is Conquest's verifiable AI financial advice engine. It comprises a calculation engine and proprietary AI expert system that analyzes each client's complete financial picture and surfaces ranked, actionable strategies. Unlike generative AI, SAM is a deterministic engine: It produces auditable, repeatable results based on codified financial planning best practices.
Our primary differentiator is our verifiable AI financial advice 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 (self-serve, hybrid and advisor-led) with a single engine, 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 comprises a calculation engine and an AI expert system under the broad category of “Artificial Intelligence.” It is a deterministic engine that produces repeatable, auditable results. 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 a fraction of the time, or 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 have to 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 guardrailed based on the relevant jurisdiction’s income tax rules, regulatory compliance and cash flow affordability and personal preferences.
No. Because SAM is a deterministic 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 pride ourselves on staying ahead of market needs. We take an agnostic approach to product functionality and enhancements so that every region benefits from continual improvement through a monthly release cycle.
Shaping Wealth has pioneered human-centric advice through transformative programs such as Building the Behavioral Advisor and the Foundations of Behavioral Advice, and received the 2024 WealthManagement.com “Wealthie” award for the industry’s most disruptive firm. Lydia is built on a decade of Shaping Wealth's proprietary behavioral science and embedded directly in the Conquest workflow.
Solutions & Use cases
We're trusted by 6 of the top 10 banks in North America, along with awide range of wealth management firms, record keepers, pension providers, insurance companies, and credit unions. Our customers include RBC, Sun Life, ManulifeWealth, IG Wealth Management, Desjardins, BNY Pershing, CanadaLife, Raymond James, Fidelity Clearing Canada and many others. Together, we've helped create over 2.5 million financial plans for families around the world.
We support three delivery models on a single platform: Self-directed, Hybrid (advisor and client in real time), and Advisor-Led (traditional, full-service). That means you can serve digitally native clients through a self-service experience while supporting full-service advisors working with complex, high-net-worth and UHNW 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
Lydia is a behavioral coaching capability from Shaping Wealth, built to help advisors have better client conversations. Where SAM solves the plan, Lydia helps with the conversation around it, such as preparing for a volatile-markets check-in, a couple who disagree, or an overspending client. It is plan-aware and works in the flow of an advisor's work, drawing on behavioral science rather than generic talking points.
SAM is the verifiable AI financial advice engine that builds and calculates the plan. Lydia helps coach the advisor on the human conversation around that plan. The short version: SAM solves the plan, Lydia supports the conversation.
Lydia's behavioral coaching is delivered through SAM Guide.
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 Strategic Advice Manager® (SAM), verifiable AI financial advice 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 Strategic Advice Manager® (SAM) and Conquest without keeping up with new logins and learning new systems. Through our open two-way API, you can connect the SAM advice 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.
Shaping Wealth is the global wealth industry’s premier learning and engagement platform powering human-first financial guidance. The firm develops coaching and content experiences designed to educate and inspire advice firms ranging from small RIAs to Fortune 500 companies.
Compliance & security
Compliance is built into our architecture, not bolted on afterward. SAM is a verifiable, deterministic engine that 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, ISO/IEC 27017:2015, ISO 27018:2019 and ISO 42001:2023 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. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We have best-in-class APDEX scores and hold SOC 2 and WCAG certification and CSA STAR Level 1.
Yes. And in today’s regulatory environment, that matters. Because SAM comprises a calculation engine and proprietary AI expert system, it is a deterministic engine that 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.
MCP Server
The MCP Server is available to configure for eligible firms. Because it connects external AI tools to live plan data, turning it on involves a short setup and agreement with your Conquest team. Get in touch and we'll walk you through it.
The MCP Server is a secure, authenticated connection that firms opt into and control. Access can be granted at the firm level or limited to specific users, and every connection is authenticated before any plan data is shared.
The plan data and calculations come from SAM, Conquest's verifiable engine, so the numbers are computed, not generated, and they trace back to the real plan. The AI tool you connect handles the conversation, so as with any generative AI, review its wording before you act. The underlying plan figures are the same auditable results you'd see inside Conquest.
It's the safe, firm-approved version of what advisors are already tempted to do and SAM does not hallucinate. When someone pastes client details into a consumer AI tool, the answer is guessed by a model, and the firm has no control or record of it. The MCP Server instead returns answers computed by SAM from the real plan, through a connection your firm turns on and controls. The advisor gets a verifiable answer instead of a plausible guess.
Advisors can retrieve live plan data (income, KPIs, goals, gaps and applied strategies) and manage strategies on a plan, including reviewing, applying, modifying and removing them through a connected AI tool. Common uses include prepping for a meeting in seconds and answering spontaneous “what if” questions during a client conversation without opening the platform.
The MCP Server uses an open, standards-based protocol, so it connects to widely used AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. One connection lets the AI tools across your firm draw from the same verified plan data.
The Conquest MCP Server is a secure connection that brings the power of Strategic Advice Manager® into the AI tools your advisors already use. Instead of logging into the Conquest platform, an advisor can ask a connected AI assistant a question in plain language and get the real plan's answer back: Income, goals, KPIs, gaps and applied strategies, retrieved live from Conquest and computed by SAM. Think of it as a standard port for AI, one connection that lets outside tools reach the verified plan.
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 UnitedKingdom, with interfaces in English (US), English (Canada), English (UK), Chinese Traditional (Canada), Chinese Simplified (Canada), Spanish (US), and French (Canada). We've created over 2.5 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.
Independent Advisors
You will be among the first to know when the trial experience launches. If you do not see our emails, check your spam folder. Make sure you opt into communications to stay informed.
You can sign up as a solo advisor; your whole firm does not need to.
You are able to sign up for the waitlist, however, this offering will roll out for US-based independent advisors and small firms to start.
Yes! We will have early adopter pricing, and we’ll be working with our early adopters to collect feedback and shape future advisors’ experience.
No. Joining is free and commits you to nothing.
The waitlist is open to anyone, but the full experience is for certified, US-based, independent advisors and boutique firms, typically teams of 10 or fewer that don’t have the time or need for a full enterprise implementation. Firms with more than 10 advisors should reach out for a tailored demo.
The waitlist is for Conquest's self-serve offering, built for US-based independent advisors and boutique firms, typically teams of 10 or fewer. Joining is free and commits you to nothing. We will let you know when you can request a trial. You can sign up here.
Conquest is rolling out a waitlist for independent advisors to buy the app directly without the need for a sales call. It runs on the same planning engine enterprise wealth firms use.
