AI Planner assistant raises £4.3m in VCT round

AI workflow tool for financial advisers PlannerPal has raised £4.3m via a venture capital round led by AI-specialist VCT Mercia Ventures.

The round also received investment from existing investor Ada Ventures, which led the AI tool’s pre-seed venture capital round in February 2024.

The fintech said the funding will allow for the rapid expansion of its engineering and product teams, support customer rollout and accelerate the development of its client intelligence capabilities.

PlannerPal claims its tools are used by over 250 UK financial advice firms and four of the UK’s top 20 wealth managers, supporting firms responsible for around £150bn of client assets. Clients include Canacoord Wealth, ValidPath and Amber River.

Mark Whitcroft, CEO and co-founder of PlannerPal, said:"Financial advice firms are sitting on an extraordinary amount of valuable client information, but much of it is fragmented across conversations, documents and different systems. The first opportunity for AI was obvious: remove the manual work of capturing it.

“The bigger opportunity is making the client data firms already hold work better. We don't believe the answer is another disconnected AI tool sitting outside the core systems of the business. A firm’s AI and client data strategy need to work together. We've been deliberately focused on the UK market and this funding lets us accelerate the pace of growth and deliver the same opportunity to the mortgage market."

PlannerPal is an AI workflow for financial advice and wealth management. It connects client conversations, documents and CRM data, helping firms automate administration, improve the quality of their client data and use it to better understand and serve their clients.

It is built into Iress Xplan and integrates with Intelliflo, Curo, Plannr, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and SharePoint.

More than nine in ten Financial Planners (93%) say artificial intelligence tools have improved their work efficiency, according to a new report from the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB) for its 10th World Financial Planning Today which was held earlier this week.

Four in five (83%) of 8,095 global Financial Planners surveyed for the second annual 'Impact of AI on Financial Planning' research from the global professional body said they expected AI to help them better serve clients, an increase from 78% in 2026.

Three quarters (75%) said they expected AI to improve the quality of advice they provided (2025: 60%).

The FPSB AI study found that Financial Planners expected AI tools to broaden access to financial advice. Seven in ten (70%) of those surveyed expected AI to increase access to advice for underserved populations, up from 60% in 2025.