What Will Differentiate Wealth Advisors in 2026?

2026 is here and wealth advisors are facing a familiar tension:

Clients are more informed, planning conversations are more complex, and expectations continue to rise, yet time remains the most constrained resource.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is this:

The advisors who will stand out in 2026 will be those who bring clear, relevant visibility into the parts of a business owner’s financial life that matter most.

Business Owners Are Still Underserved in Planning Conversations

For many wealth advisors, business-owner clients represent both the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge.

Their businesses are often:

• Their largest asset
• Their primary source of income
• Central to tax, estate, and succession planning

Yet historically, business value has lived outside the core planning conversation, treated as static, estimated infrequently, or addressed only during a liquidity event.

Now in 2026, that gap is harder to justify.

Visibility Is Replacing Assumptions

We’re seeing a shift away from assumptions and high-level estimates toward ongoing visibility into business performance and value drivers.

Why? Because better visibility leads to:

• More confident planning conversations
• Earlier identification of risks and opportunities
• Stronger collaboration with accountants and other professionals
• Better outcomes for clients, long before an exit is on the table

When advisors can clearly see how a business is performing, how value is evolving, and what’s influencing it, planning becomes more proactive and more strategic.

Efficiency Still Matters, But Not at the Expense of Insight

No advisor is looking to add friction to their workflow.

The challenge for 2026 is finding ways to:

• Reduce prep time
• Eliminate manual data gathering
• Avoid one-off analysis that becomes outdated quickly

The most effective advisors are leveraging technology that does the heavy lifting in the background, allowing them to focus on interpretation, advice, and client impact, not spreadsheets.

Where interVal Fits In

At interVal, we see our role as enabling this shift, not replacing the advisor, but strengthening the conversations they’re already having by acting as a visibility engine for business-owner planning.

By allowing advisors to:

• See the leading indicators behind a business owner’s value, cash flow, and overall trajectory
• Identify who is approaching a planning moment years in advance
• Initiate critical conversations earlier than competing advisors, and keep those clients firmly in their book
• Walk into meetings with clarity, intelligence, and the level of expertise clients expect

Advisors are able to seamlessly integrate business insights into planning discussions, making those conversations more tangible, more relevant, and ultimately more actionable for clients.

Looking Ahead for 2026

As wealth management continues to evolve, differentiation will come from how well advisors connect the dots across a client’s full financial picture.

Those who can confidently bring business value into planning conversations, efficiently, clearly, and consistently, will be better positioned to deepen relationships, defend their value, and deliver stronger client outcomes.