PlannerPal raises £4.3m in funding round led by Mercia Ventures

Artificial intelligence (AI) workflow for financial advice and wealth management firms, PlannerPal, has raised £4.3m in a round led by Mercia Ventures.

Existing investor Ada Ventures, which led PlannerPal’s pre-seed round in February 2024, also took part in the latest round, alongside a group of strategic fintech investors and angels.

PlannerPal said the funding would enable the expansion of its engineering and product teams, support customer rollout, and accelerate the development of its client intelligence capabilities.

More than 250 UK advice firms use PlannerPal, which supports firms with around £150bn of client assets, including Canaccord Wealth, ValidPath and Amber River.

Advice firms use the workflow to capture client meetings, product documentation, and connect information held across client conversations, documents and core systems.

PlannerPal has a partnership with Iress and is built into Xplan workflow, while also integrating with Intelliflo, Curo, Plannr, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and SharePoint.

"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,” said PlannerPal co-founder and CEO, Mark Whitcroft.

“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."

Mercia Ventures investment director, Adam Lovell, said the company was “delighted” to back PlannerPal as it builds the client intelligence layer for UK financial advice.

“PlannerPal clients regularly refer to them as ‘partners’; sharing their vision but ultimately delivering on promises, taking away key pain points at a pace of growth aligned with each firm’s business strategy,” he added.

“This level of trust that PlannerPal can deliver, has accelerated an appetite to turn fragmented information into higher-quality client data, meaning that advice firms will soon be able to understand and serve their clients in ways that simply weren't possible before.”

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