Claude for Financial Advisors: What RIAs Get, What It Costs and How to Start

1. What Claude for Financial Advisors Is

Claude for Financial Advisors is a plugin Anthropic released on September 14, 2026 for Claude Cowork, the agentic mode in the Claude desktop app. The launch post describes it as a suite of connectors and workflow skills for financial advisors.

In practice you get eight slash commands. Seven do jobs advisors already do by hand: preparing a client review, writing up the meeting, pre-checking a client email, organizing a prospect's statements, and reviewing a portfolio, an alternatives book or an estate plan. The eighth sets the others up.

The plugin itself is free. Its GitHub repository is public under the Apache 2.0 license, and the plugin is written entirely in Markdown and JSON, so you can read every instruction a skill follows before it goes near a client record.

This guide was written from those files. Where it says a skill does something, or refuses to, that is what the file says.

InvestmentNews reported that Anthropic built it with Dynasty Financial, Schwab and Vanguard, aimed it first at RIAs, and plans to extend it to broker-dealers, wirehouses and private banks.

Keep one number in mind as you read. Advisers focused on individual clients averaged about eight employees in the IAA's 2026 industry snapshot.

The plan Anthropic recommends starts at 20 seats. Most of the hard questions in this guide live in the gap between those two numbers.

2. How It Works: Skills, Connectors and One Approval Rule

Three parts do the work.

• Skills. A skill is a file of plain-English instructions for one job: what to gather, what to produce and what never to do. An advisor runs it by typing its slash command, such as /pre-meeting.
• Connectors. Connectors let Claude read your CRM, portfolio platform, planning software and email through MCP, the Model Context Protocol, the open standard Claude uses to talk to other software. When a system is not connected, every skill falls back to asking for a paste or an upload.
• Cowork. The skills run in Cowork, the mode of the Claude desktop app that carries out multi-step work instead of only answering questions. The Cowork vs Chat guide explains the difference.

The README sums up the data model in three sentences worth reading twice: "The plugin is a set of skills written as plain instructions (Markdown and JSON). It holds no client data: when an advisor runs a skill, Claude pulls what it needs from the connected third-party systems. The advisor must explicitly approve any action that writes back to an external system (e.g. CRM updates, client drafts)."

Read the middle sentence carefully. The plugin's files hold no client data, but a conversation that runs a skill does. Whatever a connector returns enters that conversation and is kept under your organization's Claude retention settings, while the records themselves stay in the source system.

On model training, Anthropic's commercial terms for Team and Enterprise do not use your inputs to train models, and Schwab's agreement prohibits training on client data. The client data FAQ has the detail.

Last, the plugin is a reference implementation. The README calls it "Not actively maintained or monitored, and not accepting contributions." Firms can fork it and adapt the skills, which is how a firm's own disclosures, note format and model names get in. The customization guide shows how.

3. The Eight Skills, and What Each Refuses to Do

Anthropic's plugin page puts the pitch in one line: "Prep for client meetings, handle follow-up, and pull briefs together from the tools you already use." The eight skills sort into four groups.

Here is what each one does, and what its file says it will not do.

• /pre-meeting builds a review prep document for a household and a timeframe. It pulls CRM context, portfolio data, estate and tax status, meeting notes, recent email and the MoneyGuide plan snapshot, then assembles a snapshot, relationship signals, open items, a portfolio review, planning topics, a time-boxed agenda, talking points and draft action items. It never sends anything to the client, never places a trade, and never invents plan probabilities or performance.
• /prospect-intake turns a prospect's statements, exports or screenshots into one consolidated view, then writes a plain-English summary, an analyst handoff and a what-to-expect memo, offered as a Gmail draft once you approve. It stops short of a proposed allocation, a fee quote, ACAT paperwork or return projections.
• /post-meeting turns a meeting from Zocks, Wealthbox or a pasted transcript into a CRM note, action items and opportunities, and shows them as one batch for approval. It writes only what you approve, through the CRM's own objects: notes, tasks and opportunities in Wealthbox, and notes, activities and opportunities in Redtail. It creates no contacts and edits no contact fields, and any follow-up email to the client routes through /compliance.
• /portfolio-rebalance-review covers performance, drift against the IPS or model, model mapping and tax-aware rebalance options, from loss harvesting and the 30-day wash-sale window across the accounts it gathered to RMD checks, step-up in basis and client restrictions. It drafts a rebalance rationale memo for the compliance file with the approval table left blank for the advisor to sign. It never executes or stages a trade.
• /alts-brief sets a household's alternatives from iCapital or Addepar (NAV against commitment, called and unfunded capital, distributions, and IRR, TVPI and DPI as the platform reports them, never recalculated) beside the liquid book and the IPS target. It flags cash needed for capital calls, the alternatives share against target, concentration and stale data. It does not recommend funds or forecast returns.
• /estate-and-tax-brief pulls the estate plan and the prior-year tax look-back from Wealth.com and checks them against actual account titling and beneficiaries. It flags unfunded trusts, titling mismatches and beneficiary gaps. Its only write is an optional CRM follow-up task that the advisor approves. It never drafts trust language, gives legal advice, retitles an account or changes a beneficiary.
• /compliance pre-checks client-facing material against the Marketing Rule, the antifraud and fiduciary provisions of Section 206, the books and records rule, and Reg BI and FINRA 2210 for dual registrants. It returns a verdict table (Fail, Flag, Note) with suggested rewording, disclosure language and a clean redraft. Performance, hypothetical performance and testimonials always go to the CCO, and the skill calls its output "a draft review for the firm's CCO/compliance officer, not a legal determination or an approval."
• /onboarding is the guided first run. It learns your firm, your headaches and your tech stack, walks you through connecting each tool, explains the skills, runs a demo on a fictional household (the Millers) so no real client data is used, and recommends one skill to try next.

Notice the pattern in the refusals. Every skill gathers, organizes and drafts, and the advisor decides, approves and sends. Anthropic's launch post says so directly: "Investment recommendations, client communications, compliance determinations, and other regulated activities remain subject to human review and approval."

4. The Connectors: What Plugs In

The README lists eleven partner connectors, plus Schwab marked as coming soon:

• Client records: Wealthbox, and Redtail CRM through the Orion Advisor Solutions connector.
• Portfolio and performance: Orion Connect, Addepar, Envestnet Tamarac and SS&C Black Diamond, which can also create reports, tasks and rebalance sessions with advisor approval.
• Alternatives: iCapital.
• Planning and estate: MoneyGuide for the household plan, and Wealth.com for trust and will summaries and the full balance sheet.
• Meeting intelligence: Zocks, which captures profiles, goals, life events and commitments from client conversations.
• Asset managers: BlackRock (Advisor Center analytics, model portfolios and research) and Vanguard (model portfolios and advisor investment solutions).
• Custody: Schwab, for custodial account, titling and beneficiary data.

The plugin also works with connectors Claude already offered, including Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, FactSet, S&P Global and Morningstar.

Schwab deserves a closer look because it is the one custodian in the launch. Schwab's announcement describes Schwab Advisor Services, which serves more than 16,000 independent RIAs, as the only RIA custodian integrated at launch.

Financial Planning reported how it works. RIAs switch the connector on at the firm level and choose which users get it. Account numbers, Social Security numbers and clients' dates of birth are masked, and advisors pay through their Anthropic licenses, not extra payments to Schwab.

The README still marked the Schwab connector as coming soon when this guide was written. Until it reaches your firm, the skills that use it fall back to paste or upload.

The other connectors sign in with the advisor's own account at that vendor and inherit that person's permissions there. Anthropic's install tutorial adds a caution worth budgeting for: "Access to these connectors may require a separate subscription or API key from the respective provider."

Custodians other than Schwab have no connector yet, so their data comes in by paste or upload. The connectors guide takes each system in turn, including which skills use it and what it can write.

5. What It Costs

The plugin is free; the Claude plan underneath it is the bill. For Enterprise, the plan Anthropic recommends for RIAs, InvestmentNews reported: "Anthropic's website says its Enterprise plan costs include an annual seat fee of $20 per user per month with a required minimum of 20 seats, plus usage billed separately at API rates."

For usage, Peter Nolan, Anthropic's head of asset and wealth management, put the ballpark at roughly $70 to $120 per user per month for firms that use it actively, TechTimes reported. For a 10-person firm where everyone is active, that is $4,800 in seats (the 20-seat floor) plus $8,400 to $14,400 in usage, or an estimated $13,200 to $19,200 a year. Real usage varies, and Enterprise lets you cap spend for the firm and for each user.

Add any connector subscriptions, plus the cost of setup, whether that is your own time or a consultant's fee. The pricing guide runs the numbers for 5, 10, 20 and 40 people.

6. Enterprise or Team?

Anthropic's launch post is blunt: "We recommend Enterprise plans for registered investment advisers, because it includes the audit logs that support recordkeeping."

The audit logs are only part of the reason. They list events such as sign-ins, files, and chat creation and deletion, and each export covers the past 180 days. The help center is clear about the limit: "Title and content of chats and projects are not available to be exported in audit logs."

Capturing the content takes the Enterprise Compliance API, which archive vendors read from. Smarsh built Smarsh Capture for Claude Enterprise on it in May 2026.

Team costs less and can still run the plugin, added from its GitHub repository. Standard seats are $25 per member per month billed monthly or $20 billed annually, with a two-seat minimum, per Anthropic's Team plan page. What Team lacks is the records tooling: no audit log export and no Compliance API.

So a firm of eight has three real choices: pay for 12 empty Enterprise seats, run Team and move final outputs into the archive by written procedure (weaker, and your CCO should accept it in writing), or wait.

The small RIA guide works through each option, and the Enterprise FAQ has the short answer.

7. Compliance: What the Plugin Does and What You Still Own

No software can make a firm compliant, and this plugin makes no such claim. Its part is narrower: it pauses before every write, sends client-facing drafts through /compliance, escalates performance, hypothetical performance and testimonials to the CCO, and reminds advisors that advertisements and client communications must be kept for five years. Its rules come from a checklist the skill itself calls "a static snapshot, not a live firm-rules feed."

Your firm owns everything around it:

• Supervision under Rule 206(4)-7, the compliance program rule.
• The archive under Rule 204-2. The skill says plainly, "There is no archiving connector yet."
• Vendor oversight under Regulation S-P, for Anthropic and every connector vendor.
• The accuracy of anything you say about AI in Form ADV or your marketing.

The compliance guide goes rule by rule and includes a CCO checklist for go-live. All of this is operational guidance, and your CCO and counsel own the interpretation.

8. Who It Suits, and Who Should Wait

A good fit now

• Your CRM, portfolio platform and planning software are on the connector list, so the skills read live data instead of exports.
• Meeting prep and write-ups eat real hours. Citing Kitces research, Anthropic says "A typical advisory practice spends only a sixth of its time in client meetings," and the preparation and follow-up around those meetings is where these skills work.
• You already have Enterprise, or your headcount is close enough to 20 that the seat minimum costs little extra.
• Your CCO has time to own the archive hookup and the supervision steps before advisors use it on clients.

Better to wait

• Your CRM notes are thin. A prep document is only as good as the notes it reads. If many households have no recent note, the skills will come up short exactly where you wanted help, so clean the notes first.
• You would be on Team with no records plan. Without the Compliance API, nothing captures the conversations for your archive. If your CCO will not sign off on a manual filing procedure, wait until Enterprise makes sense.
• Your core systems have no connector. A custodian other than Schwab, or a CRM outside the list, means paste and upload on every run. That works, but it eats much of the time you hoped to save.
• Nobody owns it. Five advisors who each set it up their own way end up with five different tools. Name an owner before you choose a plan.

Waiting a quarter to clean up your CRM costs you a quarter. Rolling out on messy data costs you your advisors' trust in the tool, and that takes much longer to win back.

9. The Skeptic's Case

Not everyone is impressed. Brian Green, chief product officer at Merit Financial Advisors, told Financial Planning: "At first glance, Claude for Financial Advisors appears to be more evolutionary than revolutionary." His reason: "Most of the underlying capabilities already exist across advisor technology platforms today."

He has a point. Your note-taker may already summarize meetings, and your portfolio platform may already flag drift.

What the plugin adds is one assistant that reads across those systems in a single run and drafts the document that ties them together. Whether that is worth the seat fee depends on how much of your week goes to copying between screens.

The plugin's own files add two cautions. Anthropic does not actively maintain the repository, so plan to keep your version current yourself. And the README is candid that several guardrails, including advisor approval before any write, are "enforced by the model following them, not by the runtime."

The software does enforce the tool limits on the subagents, such as keeping the file readers to read-only tools. The approval step is an instruction the model follows.

That candor is a good sign. It also tells you where supervision has to sit: with the advisor who approves each write, and with a CCO who samples what the skills produce.

10. How to Start

A sensible path for most RIAs:

1. Decide the plan in writing with your CCO: Enterprise, Team with a records procedure, or wait.
2. Install the plugin and run /onboarding, choosing the fictional Millers for the demo. Enterprise customers find it in Cowork's plugin browser, and other paid plans can add it from GitHub.
3. Connect the CRM and portfolio platform first, read-only where the vendor offers it.
4. Switch on the Compliance API and connect your archive before any real household goes through a skill.
5. Pilot for one week with two or three advisors on real households, and fix what they find.
6. Launch, train and customize: push the plugin to everyone, build the approval habit, and write your firm's rules into your own copy of the skills.

The step-by-step setup guide expands every step, and the training guide turns step six into a 30-day plan. If you would rather not do it alone, the guide to Claude for Financial Advisors consultants compares every kind of outside help, from your custodian to specialist firms.