10 Years Later: Why We Never Stopped Believing in Fee-for-Service

Ten years ago, fee-for-service planning wasn’t controversial because it was bad. It was controversial because the business model and the infrastructure weren’t built for it. When Michael Kitces and I first started sketching out the framework for AdvicePay, the prevailing wisdom was that financial planning outside of AUM was a “niche hobby” for those who couldn't gather assets. We were told it wouldn’t scale, that clients wouldn't pay for "just" advice, and that the compliance hurdles were insurmountable.

But I knew better, because I had lived the heartbreak of the AUM-only gatekeeper.

The Doctor and the "No" That Changed Everything

Earlier in my career, while working at a “traditional” RIA, I met a prospective client, a young doctor. She was earning a significant income, facing complex student loan debt, and navigating the financial decisions that come with the start of a medical career. She needed professional advice, she wanted to pay for it, and she certainly had the cash flow to afford it. But because she didn't yet have "investable assets," my firm told me I couldn't work with her.

It was a wake-up call. I realized the industry was turning away the very people who needed us most. And it wasn’t just the "rising professionals." This model failed the High Net Worth families with millions in real estate, stock options, or a small business who needed financial advice but had no managed assets to pull a fee from. It failed families navigating the intergenerational transition of wealth, where the next generation needed guidance years before they inherited the portfolio.

When the Industry Giants Said "No," We Said "Watch Us"

While running my own firm, I was watching hundreds of talented advisors try to build firms for these clients using 1980s infrastructure. I saw the stacks of paper checks and the manual "Friday afternoon scramble." I knew we needed a professional, compliant, digital solution.

So, we went to the established players. We sat down with the big billing and payment companies and asked them to build this for us. We showed them the movement. We showed them the need. And they refused. They told us the market was too small and the compliance was too tricky.

When they wouldn't build it, we realized that if the industry was going to evolve, we had to be the ones to move it. We set out to do it ourselves.

The Check Gap: Why This Needed Infrastructure

The “check gap” was the real problem hiding in plain sight. You can’t scale a real fee-for-service business on mailing paper checks. It’s slow, it creates a messy paper trail, and it turns billing into a part-time job for somebody on your team. And in a regulated industry, “messy” eventually becomes “expensive.”

The big realization for us was simple: clients did value advice. The industry just made it weird to pay for advice. The friction was so high that even advisors who wanted to do the right thing would quietly avoid it.

So we didn't set out to build "another payment tool." We built workflow and oversight around how planning fees actually work in the real world: agreements, invoices, guardrails, approvals, audit trails. Advisor-led billing, with a home office that can still supervise it.

Ten years later, fee-for-service isn't hypothetical anymore. AdvicePay has processed over $1B in planning fees, and in 2025 alone, the platform handled 525,000 transactions.

But here’s what surprised me: once firms solved "getting paid," a different problem got louder.

They stopped drowning in money coming in. They started drowning in the complexity of the money going out.

AdvisorBOB: Solving the Math of the Money Out

As soon as you add more advisors, more revenue streams, more billing cadences, more splits, more exceptions, the "spreadsheet system" turns into a reconciliation project. Not because your people are bad, but because the work is inherently brittle. One wrong cell, one missed adjustment, one outdated payout schedule, and now you've got an advisor asking if they can trust the numbers.

That's the part exec teams don’t always see until it bites them: billing errors don’t just create rework, they damage relationships and trust. Back offices spend hours chasing down what happened. Compliance risk goes up because the process lives in tribal knowledge and version-controlled chaos.

AdvisorBOB fits in our ecosystem because it finishes the loop.

AdvicePay helps you standardize and supervise how planning revenue gets billed and collected, while AdvisorBOB helps you standardize how that revenue gets allocated, reported, and paid out—without living inside endless spreadsheets. Automated calculations, real-time visibility, and audit trails matter when you're doing this at scale.

Spreadsheets work until they don’t. At a certain size, you either build infrastructure or you accept errors, delays, and a back office that’s always playing defense.

We spent the last decade proving that fee-for-service is real. The next decade is about making the operating system behind it feel boring, predictable, and buttoned up.

Whether you’re solving for billing, compliance, payouts, or operational scale, the next decade of financial planning will be built on systems designed for how firms actually operate.

Learn how AdvicePay and AdvisorBOB are helping firms build that foundation.