Conquest drops 'Planning' and bets on a white-label advice engine

Conquest Planning is now simply Conquest, a shorter name for a company that no longer wants planning to define the buyer. The Canadian fintech that launched in 2018 paired the cut with a refreshed visual identity — a mark the company says draws on a sonic boom — and an explicit pivot beyond financial planning into what it calls a broader financial-advice platform. Underneath, the engine still carries the name Strategic Advice Manager, or SAM: a calculation engine paired with a proprietary artificial-intelligence expert system that works through strategies, models life events and answers client questions, and that has picked up agentic capabilities the company announced earlier this year.

For an advisor weighing the tool, the branding is beside the point. Conquest says every recommendation SAM generates is backed by a deterministic algorithm and an audit trail that can be checked at each step; in a category where the output lands in front of a client, that checkable chain is what separates a recommendation an advisor can defend from a demo. Advisors vetting planning technology now ask what the model does when it is wrong, and a vendor that can point to a checkable step at each stage has an answer.

The rebrand makes distribution the operating question. Conquest says the engine can power AI-enabled advisor, client and white-label experiences across any wealth segment, channel and surface, and white-label is the operative word. That turns the rebrand from marketing into a decision about who pays: "planning" caps the buyer at the planning workflow, while an advice engine sells to whatever surface a platform wants to put in front of an end client.

That distribution path is already visible. In April, Advisor360°, the all-in-one advisory platform, announced a collaboration and integration aimed at unifying workflows across planning, execution and client management. Conquest raised an $80 million Series B in June 2025, pushing total funding past $100 million after the $17.8 million Series A announced in February 2023, and in December founder Mark Evans, who created Naviplan, stepped down as chief executive and moved into the executive chairman role, with Brad Joudrie now running the company. The firm launched in Canada in 2020 and reached American advisors in mid-2022, and it will show the new identity at Future Proof Festival.

The bet is that the money in advice technology sits with platforms rather than practices — that white-label distribution is where an AI planning engine scales. When SAM runs behind someone else's label, Conquest owns the engine and the platform owns the client, which is the specific cost of that bet. Advisors evaluating it should ask who stands behind the audit trail when a recommendation is challenged, and spend the next year watching for a custodian or broker-dealer putting SAM on its own surface. The first such contract would settle what Conquest has actually become.