Something significant is happening in the advisory space that goes beyond the usual headlines about AI and M&A. More and more RIAs are integrating tax preparation and planning directly into their practices — acquiring CPA firms, hiring tax professionals, and building out capabilities that used to be referred out.

It's not a fringe experiment. It's becoming a strategic priority for firms serious about deepening client relationships and driving organic growth.

John Bunch, CEO of Allworth Financial, has been at the forefront of this trend. "I bought three tax firms last year," he shared on a recent episode of the Next Mile podcast. "We did over 6,000 tax returns last year. We have 50 tax professionals."

For Allworth, this isn't a side project. It's a core part of how the firm delivers value — and keeps clients.

The client case for integrated tax

The logic starts with the client experience. Most high-net-worth individuals have fragmented financial lives — an advisor managing their investments, a separate CPA handling taxes, an estate attorney on retainer, maybe an insurance specialist somewhere in the mix. Each professional has a partial picture, and the client is the one stitching it all together.

"If I had the ability to have both taxes, investment management, estate, and all of that wrapped into one firm, convenience is important," Bunch explained. "Time is really important to me. And obviously you have to do things right and you have to be competent in what you do. But I think marrying all those together, you're going to get a better client outcome."

This isn't just about convenience, though. There are real financial outcomes at stake. Tax planning and investment management are deeply intertwined — asset location decisions, Roth conversion strategies, charitable giving timing, capital gains harvesting, and business sale planning all sit at the intersection of tax and wealth management. When those disciplines live under one roof, the coordination happens naturally rather than through a series of phone calls and emails between separate firms.

The business case: stickier clients, deeper relationships

Beyond better outcomes, there's a compelling business argument. Clients who receive tax services from their advisory firm are measurably more loyal.

"We have proven out doing taxes for people — clients are stickier than they would be if you don't do taxes," Bunch noted.

This makes intuitive sense. When your advisor also handles your taxes, switching firms means disrupting not just your investment management but your tax preparation, your multi-year tax history, your understanding of your specific situation. The switching costs increase materially, and so does the depth of the relationship.

For firms focused on organic growth, this stickiness compounds. Retained clients generate referrals. Referrals from clients who receive comprehensive services are higher quality because they come with the implicit endorsement of the full-service model. Over time, tax services become a growth flywheel, not just a retention tool.

The advisor-as-quarterback model

One question firms face when adding tax services is how to structure the client experience. Do you wall off the tax department from the advisory team? Do advisors need to become tax experts themselves?

Allworth's model provides a useful framework. The advisor remains the center of the client relationship — the quarterback — but has access to a team of specialists they can bring into conversations as needed.

"We believe that the adviser is the center of that relationship, but they should have the ability to bring in specialists," Bunch said. "I think it's unrealistic in today's world to think that an adviser can be an expert in everything, whether it's taxes, whether it's complex investment vehicles."

The model works like this: an advisor meets with a client or prospect and discovers they're selling a business and will come into $30 million. Instead of referring the client to an outside CPA and hoping the coordination works, the advisor brings in internal tax experts, estate planning specialists, and investment professionals. It becomes a team effort — one where the client sees a coordinated response rather than a patchwork of separate engagements.

"It starts with the client, but at the end of the day the adviser is in the middle of all of it," Bunch said. "It's team effort. I think that's better for the client as well because there's more stability in that relationship. They get to know more people."

The operational challenge: merging tech stacks

Here's where the practical reality gets harder. CPA firms come with their own technology stacks — tax preparation software, document management systems, client portals, workflow tools. Those systems are almost entirely separate from the technology that advisory firms use for portfolio management, financial planning, and CRM.

"No one has yet cracked the code on the tax tech stack and the investment management financial planning tech stack," Bunch acknowledged. "We brought in outside consultants. We're probably a few months away from breaking that into a more manageable solution."

This is the technology challenge that every RIA moving into tax will face. The tax world and the advisory world were built on different platforms, with different data models, and different workflow assumptions. Bringing them together in a way that actually feels seamless to the advisor and the client requires connecting data across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

For firms considering this path, the technology integration question deserves serious upfront planning. What data needs to flow between the tax system and the CRM? How do you create a unified client view that includes both tax and investment information? How do you maintain compliance and audit trails across both domains? These aren't afterthoughts — they're foundational to making the integrated model work at scale.

The talent pipeline problem

There's another dimension to the tax integration trend that doesn't get enough attention: the talent shortage. Fewer people are entering the tax profession, and the pipeline of new CPAs is thinning.

"More and more people are leaving the tax business and that new generation of tax planners is not coming in," Bunch observed. "I'm a big believer you have to use technology to drive cost down and build scale."

This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for RIAs. The challenge is obvious — finding and retaining qualified tax professionals is competitive and getting more difficult. The opportunity is that firms willing to invest in technology that makes tax professionals more efficient will be able to serve more clients with smaller teams, creating a structural advantage over firms that are still running manual, paper-heavy tax operations.

AI and automation are likely to play a significant role here. Tax preparation is data-intensive, rule-bound, and repetitive in many aspects — exactly the kind of work where technology can create meaningful leverage. The firms that figure out how to combine skilled tax professionals with intelligent automation will be the ones that scale tax services profitably.

Getting started: what to consider

For firms evaluating whether to bring tax services in-house, here are the key questions:

Client demand: Are your clients asking for it? Are you losing coordination opportunities by referring tax work out? Are your advisors spending time on tax-adjacent conversations they can't fully serve?

Acquisition vs. build: Buying an existing CPA firm brings clients, talent, and established processes. Building from scratch gives you more control but takes longer. Most firms pursuing this are acquiring, as Allworth has done.

Technology readiness: Can your data infrastructure support the addition of an entirely new service line with different systems? Do you have a way to create a unified client view that spans both advisory and tax?

Talent and culture: CPA culture and advisory culture are different. Integration requires intentional effort to build a shared identity and collaborative working model.

Economics: What does the payback look like? Tax services generate their own revenue, but the real economic value comes from client retention, cross-selling, and the competitive differentiation of a comprehensive offering.

The direction of the industry

The integration of tax into advisory practices is still early, but the direction is clear. Clients want comprehensive service. Advisors want deeper relationships. Firms want stickier revenue. Technology is making it increasingly possible to connect these worlds — even if the perfect solution doesn't exist yet.

The firms that move on this now, while the playbook is still being written, will have a meaningful head start. The firms that wait for someone else to figure it out will find that the best CPA firms have already been acquired and the best tax professionals have already been hired.

As Bunch summarized his view: "If you can help people do better tax planning, be able to do the tax preparation properly, and also weave in investments and financial planning — I think that's the right model."

This article is based on insights from Episode 113 of the Next Mile podcast, featuring John Bunch, CEO of Allworth Financial, in conversation with host Kyle Van Pelt, CEO and Co-Founder of Milemarker.

For more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of wealth management, subscribe to the Next Mile podcast. And if you want weekly insights on WealthTech, data, and growth strategy delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Rising Tide newsletter.