Answering service for financial advisors and financial planners that books discovery meetings 24/7

It answers your practice's phone when you and your staff cannot, and turns each call into the right next step. An advisory practice gets four kinds of calls, and each one needs a different outcome.

A prospect asking about retirement planning, a rollover, an inheritance or a second opinion needs a discovery meeting booked, with enough context written down that you walk in prepared. An existing client asking about a distribution, a beneficiary change or a statement needs to reach your team, and nobody outside your firm should discuss that account. A client who wants to place a trade needs to be told, every time, that orders cannot be taken by the answering service and that a licensed person will call back. And a caller who is only shopping needs a straight answer about your minimums and how you charge.

A traditional answering service handles all four by taking a message. PhoneAgent.ai books the first, routes or logs the second, refuses and escalates the third and answers the fourth from a script you approve, the same way at 10am on a Tuesday and at 8pm on a Sunday. Accounting and tax practices that share many of your clients are covered on the answering service for accountants page.

For a practice taking about 60 calls a month, published pricing puts an answering service for financial advisors between $59.95 and $720 a month. Almost all of that spread comes from who answers and how usage is counted.

Live answering services bill by the minute. MAP Communications sells 125 minutes for $179 with $1.30 a minute after that, about $250.50 for 180 minutes. PATLive's 200 minute plan is $349. AnswerConnect's Entry plan is $350 for 200 minutes and it rounds every call up to the next minute. Posh sells 100 minutes for $215 and $2.15 a minute over, about $387. Smith.ai's live receptionists bill per call from $300 for 30 calls, and Ruby runs $720 for its 200 minute plan with no published overage rate.

AI services bill differently. Upfirst is $59.95 for 90 calls, Goodcall is $79 a month and meters unique callers, Rosie includes calendar booking from its $149 plan, and Smith.ai's AI receptionist is $150 for 75 calls. PhoneAgent.ai is a flat $89, $199 or $399 a month. How every provider prices across industries is on our answering service cost page.

It can be, but the answer belongs to your chief compliance officer, and any vendor who tells you their service is "SEC compliant" out of the box is overselling. Three rules decide how an answering service fits into an RIA or a broker-dealer practice.

The first is recordkeeping. Advisers Act Rule 204-2 requires an RIA to keep written communications relating to advice and recommendations, and the SEC has spent the last four years fining firms for business texts and messages that were never captured, including $392.75 million across 26 firms in August 2024 alone. An answering service creates written records (call summaries, transcripts and the text it sends a missed caller), so those records need to land somewhere your archive can see them. PhoneAgent.ai emails every summary and transcript and keeps every text it sends in your dashboard, so the simplest setup sends the emails to a firm mailbox your email archiving already journals. Ask your archiving vendor how it wants SMS sent by a third party captured before you switch text back on.

The second is Regulation S-P. The 2024 amendments, which smaller firms had to comply with by June 3, 2026, require due diligence on service providers that touch customer information and a written expectation that the provider will tell you within 72 hours of a breach affecting it. Ask every answering service you consider, including us, to put its security practices and breach notice terms in writing before you sign. The third is content: the service must never give advice, discuss a client's positions or accept a trade instruction, which is a scripting question you can test on a demo call.

The questions you would ask before you commit an hour to a discovery meeting, asked in the same order every time. Most independent advisors and planners settle on a list close to this one.

What prompted the call (a retirement date, an inheritance, a job change and a 401(k) rollover, a sale of a business, a bad experience with a current advisor). A rough range of investable assets, so you can confirm the caller is inside your minimum before the meeting rather than during it. Whether they currently work with an advisor. Whether a spouse or partner should join the meeting. How they found you, which matters for your marketing and for referral thank you notes. And a callback number and the best time to meet, in person or by video.

PhoneAgent.ai asks those questions on every call, books the meeting and emails you the answers with the full transcript. It only quotes what you give it (your minimum, whether you are fee only, your hourly planning rate if you have one) and tells the caller the advisor will cover everything else in the meeting. It does not talk about markets, products or returns, which is exactly where you want an answering service to stop.

Yes, and this is the part to set up carefully. Existing clients call for three reasons: something routine (a statement copy, a meeting time, an address change form), something urgent (a distribution they need this week, a death in the family) and something they should never leave with an answering service (sell everything, move the cash, buy this stock).

You write the rules once. Routine requests are logged and emailed to your operations person. Urgent ones are warm transferred to whoever is on duty on Professional and Practice, or texted and emailed to you straight away on Starter. Anything that sounds like a trade instruction gets a scripted reply that orders cannot be taken by phone message, and the client is put through to a licensed person or promised a call back within the window you set. The AI never confirms balances, holdings or account numbers, because it never has access to them.

It also does not connect to Redtail, Wealthbox, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud or your custodian. Professional syncs calls to HubSpot or any system that accepts a webhook, and every plan books into Google Calendar, Outlook, Calendly or Acuity. If a CRM write-in is a hard requirement, ask each vendor to show a test call landing in your CRM on the demo.

For most solo and small-team practices, an AI receptionist covers the prospect calls better and costs a fraction of a live service. It answers on the first ring, handles several calls at once when markets move, asks every qualifying question every time and books the meeting on the call. It is the only way to get evening and weekend coverage with booking for under $200 a month.

A live receptionist is the better buy when your client base skews older and expects a person, or when your practice is large enough that the receptionist is effectively part of your service model. If that is your book, MAP Communications, PATLive and Posh publish their prices, and our live answering service page compares them in detail. Practices that want both often put the AI on after hours and overflow and keep a person on business hours, which our after hours answering service page covers.

PhoneAgent.ai tells every caller in its first sentence that it is an AI assistant for your firm. On Professional and Practice a caller who asks for a person is transferred. Callers who hang up before it answers get a short text back that names your firm, every text it sends is kept in your dashboard so your compliance team can review it, and the reasoning behind that feature is on missed call text back. If you also want a priced side by side of AI vendors, see AI receptionist pricing.