Libretto is an innovative advice platform that unifies financial planning, ‘total wealth’ portfolios, and risk management for RIAs and family offices, offering an alternative to the traditional risk tolerance and Monte Carlo ecosystem. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Libretto Founder and CEO Jeffery Coyle to learn more.
Jeffery Coyle’s Background
When asked about his professional background and the experiences that led him to establish Libretto, Coyle shared:
Before founding Libretto, I spent more than 25 years advising ultra-affluent clients and building multi-generational and multi-disciplinary approaches to wealth management. Over that time, I founded three boutique advisory firms serving ultra-high-net-worth private clients, served as Deputy Chief Investment Officer of Personal Financial Services at Northern Trust, and was Chief Strategy Officer at myCFO.
The common thread across that work was a belief that sophisticated wealth management is not just about managing a portfolio. It is about helping a family understand its full financial structure: assets, liabilities, spending needs, future inflows, risks, private investments, insurance, estate planning, tax considerations, and the purpose behind the wealth. Libretto grew out of that philosophy.
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How Libretto Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Coyle explained:
Libretto came from a practical problem I experienced as an advisor.
When we worked with ultra-affluent families, we developed a framework that brought planning, portfolio construction, risk management, and wealth management into one coherent process. Clients responded to that because it helped them see the full picture. They wanted to understand what they owned, what they needed, what was protected, where they were taking risk, and how each part of their wealth supported the life they wanted to build.
The challenge was that we were delivering much of that work through spreadsheets, custom analysis, and very manual processes. The methodology was powerful, but it was hard to scale.
Libretto was founded to turn that framework into technology. Originally, the goal was to streamline comprehensive advice delivery for ultra-affluent clients. Over time, it became clear that the same methods could help a much broader advisor market.
Every client has a financial structure. Every client has essential needs, important goals, uncertainties, tradeoffs, and limited resources. The complexity varies, but the need for better advice is universal.
Elevating The Quality Of Advice
When asked about his favorite memory from working at Libretto, Coyle reflected:
My favorite moments are when an advisor sees the framework click for the first time.
Many advisors know that the traditional planning conversation can feel incomplete. They are often asked to reduce a client’s life to a risk score, a model portfolio, or a probability of success. Those tools can be useful, but they rarely capture the full reality of a client’s financial life.
When an advisor realizes they can use Libretto to show a client their total wealth picture, connect objectives to resources, and design a portfolio with a clear purpose, there is usually a moment of recognition. They see a way to deliver the kind of advice they always wanted to deliver, but in a more systematic and scalable way.
That is energizing because Libretto is not just software for software’s sake. It is a platform for elevating the quality of advice.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Libretto’s core products and features, Coyle detailed:
Libretto is a total wealth advice platform for financial advisors, RIAs, and family offices.
The platform unifies planning, portfolio construction, and risk management. It helps advisors evaluate a client’s full financial structure, including liquid portfolios, businesses, private assets, real estate, liabilities, Social Security, pensions, human capital, insurance, future inflows, and life objectives.
A central idea in Libretto is that the liquid investment portfolio should not be treated in isolation. It should function as a completion portfolio, filling the gaps left by the rest of the client’s financial structure.
That means portfolio design is driven by the client’s objectives, liabilities, time horizons, and risk exposures rather than by a generic risk score.
Libretto also supports advisor efficiency through automated onboarding, client-ready visuals, scalable planning workflows, and AI-enabled tools. Our recent AI features help advisors populate new client strategies from uploaded data files and use an assistant to streamline work across planning, asset allocation, and risk management.
Rethinking Legacy Frameworks
When asked about challenges in wealth technology and how Libretto has addressed them, Coyle noted:
One challenge in wealth technology is that many tools are built around legacy frameworks. The industry has become very accustomed to risk questionnaires, model portfolios, and Monte Carlo simulations. Those tools are familiar, but familiarity can make it difficult to introduce a more structural approach.
Our view is that advisors need more than a forecast. They need a framework for managing uncertainty.
Real client lives involve market downturns, job loss, business risk, inflation, health events, property damage, liquidity needs, family obligations, and changing priorities. These are not always well captured by a probability score.
We have addressed that challenge by focusing on education as much as technology. We spend a lot of time helping advisors understand total wealth, liability-driven investing, risk management, and the role of the advisor as a wealth architect.
Once advisors see how the framework applies to real client conversations, the shift in perspective becomes much more intuitive.
Technology Evolution
When discussing how Libretto’s technology has evolved since launching, Coyle explained:
Libretto began as a way to translate a sophisticated UHNW advice framework into scalable software. Early on, the emphasis was on capturing the client’s full financial structure and connecting planning to portfolio design.
Since then, the platform has evolved in several important ways. We have adapted the product to the needs of mass affluent clients, expanded the planning and asset allocation workflows, improved client-facing outputs, and added more tools to help advisors deliver personalized advice efficiently.
More recently, AI has become an important part of the platform. We are using AI to reduce friction in the planning process, especially around onboarding and data entry.
Advisors can upload client data files, and Libretto can help populate a new strategy automatically. That saves time, but more importantly, it helps advisors focus on judgment: evaluating sufficiency, identifying key risks, and making thoughtful recommendations.
Our goal with AI is not to replace the advisor. It is to help the advisor spend less time on manual work and more time delivering better advice.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about Libretto’s most significant milestones, Coyle said:
The first major milestone was turning a methodology that had been used with ultra-affluent families into a scalable technology platform.
Another important milestone was realizing that Libretto’s total wealth framework was not only relevant for UHNW clients. It was highly relevant for RIAs serving clients across many wealth levels.
Advisors want to deliver more personalized and sophisticated advice, but they need a system that makes that possible across their full client base.
More recently, the launch of our AI-automated client onboarding and AI assistant was an important step. These tools are designed to help advisors scale sophisticated advice more efficiently, from their largest clients to their smallest clients.
I would also count the development of our advisor community and educational resources as a meaningful milestone.
Libretto is not just introducing a new tool. We are helping advisors adopt a new way of thinking about planning, portfolios, and risk management.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Libretto from its competition, Coyle emphasized:
Libretto is differentiated by its methodology.
Many advice platforms focus on risk scores, model portfolios, or Monte Carlo projections. Libretto is about understanding the client’s total wealth.
We help advisors look at the full financial structure: assets, liabilities, future inflows, objectives, risks, and constraints. They can then design a planning-driven portfolio and risk management strategy around that structure.
That is a very different approach to advice. It moves the conversation from “How much risk can the client tolerate?” to “What is the client trying to accomplish, what must be protected, where can they take risk, and how should each part of their wealth be used?”
The other differentiator is that Libretto was originally built from UHNW advice methods. We are taking approaches that were historically delivered manually to very affluent families and making them accessible to advisors serving a broader range of clients.
In simple terms, Libretto helps advisors make every client feel like they are worth $100 million.
Future Goals
When discussing Libretto’s future goals, Coyle outlined:
Our long-term goal is to help redefine what high-quality financial advice looks like.
We believe the future of advice is more integrated, more personalized, and more focused on total wealth. Planning, portfolios, and risk management should not be separate conversations. They should be part of one coherent framework.
From a product standpoint, we will continue to improve the advisor experience, deepen our planning and portfolio capabilities, and use AI to remove friction from the advice process. We want advisors to spend less time wrestling with data and more time helping clients make better decisions.
From a market standpoint, we want Libretto to become the platform advisors use when they want to deliver sophisticated, planning-driven, total wealth advice at scale.
Incorporating AI
When asked how Libretto is incorporating AI, Coyle explained:
We are incorporating AI in practical ways that help advisors work more efficiently without diluting the quality of advice.
Our AI-automated onboarding helps advisors create new client strategies from uploaded data files, including reports from other planning tools, client intake forms, and custom data sources.
That can significantly reduce manual data entry and make it easier to move from information gathering to analysis.
We also introduced an AI assistant designed to help streamline planning, asset allocation, and risk management workflows.
The purpose is not to replace the advisor’s judgment. The purpose is to help advisors move faster through the administrative and analytical work so they can focus on the decisions that matter most.
For us, AI is most valuable when it supports the advisor’s role as wealth architect.
The advisor still needs to understand the client, interpret the tradeoffs, and make recommendations. AI helps make that process more efficient and scalable.
Risk Tolerance Versus Risk Management
When invited to discuss another topic he believes deserves more attention, Coyle concluded:
One topic I think deserves more attention is the difference between risk tolerance and risk management.
The industry often talks about risk as if it is mainly a question of portfolio volatility. But clients do not experience risk only as volatility.
They experience it as uncertainty: losing a job, facing a health event, needing liquidity during a downturn, dealing with business risk, managing family obligations, or discovering that different parts of their financial life are not working together.
Good advice should help clients prepare for those realities. That requires more than asking how they feel about market losses. It requires a thoughtful structure that uses reserves, hedges, insurance, diversification, liquidity, and flexibility.
That is where advisors can add enormous value.
Important Disclosure
This article is being provided for informational purposes only, and nothing contained herein should be considered, or is, investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any securities. Libretto is an SEC-registered investment advisor; however, such registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training and no inference to the contrary should be made. Libretto provides advisory services to registered investment advisors and other professional advisors and does not advise individual clients.
