Afternoon, an AI-powered operating model designed to automate the financial advice process, has won AdviceTech Catwalk 2026, the annual early-stage showcase run by Scottish financial services consultancy the lang cat. The result was decided by a margin of two votes from an audience of practising financial advisers.
The company competed against four other early-stage propositions: Planbot by Ammonite, Obsidian, Life After Me, and Eddie by Jigsaw Tree. Each competitor had five minutes to demonstrate their product before facing questions from a panel of industry judges and the adviser audience, who cast the deciding vote.
The product
Afternoon’s proposition centres on connecting data across the full advice workflow, from meeting capture through to the production of suitability reports. The stated aim is to reduce the administrative overhead that currently pulls advisers away from client-facing work. Crawford Taylor, chief executive and founder of Afternoon, said the five-minute slot felt insufficient to show the system’s full capability, but that enough came through to demonstrate its core value. “The advice industry is evolving all the time, and tech is a big part of that,” he added.
The judging panel, described by the lang cat as “high inquisitors,” included Felicia Meyerowitz Singh, non-executive director and co-founder of Engage Smarter AI; James Dunne, managing director at FNZ; and Joseph Williams, co-founder and chief executive of ZeroKey, who won the inaugural Catwalk event in 2024.
Market context
Catwalk operates in an advice-technology segment that has attracted sustained interest from investors and incumbents alike, as UK financial advice firms face persistent capacity constraints and a growing regulatory expectation around suitability documentation. The FCA‘s Consumer Duty framework, which came into full effect in 2023, has sharpened demand for auditable, end-to-end advice processes, and several technology vendors are now competing to own that workflow layer.
The broader category in which Afternoon sits, often labelled “advice automation” or “AI-assisted suitability,” remains fragmented. Established platforms such as Dynamic Planner and Intelliflo occupy the planning and practice-management layer, but the generation of meeting notes, fact-finds and suitability letters has historically been manual or only partially templated. A wave of AI-native startups is now targeting this gap, using large language models to compress the documentation burden. Whether Afternoon’s connected-data approach produces a durable advantage over rivals will depend largely on integration depth with the platforms advisers already use and on the audit trails it can provide for regulatory purposes.
Natalie Holt, head of content at the lang cat, said the Catwalk format is designed to give advice professionals direct exposure to technology they would not ordinarily encounter, adding that the final vote reflects adviser confidence in the firm rather than a purely technical assessment. The competition, now in its third year, is increasingly functioning as an informal pipeline signal for the wealthtech and advice-technology investment community, with the 2024 winner ZeroKey among those to have built profile through the format.
Afternoon did not disclose current customer numbers, revenue figures or details of any funding at the time of the announcement.
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