It’s that time of year again when Financial Planning magazine publishes its annual survey of technology in use by financial planners and advisers. This is the third year for the survey, and again Joel P. Bruckenstein tallied up the responses (from over 1,500 individuals!) and reviewed the results.

Click here to view Bruckenstein’s review of Financial Planning’s 2009 Software Survey.

Just as I did last year, I’m posting my 30-second summary of the review. I’m listing each comment along side those of 2008 for easy comparison.

• 1,550 people responded to the 2009 survey (over 4 times the 350 responses in 2008)
• 24% said they use Microsoft Outlook as their CRM (barely down from 25% in 2008). That sound you hear is me slapping my forehead. Zoho CRM was a surprise write-in response.
• SaaS CRM programs still lag their locally-installed counterparts, just as in 2008
• MoneyGuidePro is the most popular financial planning package with 20% of users (down from 23% in 2008). Now 19% reported no planning software used, up from 11% in 2008
• In portfolio management software, Morningstar Office topped responses with a 24% share (after not even making the 2008 list because of a survey design glitch), beating out Schwab PortfolioCenter® (19%, 18% in 2008) and Albridge (14%, 18% in 2008). This year, 23% said they don’t use anything, down from 28% in 2008 (again, likely because they don’t manage money or they get portfolio data off of a broker/dealer website)
• Account aggregation adoption still falters. The topic received a 5-sentence paragraph mention in the 2009 article. 70% responded that they don’t use account aggregation software (down from 75% in 2008). ByAllAccounts and CashEdge led the choices for those that do use it. I guess a lot of advisers are simply waiting for clients to retire to capture assets held in captive retirement accounts.
• Paperless office and document storage systems continue to be nearly non-existent for the majority of respondents. Note to Financial Planning magazine survey designer: As Adobe admits its Acrobat software is not a document management application, a point freely expressed in the survey article, so why continue to list it as an available choice in the survey? I know it was listed in prior years’ surveys, but in my opinion this continues to skew results in this category.
• Rebalancing software gained in use from 22% in 2008 to 33% in 2009. Prices in this category are falling and more vendors are entering this space with competitive solutions. Tamarac, Advisor Software (on Schwab and TDAmeritrade’s custody platform), and iRebal continue to lead this sector.

Those are the significant takeaways from this year’s software survey. There’s lots more in the article, but this short summary should give you the overall concept of what was highlighted.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.