Finametrica Archives

FinaMetrica merges with PlanPlus: Fintech updates for August 8, 2017

Posted on August 8, 2017 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

Here is your FPPad Bits and Bytes update for August 8, 2017.

FinaMetrica merges with PlanPlus

FinaMetrica announced its merger with PlanPlus, a Toronto-based financial planning software provider. Founded in 1998, FinaMetrica is one of the first companies to gain significant traction for its risk tolerance assessment software, though the company has seen its market share decline over the last few years due to increased competition from Riskalyze, Pocket Risk, RiXtrema, and others.

The combined company will be called PlanPlus Global, and will offer solutions for comprehensive financial planning, goals-based automated investing, and psychometric risk profiling to its 12,000 current users in over 30 countries worldwide. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Advicent adds integration with Envestnet

Advicent announced a new integration this week with Envestnet, which allows advisors to extract client demographic, investment account, and investment portfolio data from Envestnet and populate the data into the company’s NaviPlan financial planning software.

Advicent is a leading provider of financial planning software in the enterprise space, with over 100,000 financial professionals across 4,000 clients worldwide using at least one of the company’s solutions. The integration also demonstrates Envestnet’s continued expansion of its Open ENV initiative announced last year.

Here’s Envestnet President Bill Crager with more information:

So as the platform began to take on a bit of a one-size-fits-all, we realized we had to open that up. So the core engine will fire into these user interfaces that will really speak to the adviser, will speak to the home office. And not only that, we’re building APIs to integrate with the full ecosystem of an adviser’s practice, whether that’s CRM or other applications that they’re using. How do you get information into the system to, again, provide really profound and comprehensive advice for that client that is not a moment in time, but is ongoing. And that’s really our goal, and Open ENV, I think, is a strategic breakthrough and I’m very excited about it.

PreciseFP adds iOS and Android Mobile Apps

For your client data gathering needs, PreciseFP announced new mobile apps for iOS and Android, giving advisors more convenient access to client information. The new app lets advisors add new information about prospect to their PreciseFP database, send data gathering forms to clients and prospects on the spot, and review any existing client data or forms right from their phone.

And finally, if you’re looking for ways you can leverage technology to enhance your client engagement, save the date for Wednesday, August 16 at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, as I’m hosting a webinar with two advisors who’ve doubled down on technology and seen a huge increase in their client satisfaction. Head over to fppad.com/webinar to register today, that’s FPPad.com/webinar to secure your spot

Those are the headlines for today, I’m Bill Winterberg, be sure check back in for more FPPad Bits and Bytes Updates.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 6

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, Wealthfront wants you to know they crossed another round number in AUM, ByAllAccounts is now aggregating over $1 trillion dollars in investor assets, and Morningstar is out with a new iPad app for advisors.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by IMPLEMENT NOW, the independent advisor’s Practice Management Virtual Summit hosted by Kristin Harad broadcasting online March 16th to the 20th. When you register, you’ll get access to interviews and bonus material from 22 industry thought leaders as they reveal their practice management secrets for success.

And if you register by March 15th, you’ll receive a copy of Carl Richard’s new book The One Page Financial Plan. Find all the details for this high-impact event by visiting fppad.com/implementnow

Two Billion Reasons to Believe from Wealthfront, and

Vanguard may expand fast-growing virtual investing service to advisers from InvestmentNews

[First up is news from online investment service Wealthfront, as the company announced this week that it has surpassed the $2 billion dollar mark in assets under management, an increase of 20 times in just over two years. This places the automated investment service just barely in the Top 100 RIA firms measured by assets according to the InvestmentNews RIA database. However, another online provider has also entered this rarefied territory, but with very little fanfare.

That provider is mutual-fund giant Vanguard, as the Vanguard Personal Advisor Services™ reached $10.1 billion dollars in assets as of the end of 2014, and it’s still in a limited pilot program. If you do the math, the company added nearly $8.8 billion to its platform in just nine months, and the company is also considering offering some form of the service to advisers.

So while the startups continue to make headlines and receive face time on cable business TV, the incumbents that the startups say they’re disrupting are putting up some very impressive growth metrics of their own.] Wealthfront managed less than $100 million in client assets when I joined, and had many skeptics. No one outside of the company could have imagined that, just over two years later, we’d celebrate being the first automated investment service to reach $2 Billion in client assets under management.

Morningstar Reaches Milestones, Aggregates More than $1 Trillion in Assets Daily With Access to 20,000 Financial Data Sources Through Morningstar ByAllAccounts Aggregation Service from Morningstar

[Related to online asset tracking is this is news from Morningstar, as the company announced its ByAllAccounts aggregation service now aggregates over $1 trillion dollars in investor assets. You may recall that Morningstar acquired ByAllAccounts back in April of 2014, and since then the number of supported data sources has grown to over 20,000 from 4,500. Can you say Yodlee?

So what does this mean for you? Remember, most of the online investment services don’t take into account the assets users have in their held away accounts. Personal Capital is one exception, but they’re not a pure online service, either. The rest don’t have the complete picture of their users’ net worth, so if you’re on the fence about incorporating account aggregation in your business, this is one area in your value proposition where you can outperform the online competition.] Morningstar, Inc., a leading provider of independent investment research, today announced a number of milestones for its Morningstar® ByAllAccounts aggregation service.

Review: Morningstar’s New iPad App from Financial Planning Magazine

[And finally, Morningstar also rounds out this week’s broadcast as Joel Bruckenstein reviewed their new iPad app built for the needs of financial advisers. I had the opportunity to recently test the app with Morningstar’s Mike Barad as he walked through the market research information, complete with embedded videos from Morningstar analysts, as well as the Clients and Portfolios view that advisors can use to stay up to date on client asset allocations, holdings, and more.

There are a few wish list items that Bruckenstein highlighted, such as the inability to conduct trading or rebalancing activity within the app, or to view Portfolio X-Ray reports on aggregated accounts. Still, for a version 1.0 app, advisors who use Morningstar Office or Workstation in their business should find the app useful for those times they’re away from their desktop computer.] While Morningstar has long been known as a leading provider of independent investment research, the company also produces a number of software applications for advisors.

Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Into The 21st Century, Finally from Financial Advisor Magazine

Years before there was Riskalyze or Pocket Risk, there was FinaMetrica, a comprehensive risk-profiling tool for use by advisors with their clients.

Wealth Access integrates with MoneyGuidePro from InvestmentNews

Wealth Access, a personal financial management platform, announced Tuesday its integration with MoneyGuidePro, a popular financial planning software.

Breaking Delivers the News to Your Mac or iPhone Notification Center from Lifehacker

OS X/iOS: Keeping up with the news is easy, but keeping up with news you care about can be trickier. Breaking is a new app that makes it easier.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 6, 2014

FPPad Bits and Bytes for December 12

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, Financial Planning magazine’s annual tech survey is here. Find out who makes up this year’s winners and losers in advisor technology. Fidelity announces a new collaboration with LearnVest. How will this partnership help you with your digital advice delivery to clients? And, Wealthfront fires the first salvo at the separately managed account industry. Does this new service have the potential to put pricing pressure on the SMAs you use today?

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now.

(Click to watch on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by the 2015 T3 Conference, Advisor Edition, exclusively designed for the technology needs of independent financial advisors.

You can get $50 off the regular registration rate by using the promo code “2015T3FPPAD,” so reserve your spot to the event Michael Kitces calls the Best for Advisor Technology by visiting technologytoolsfortoday.com

Now here are the links to this week’s top stories:

Tech Survey 2015: What’s New Now? from Financial Planning

[This week’s top story comes from Financial Planning magazine, as technology columnist Joel Bruckenstein revealed the results of the publication’s annual technology survey of financial professionals. The first surprise of the survey involves tools advisors use to assess client risk tolerance.

For the longest time, the risk assessment category has been dominated by FinaMetrica, the Australian-based firm that launched its client profiling tools back in 1998. Today, assessment tools from Riskalyze and PocketRisk have gained respectable adoption among advisors. But roughly 50% of survey respondents admitted that they don’t use any risk profiling tools, so if you’re part of that 50%, you might want to consider adding one of these solutions to your technology plan for 2015.

Also gaining traction are portfolio rebalancing solutions, as these tools are now in use by more than half of all survey respondents, a first for the category. TD Ameritrade Institutional’s iRebal earned top honors, with Envestnet|Tamarac and Orion Advisor Services rounding out the top three solutions in use today. And with all of the low-cost online investment solutions touting their rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting attributes, I expect to see rebalancing software adoption to continue to grow as advisors match the rebalancing capabilities of the online providers.

Other than that, this year’s survey is pretty similar to the one from 2013, with TD Ameritrade Institutional taking top honors in advisor satisfaction, MoneyGuide Pro cited as the most popular financial planning software, and Junxure, Salesforce, and Redtail duking it out once again for top honors among CRM software depending on how you slice the data.] In the advisor technology sphere, it used to be enough to look for evidence of change. What’s different now is the velocity of the action.

Fidelity Institutional Announces New Collaboration with LearnVest from Fidelity Institutional

[Speaking of online investment solutions, the next story comes from Fidelity Institutional, as the company recently announced a new collaboration with LearnVest, the online technology-enabled financial planning provider. This news follows Fidelity’s announcement last month of a similar collaboration with Betterment Institutional, where Fidelity will list the online investment service in its list of resources advisors should consider as they contemplate ways to attract the next generation of investors.

Under the collaboration, advisors can publish what’s called a “financial wellness” micro website that features educational content produced by LearnVest. In addition, advisors can offer the LearnVest planning program to their clients under a preferred pricing agreement.

Now I’m all in favor of advisors embracing digital advice delivery at an affordable price, buy why should you be piggybacking off of LearnVest’s content? Shouldn’t YOU be the one delivering valuable financial planning content to your clients and prospects? If you have the resources, you should be building your own website, creating your own content, and training yourself and your colleagues to deliver your message with compelling video content. Yes, it takes time and a nominal financial investment, but I bevel the potential reward is worth it.

However, if you don’t have the talent or the resources to make this happen, then the LearnVest collaboration at least gives you a starting point to bridge the gap between your current service model and the technology-enabled relationships that emerging clients are demanding.] Fidelity Institutional, the division of Fidelity Investments® that provides clearing, custody and investment management products to registered investment advisors (RIAs), retirement recordkeepers, broker-dealers, family offices and banks, today announced a new collaboration with LearnVestTM, as well as additional resources to help advisors explore options to digitize their practices.

Direct Indexing: The Next Generation of Index Investing from Wealthfront

[And finally, it seems like I can’t stop talking about online investment services this week, as this time it’s Wealthfront making headlines, as the company just announced a new offering called Direct Index investing. Starting with an account minimum of $100,000, Wealthfront will purchase individual securities and ETFs on behalf of its customers that are benchmarked against the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF. Holding individual securities instead of funds and ETFs allows Wealthfront to track the performance of the index, but harvest individual gains and losses from individual in securities to be more tax efficient.

If this sounds a lot like separately managed accounts, or SMAs, that advisors use today, that’s because it is. So while Direct Index Investing isn’t anything new, Wealthfront is now able to offer the service with very low account minimums and charges its low annual management fee of just 25 basis points, which could very well put pricing pressure on many of the SMA providers you use like Parametric, Envestnet, Nuveen, and more.] Today, we are very excited to announce the expansion and improvement of our unique direct indexing technology. With this release, the Wealthfront Direct Indexing Platform will extend the benefits of direct indexing to broader sets of clients, with increased tax benefits and lower costs.

Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Junxure Expands Relationship and CRM Integration with Advent Software

Junxure CRM, an industry-leading practice improvement firm for financial advisors that integrates CRM technology, consulting, and training, today announced the expansion of its relationship with Advent Software, a leading provider of software and services for the global investment management industry. Advent’s Black Diamond(SM) wealth management platform now offers an integrated experience with Junxure Cloud, Junxure’s cloud-based CRM/office management solution.

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for December 12, 2014

FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 9

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, a new risk tolerance questionnaire gets reviewed. How is it different from the existing solutions already on the market? Gamification is coming to a financial plan near you. Learn how one company is getting consumers to follow through with smart financial moves. And I have a bone to pick with Bob Veres. Find out what he said that I feel mischaracterizes how the future of the financial planning profession will evolve.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

This week’s episode of Bits and Bytes is brought to you by Total Rebalance Expert, the industry’s largest, privately owned portfolio rebalancing software provider.

Now available as a part of the Orion Advisor Services platform, TRX features tax-efficient rebalancing, an easy to use interface, and more, all at an affordable price. Learn how you can gain a half a million dollar return on your technology investment by downloading their latest white paper at fppad.com/trx

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

New Test for Risk Tolerance from Financial Planning

Visit the Pocket Risk website

[This week’s top story is a review of a new risk assessment tool called Pocket Risk. Pocket Risk is the latest product that joins Riskalyse, Finametrica, Financial DNA and several others to assess client risk tolerance using an interactive questionnaire.

Clients go through a list of 20 questions regarding their personal definition of risk, preferences around investment volatility, and other introspective qualities to generate their risk tolerance score, measured from 0 to 100. If you’re curious about Pocket Risk’s specific methodology, the company posted technical details on their website. And Bruckenstein compliments Pocket Risk for its analysis report, calling it quote “short and sweet.”

A two-week free trial of Pocket Risk is available, and subscriptions begin at just $55 per month for one user.] Recently, a number of firms have come to market with standalone applications to measure risk tolerance. One is Pocket Risk, which has an intriguing pedigree and approach.

A new planning tool for advisers challenges clients to win a game from Investment News

[Next is a story about a company called FlexScore, which is using gamification to encourage consumers to make positive choices when managing their finances. Created by financial advisors Jeff Burrow and Jason Gordo, Flexscore creates a score for each user, ranging from zero to 1,000, based on how well they manage their personal finances.

It takes about 20 minutes to complete a profile and connect financial accounts using account aggregation, and users can increase their score by completing recommended action steps, which can be as simple as watching a view for a few points, or paying off debt for a lot more points.

~~While an advisor version of Flexscore isn’t available today~~, Flexscore just announced an advisor version of the product at Finovate Spring 2014, so I expect the application of gamification surrounding financial decision making to weave its way into the technology solutions you use with clients. So keep Flexscore on your radar and think about how gamaification might make sense in the technology you use with clients.] Jason Gordo told me he was bringing FlexScore to Finovate because the online tool uses the popular tech trend of gamification to engage consumers in the process of goals-based wealth planning.

Watch Flexscore’s Finovate Spring 2014 demo

Ten Ways the Next Generation of Financial Planners Will Change the Profession from Advisor Perspectives

[And finally, this week’s broadcast wraps up with commentary from the venerable Bob Veres, who writes at Advisor Perspectives about ten ways the next generation of financial planners are going to change the profession.

In his article, Veres highlights trends he sees among younger financial planners, which includes the complete outsourcing of investment management activity, charging clients a low-cost monthly subscription automatically paid by credit card, hosting videoconferences with Skype and Google Hangouts, and running through illustrations in financial planning software in real time with clients, either in the room or through a screen sharing programs.

But here’s the beef I have with Veres’ article: none of the ten characteristics are exclusive to younger financial planners. Whether you’re a new advisor or a veteran of the industry, you can use any of the ten techniques to streamline your business, add scalability, and enhance the experience you deliver to clients.

So if there’s one takeaway I have from Veres’ article, it’s the call to action of how quickly your business can implement useful technology and ultimately change the profession for the better.] Having interviewed a number of people who will attend the NexGen gathering, and others who are in their generational cohort, I have distilled the ten key themes that illustrate how the next generation of advisors will change the profession when they take the reins.

Here are stories that didn’t make the cut in this week’s broadcast:

Ric Edelman: Stay Cutting-Edge on Technology or Fail from Think Advisor

Education is key to winning Next Gen assets from InvestmentNews.com

Five Easy-To-Use Tech Tools For Advisors from Financial Advisor Magazine

Motif Launches Products to Help Advisors Compete With Robo-Advisors from Think Advisor

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 9

FPPad