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Advisor Applications
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Suggestion Engine For Financial Advisors Finds Opportunities To Sell Clients Products, But Can It Be Harnessed By Fee-Only RIAs? |
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Friday, April 13, 2012 01:55
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RightBridge is a suggestion engine for financial advisors. It provides sales intelligence on your clients.
This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
RightBridge is a web-based solution from CaptialROCK, which was founded by John Hyde. Hyde led the team that built SunGard WealthStation, which today sits on the desktops of tens of thousands of advisors at wirehouses, insurers, regional brokers, bank trust departments, and other financial advice enterprises. RightBridge is yet another example of the boom in innovation and productivity occurring across American business and that I regularly document in the financial advice business.
No software I’ve ever seen does what RightBridge does for financial advisors. RightBridge is not financial planning software and it’s not a marketing tool. It represents a new category of software for advisors. For the second time in two weeks, I’m writing about a product that’s a category-buster. (See inStream Wealth.)
RightBridge’s suggestion software does things CRM does not. Hyde says CRMs are great at setting up a process for handling existing clients but they do not analyze your client data and suggest opportunities. Landing credence to Hyde’s assertion is the fact that Ebix CRM, one of the largest CRMs in the financial services industry that is on about 125,000 advisor desktops, has partnered with RightBridge even though its CRM has its own “opportunities finder” module.
Hyde says that in his experience only about 20% of financial advisors use financial planning software. In addition, the 20% of advisors using professional financial planning software with clients only use with about 20% of their clients.
“Financial planning is great,” says Hyde. “I love it. But it just does not get done.”
“With less than 10% of advisor client actually getting a financial plan, it makes you wonder what the other 90% of clients are getting from their advisors,” says Hyde.
RightBridge scans and analyzes an advisors’ client data using algorithms to find automatically opportunities o sell them products, and fiduciaries would frown upon that. However, the rules engine can be built to support fee-only fiduciaries. We’ll come back to that later.
Hyde says that instead of an advisor conducting a tedious data-gathering process —as is required of financial planning apps today — RightBridge proactively provides advisors suggestions without requiring a “discovery” meeting with a client where you collect all their account and personal demographics. RightBridge relies on brokerage and account aggregation systems to collect to client’s assets, liabilities, insurance and other key financial and demographic data. For enterprises RightBridge targets, that’s fine. (For RIAs, collecting data on held away and AUM presents a challenge but it is not insurmountable.)
RightBridge’s suggestion engine is similar to what Netflix uses to pick movies you’ll like and to the way Amazon suggests items you might to buy. By looking at the sage of everyone in a family, RightBridge can suggest college-planning, life insurance, annuity and other products. It’s a needs-based analysis.
The system has been deployed in insurance and brokerage enterprises and, according to unaudited data from RightBridge, the average advisor acts on 37 suggestions a month and 32% result in a positive outcome — a sale, a pending sale, recommendation or scheduled follow-up meeting. Users of RightBridge average a 13.6% rise in revenue.
Hyde, along with RightBridge’s sales VP, Matt Paulsen, came to New York and met with me, and the Salt Lake City company team is impressive. Many of the company’s 12 employees formerly worked for Hyde in building SunGard WealthStation.
The history here is important. Hyde worked for Sterling Wentworth, a software company, and ran its financial planning division. When SunGard acquired Sterling Wentworth in the late 1990s, Hyde was brought over to run SunGard’s financial planning software effort. Hyde oversaw the purchase of Frontier Analytics, an asset allocation application integrated into WealthStation, as well as other small software companies that were successfully bundled into WealthStation and sold by SunGard to the enterprise market.
“I came into this with my eyes wide open,” says Hyde, “and I know that getting the client data is crucial to the success of the suggestion engine — garbage in, garbage out.”
Hyde says the RightBridge suggestion engine can be tailored to RIAs, which is why he contacted me. He is interested in creating a version of RightBridge that could be used by fee-only investment advisors.
Hyde says implementing the suggestion engine for an insurer is very different than in a brokerage, and that the software was built to make it easy for a business analyst — not a programmer — to create the rules used by suggestion engine. Thus, an advisor can configure RightBridge to monitor cash withdrawals from retirement plans or support other service-oriented objectives.
“You can build rules that would only recommend win-win opportunities for both the client and the advisor,” says Hyde. :”Just because it’s a suggestion engine does not mean you can’t make suggestions that promote win-win opportunities.”
If you want to be on an advisory board to help RightBridge develop a version of its rules engine for fee-only RIAs, please let
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.
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I've Seen The Future Of Professional Wealth Management Software And Its Name Is inStream Solutions |
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Wednesday, March 28, 2012 19:45
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Tags: advisor industry people | financial planning | Financial Planning Apps | online financial advice | practice management | value proposition | Wealth Management In 1974, rock critic Jon Landau, writing in Rolling Stone, said: "I've seen the future of rock 'n roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen." Well, I’ve seen the future of professional wealth management software and its name is inStream Solutions.
If Advisors4Advisors gave an award to the most innovative advisor application of the year, inStream would get it. In fact, inStream would win the Advisors4Advisors award as the most innovative professional wealth management software of the past decade. This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
inStream was developed by Alex Murguia. Murguia came to McLean Asset Management in 2001 right after completing his Ph.D. in psychology. His wife's uncle founded McLean. Murguia has taken the firm from $25 million of assets under management to $550 million today. Murguia is a visionary.
inStream totally reinvents an advice professional’s approach to wealth management. It aligns your value proposition with what you do for clients.
“Ask any financial planner or wealth manager what his value proposition is and he will tell you, ‘It’s helping people achieve their goals,’” says Murguia. “Yet on any given day advisors don’t know where each client stands with regard to achieving their goals. It’s a question that advisors can’t answer yet it’s core to their value proposition.”
Murguia says there are about 20 tasks advisors are asked to do by clients all the time—find me a new mortgage, help me buy life insurance, help find a long-term care insurance policy. Doing these little tasks day in and out for clients creates stickiness and enables advisors to fulfill their value proposition.
In contrast, Murguia says advisors now currently update a financial plan and then it’s put on the shelf for a year. Instead he says advisors should be updating financial plans every day and proactively monitoring them. 
“When you create a goal-based plan for a client, there is no reason why it cannot be updated nightly and when a client falls below certain tolerance levels, the advisors should receive an alert about it,” Murguia says.
“We’re not making the math better or trying to make assumptions about what will happen 10 years from now more accurate,” he says. “We’re trying to help advisors use planning better every day.
“Right now, planning is reactive and event-driven,” says Murguia. “We should be beyond that. Clients pay us a lot of money and it’s not because we do a plan once a year. They pay us to guide them proactively through life cycle decisions.”
Murguia says advisors are going to Dinkytown.com and using non-professional calculators to find out if a client should lease or buy a car or refinance a mortgage, or they call their cousin Vinny, the mortgage broker, or research the answers on sites like BankRate.com. Instead inStream tackles these tasks alongside a goal-based financial plan.
When you calculate a whether a client should refinance his mortgage one time, you have that data in your system and can be notified when rates drop low enough for another round of refinancing. So you are proactively contacting the client to tell him to refinance and not simply waiting for a call.
“There is no reason why not to have these pre-calculated events tracked for each client so you can proactively call them with information when they cross a threshold. That’s advice that does not happen now proactively.”
“Right now, advisors have no way of providing that level of advice in a scalable manner,” says Murguia. “Advisors do a terrible job coordinating these additional services like insurance and taxes. You don’t need to do all of these things, but you need to quarterback them. We need to make our clients more informed consumers and help them with these things.
As if that is not revolutionary enough, Murguia is building a marketplace of solutions to provide products that will allow advisors to be at the center of advising on these every day financial decisions. When you go to look for a mortgage, there is a marketplace for you to shop and advise the client on.
What’s more amazing is that inStream makes all its money on the marketplace. It’s wealth management platform is free! Whatever you are now paying for financial planning software, you can keep.
Murguia, a fee-only advisor and member of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, says he knows that the marketplace he builds must be acceptable to a fiduciary.
Murguia says he opened up the system for a beta test three months ago and expect to get 100 firms using inStream in 12 months. He says inStream already has 450 firms on its platform and several more are coming aboard every day.
Murguia, who previously used MoneyGuide Pro for financial planning, says Junxure for CRM at McLean, says neither of those systems do exactly what wealth managers need to fulfill their core value proposition. A CRM, he says, is good at telling you helping a firm execute a sequence of events but neither proactively tells an advisor when to trigger an event.
inStream is addressing a flaw in the business model used by Certified Financial Planner professionals and other professional advisors. It’s taking common financial questions in clients’ lives and putting them into a system to be monitored and updated. It enables advisors to monitor and advise on practical financial decisions faced by the mass affluent and ultra-high-worth-net-worth.
In addition to rethinking the professionals can offer a scalable wealth management system and bolting on a marketplace for solutions, inStream includes social CRM aspects. It let's you track and view what's going on with each of your clients socially.
Murguia says he is also planning a way for advisors to use "crowdsourcing." It examines data about what all advisors on inStream are doing. So you can input "55-year old physican" and it will show you in composite what other advisors using inStream are doing for 55-year old physicians. This is not yet available, however.
Keep in mind, while inStream is innovative, other planning apps are not standing still. They will adopt the innovative ideas embraced by inStream. But this app has set a new standard and is a game-changer for financial advice professionals.
“It’s not financial planning,” says Murguia. “It’s every day wealth management.”
An earlier version of this article incorrecltly identified the founder of McLean Asset Management. It was not Murguia's wife's father. It was her uncle.
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Is Open Architecture Really The Answer To Fiduciary Questions? |
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Monday, March 19, 2012 13:36
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Tags: Portfolio Management Software Citi Investor Services is positioning its open architecture investment platform as a cure for fiduciary headaches. Maybe. But the real benefits may lie elsewhere.
This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
Nice summary of a white paper on Citi's OpenWealth program in Financial Planning, taking the point of view that automation and account aggregation help fiduciaries do their jobs.
Platforms like OpenWealth are often sold as a way for advisors to get a 360-degree perspective on client finances.
That makes sure that nothing gets missed. Retirement accounts are brought into the overall household allocation and the entire portfolio is automatically optimized from a tax perspective.
However, the platform can only point out positions that break the client's investment policy statement. Ultimate responsibility for monitoring the platform and its "suggestions" still resides with the advisor.
Technology can help make it easier to perform up to a fiduciary standard, but it can't do the whole job. That burden is not going away, no matter how much computing power advisors throw at the problem.
What programs like this can do is eliminate routine tasks and the associated costs. Streamlining the amount of human intervention required helps keep the job managable -- or at least not quite so overwhelming.
And with a better strategic view of all the assets, advisors can avoid making the well-intentioned mistakes that now happen all the time.
That can't help but incrementally enhance long-term performance as trading, commission, and tax drag decrease.
Meanwhile, of course, advisors who can trust their platform can divert more of their attention to the tasks that only they can do: working with clients and bringing in new ones.
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Remote Offices Seen Driving Advisor Networks' Social Media Needs, And There's A Productivity Twist |
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Friday, March 09, 2012 16:16
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Tags: mobile apps | Social Media | tablet Advisory firms with multiple physical locations are pointing to their need to standardize as a reason to adopt third-party social networking technology. There may be unexpected benefits to think about here.
This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
A nice case study here on how a firm with "far-flung" reps decided to bring in social media tools from Actiance.
We've talked about Actiance a lot around here, but this is the first time geography has come up as a factor for getting the software.
Granted, every firm that does business in more than one location will need to standardize every single facet of the operation that it can: technology, compliance, client communications, document processing and storage.
However, a lot of non-financial firms have started using social media tools not only as a client-facing communications platform, but as a way for employees to interact.
Whether it's Skype, Google Plus, or Twitter messages, they're turning "social" platforms into internal workflow and idea-sharing engines.
And as more advisors tiptoe out of the office to run client meetings on their tablets or other mobile device, the ability to communicate instantaneously is going to become more mission-critical, even for firms with only one official "office."
Sure, that's what a Blackberry used to be for.
But why do advisors need a Blackberry now?
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When Is The Right Time To Buy New Technology? |
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Wednesday, March 07, 2012 15:32
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Tags: apple | gadgets | iPad
The new age question is, “When is the right time to buy new technology?” If you’ve waited to buy an iPad or simply have to have the latest tech, it’s a good idea to know where to find the latest gadgets at a more reasonable price. As attractive as being the first to own a new gadget might be, waiting until other retailers pick it up can save you some significant change.
Buying the latest thing from a retailer rather than from the manufacturer can also give you more flexible options on returns, exchanges, and applying loyalty points for purchase. With the recession still offering incentives for greater frugality, saving money can become a fun part of new tech acquisition.
This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
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