One of the longest-standing constraints to doing financial planning for clients is that it's difficult to look across all the domains of their financial household to provide advice, if their financial household isn't in good order in the first place. In other words, if (prospective) clients don't even understand and can't explain where all their dollars currently are, and how they're being spent, it's difficult to provide any financial planning advice to improve their outcomes!
In the early days, going through the process of collecting all of a new clients' various financial statements and documents, and combining them together into a single comprehensive financial plan, was itself part of the value proposition, as it might be the first time clients ever actually saw all their financial assets in one place. Which means the process of helping clients to Get Organized was often as much a part of the value proposition as the advice that came afterwards!
Fortunately, the rise of technology has made this easier over the years, though. From the emergence of Quicken on the personal computer nearly 40 years ago, to the rise of Mint.com just under 20 years ago, technology tools have increasingly sought to expedite the financial-organizing-and-tracking process, first by providing an electronic way to track it all, and then increasingly by leveraging solutions like account aggregation to automatically draw in current balances, transactions, and cash flows, to provide more and more continuous real-time flow of data, with less and less time commitment for the consumer themselves.
For technology firms providing the software, this is a value proposition unto itself, but for financial advisors, it also greatly helps to solve the original problem that "it's hard to give advice on the finances of a client who doesn't know the status of their finances in the first place". As a result, account aggregation and financial dashboards like Mint.com or more recently Monarch Money were not only a direct-to-consumer solution, the advisor industry has also built solutions, from eMoney's pioneering personal financial management dashboard that emerged more than 15 years ago, to Envestnet's acquisition of account aggregator Yodlee alongside MoneyGuide financial planning software, and RightCapital's development of its own financial dashboard and budgeting tools.
In this vein, it's notable that this month, Edward Jones announced that they have taken a minority stake in the personal finance app Quicken, with an explicit intention that the investment is a step towards integrating Quicken's personal financial management capabilities more directly into Edward Jones as a way to support their value proposition and advisor conversations with clients.
From the advisor perspective, the Edward Jones investment continues to reinforce the ever-growing focus on how technology can support deeper conversations with clients when software helps to ensure their finances are better organized, automatically, year-round. Because advisors no longer have the bottleneck of struggling to deliver planning advice in the absence of clear data about the client's financial situation, and clients themselves can be more proactively and productively engaged in the advice process when they have a better understanding of their own financial situation. Though Edward Jones itself notes that they are still determining the actual deployment strategy, to decide where or how Quicken will be offered to their clients and integrated into their internal advisor software platforms.
At the same time, though, it's notable that Edward Jones' decision to invest in Quicken comes just a few years after they shut down their long-standing internal Financial Foundation solution and chose to adopt MoneyGuide instead… the software long known to be the least cash-flow-based of the financial planning tools. And now Edward Jones is procuring access to its own cash-flow-based personal financial management tool for clients, raising the question of whether the firm regrets (or at the least, sees a significant capability gap) in MoneyGuide, compared to competitors like eMoney and RightCapital that have more deeply built such features themselves (while MoneyGuide parent Envestnet just spun off its Yodlee account aggregation division!).
In turn, it's also striking that Edward Jones chose Quicken… a PFM software that originated in the DOS era more than 40 years ago, still runs an active desktop version for consumers (how exactly will that integrate to… anything?), and only fully rolled out a cloud-based subscription service (Simplifi) in 2020. If Edward Jones was going to focus on "modernizing" their planning software and tech stack with personal financial management capabilities, why not buy out Mint.com from Intuit just a few years ago before it was just outright shuttered (and ostensibly could have been had, in full, for far less than a partial stake in Quicken)? Or invest into a more modern platform solving the same "personal financial management" problem with modern tech, like Monarch Money (which has already been developing a For-Advisor-Professionals version?).
Ultimately, though, Edward Jones' deal with Quicken is still likely to make waves, if only for the sheer size of Edward Jones itself… with 20,000 advisors and nearly 10 million clients they serve (compared to the only-2-million existing customers using Quicken itself), if Quicken is now building for financial advisors, it may soon become a broader offering for more advisory firms than just Edward Jones (and/or spur competitors like Monarch Money to expand their offering alongside). At the same time, the Quicken deal seems yet another negative harbinger for MoneyGuide, which by Kitces Research on Advisor Technology has already faced declining satisfaction ratings and market share amongst independent advisors, and seems to have gotten a vote-of-no-confidence from Edward Jones that it can provide the full breadth of what it takes to deliver a comprehensive financial planning value proposition in the modern era?
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-july2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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