AdvicePay, the payment processing platform launched by XY Planning Network founders Alan Moore and Michael Kitces, announced a new feature on Friday that lets users customize different components of a fee-for-service financial plan.
The new feature, which the firm is referring to as Engagements, is designed to compliantly automate the entire financial planning fee from tracking a completed agreement on file to ensuring the right agreement is with the right signers and providing delivery.
All of the functions available within the AdvicePay platform — invoicing, document eSignatures, approvals and deliverables — can be bundled together in customizable sequences, according to the announcement.
The update was necessary because enterprises do compliance in number of different ways, Kitces said in an interview. For example, some enterprises require that an agreement must be signed before issuing an invoice, while others require the financial plans to be reviewed in advance of issuing invoices.
“One of the biggest inhibitors for enterprises doing more fee-for-service financial planning was simply that they didn't have the systems in place to be able to do it, so it wasn't even profitable for them to do, because it got gummed up in the internal systems,” he said.
The issue for financial services firms has been adopting new fee models at scale, Kitces said. Typically, firms resort to using complex, error-prone spreadsheets with manual updates. Home offices can design and deploy their own custom compliance and operational processes by inserting their rules and requirements into the AdvicePay system.
Engagements provides a centralized platform that will track and automate planning agreements, capture digital signatures, match agreements with invoices, review financial plan deliverables, and process client payments electronically.
The enterprise space has been a key market for AdvicePay, as the platform has specifically designed the platform to scale across thousands of advisers, said Alan Moore, CEO and co-founder of AdvicePay. The platform has the majority of the market share for customized billing and payment tools at 7.65%, a notable leap from 2.84% last year, according to the 2021 T3 Advisor Software Survey.
Engagements is already deployed with launch partner Cetera Financial Group and its network of 8,000 advisers. Thrivent Advisor Network and Financial Services Network have also already rolled out the feature among their enterprises, Kitces said.
In April, AdvicePay launched Deliverables a centralized platform that tracks, reports and manages the financial planning deliverables that a firm’s advisers produce. Advisory firms can use the tool to ensure that financial plans were delivered when clients are engaged in subscription or retainer financial-planning fee models.
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