There's a new client portal provider in town. Omyen Corp. has rolled out what it is calling the Client Information Center.
I first wrote about Omyen and its health care cost estimation calculator two years ago. That was followed by a suite of additional online tools for advisers introduced last year (see links below).
These included the Personal Financial Index tool for prospecting, and Wealth Planner, a set of financial planning tools for gathering client data and synchronizing it with an advisory firm's customer relationship management system.
Adding to that is the CIC, which is meant to assist in an adviser's collaboration with clients during financial planning meetings and through use of hosted document sharing. There also is a set of alert capabilities and integration with several CRM packages popular with advisers.
The new service is priced at $39 per adviser per month.
In addition to desktop accessibility, the CIC can be accessed through smartphones and tablet devices through a secure Internet connection.
Arranged in three sections for now, the CIC portal includes modules dubbed Personal Information, Personal Documents and Documents from Advisor.
While the Omyen offering is highly customizable for firms, by default the personal information section consists of a client's demographic, contact and detailed personal financial information. The financial information section allows input and syncing of assets, liabilities, income from different source, expenses, insurance, health care, estate planning and a risk-profiling questionnaire.
As with various other personal documents repositories, Omyen's offering is a place for clients to store important documents online. including their wills, trusts, Social Security statements etc. These documents can be shared with their adviser using controls inside the portal.
And as one might suspect, the “Documents from Advisor” module of the CIC provides clients access to financial plans and reports from the adviser.
In a conversation a few months ago, Omyen chief executive Dinesh Sharma hinted at additional features coming to the platform.
And development of the CIC fits with the plans he outlined to build out Omyen's platform suite of tools into a one-stop hub for advisers to initiate and carry through on prospecting, client data input (whether by client or the adviser), and various financial planning activities.
His firm has designed its platform to be especially attractive to advisers and independent broker-dealers that previously did not offer financial planning or saw it as an area of secondary focus.
The architecture is open, intended to also be of interest to other best-of-breed third-party technology providers.
Next up on the road map for Omyen is integration of an account aggregation offering.
The CIC offering and the rest of the Omyen suite will compete or overlap with those of several other third-party providers in a variety of categories.
For example, many of the features in the portal are available from AdvisorProducts and various website construction and hosting firms for advisers.
Then there are modules or features available within or as add-ons to several popular CRM products such as Junxure from CRM Software and its Client View product as well as Redtail Technologies and its CRM and document management modules.
The above list is not meant to be exhaustive, by any means.
And for some of the firms mention above, especially the CRM providers, Omyen's offerings, while duplicative, might be complementary for firms that want the CRM but like what Omyen has done more in terms of client portals.
"We're working with nine broker-dealer firms including LPL [Financial LLC] and now have more than 100 RIA firms that use our technologies," said Mr. Sharma, adding that six RIA firms already are using the new CIC offering in production usage.
The CIC is available immediately.
I also asked about CRM system integration.
"We have integrated with Salesforce and are currently working on an integration with Redtail," Mr. Sharma said, referring to two CRM applications that are widely used by various types of advisers.
"And later this month, we will also announce account aggregation as part of CIC and its integration into our Wealth Planner comprehensive financial planning software," Mr. Sharma said.
For more information, visit
Omyen online.
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Tools to Estimate Costs Client Input Tool to help advisers estimate health care costs
