eMoney to collaborate with 28 companies on new platform

eMoney Advisor, a financial advising software firm, said Friday it will collaborate with 28 companies, including Redtail and Orion, on a new adviser platform. With the program, called emX Select, advisers will be able to access their clients' data from their dashboard simply by clicking on a client's name and then choosing the database they want among all the options across service functions. “It is true integration,” Edmond Walters, founder and chief executive officer of eMoney, said at the T3 adviser technology conference in Dallas Friday. Seven companies currently are available on the platform, including Morningstar Inc., HiddenLevers, Albridge, Envestnet and MGP. On May 1, about 10 more will be added, and by Sept. 1, all 28 companies will be fully integrated. The collaboration among contending companies will invoke a sense of healthy competition, since advisers will be choosing the companies they want to use. Even if services that advisers currently use are available on the platform, the ability to see the other options can be valuable. “If you don't maintain standards, someone else will take your spot and the person determining that 'on or off' won't be the CEOs on the platform, it'll be advisers and consumers,” Mr. Walters said. In other words, the most popular services will remain on the platform but those that fail to gain traction among advisers will eventually be dropped, replaced by new options. Earlier this month, Fidelity Investments announced it was acquiring eMoney. Though Fidelity will possibly be on emX Select, Mr. Walters said it would not appear until a competing company like Pershing or Schwab did. “I want competitors to go out together,” Mr. Walters said. He added that the deal with Fidelity was important. “We don't need money to survive,” he said. “We need money to grow.” INTEGRATION COSTS Companies joining the emX platform will have to pay their own integration costs, he said. Audience members at T3 seemed to embrace the platform.

#T32015 @eMoneyAdvisor thank you for the right vision. It's about time advisors can mix and match their software applications of choice.

— Deborah Fox (@DeborahSFox) February 13, 2015

emX update killed it. Awesome. @eMoneyAdvisor #GameChanger #emXSelect #tippingpoint #creativedestruction pic.twitter.com/s7qJ1wv1ft

— Thom K. Hall, CFP (@ThomKhall) February 13, 2015

But eMoney has intentions to see emX Select become much more than a platform for financial services, and has reached out to Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox and other companies for input. Advisers working with clients' money will only be able to see finances at this point, but the company hopes to incorporate client data on insurance and health records as well. “Advisers right now have a huge disadvantage having so many tools,” Mr. Walters said. “Those technologies have to work for advisers, not advisers working for technology.”