The software vendor eMoney Advisor Inc. added five new modules to the latest version of eMoney 360, its suite of online
financial planning tools.
The vendor launched the new release, version 5.2, late last month.
Previous versions of the online
financial planning software are already in wide use by 5,000 planning firms, including
AIG Advisor Group, a subsidiary of American International Group Inc. of New York, and
LPL Financial of San Diego and Boston, in addition to several large insurance companies.
One of the modules is an annuity income analysis tool that was developed to handle increased annuity sales and help advisers compare guaranteed annuities with expected retirement expenses and address shortfalls.
The other new modules cover asset allocation, asset protection and business insurance, as well as a financial statements module that analyzes a client's basic financial condition, including their net worth, income, expenses and current cash flow.
The Conshohocken, Pa.-based software vendor sells two different suites, both of which provide the new modules. The eMoney 360Pro suite costs $540 per month or $6,000 for an annual subscription, while eMoney 360, which has fewer features than 360Pro, is $324 a month or $3,600 annually.
To keep the eMoney 360 software suite in line with advisers' expectations, the vendor meets with its users to get feedback on the product.
"Over the last year we've been going around the country meeting with five or six users of the software at a time and asking them what they next wanted to see," said the vendor's senior vice president in charge of enterprise initiatives, Matthew J. Schulte, who is also a certified financial planner.
REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
He said that advisers want the software to stay modular but desire more flexibility, such as interactivity.
"Clients are seeking advisers that can work with them interactively — the boomers know they are fast approaching the post-accumulation, post-nest-egg period and ... can't afford to screw up," Mr. Schulte said. They're concerned about retirement income, and that's where the new modules come in, he said.
The new modules allow advisers to do more on the fly, even during face-to-face meetings, thanks to the ease of performing analytical "what-if" scenarios, Mr. Schulte said.
"The adviser can now have the real-time conversation, saying, 'Hey, you've done a great job [of accumulation], now lets look at how much risk you want to take in terms of what to invest in during retirement,'" Mr. Schulte said.
Joseph Murray, a chartered financial consultant and five-year veteran user of eMoney Pro, said he most appreciates the business insurance module and was involved in the development stages and beta testing of the module.
"Mine is kind of an advanced practice, and a big part of what I do focuses on business insurance and
estate planning, and the business insurance was an area [eMoney was] really lacking in prior to this release," he said. Mr. Murray is an affiliate of First Financial Group, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., a division of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Springfield. The firm has $15 billion in assets under management.
"Not only is the depth you find in the business insurance module important, but that module and all the others talk seamlessly to one another," he said, alluding to how the various modules can exchange data.
Other advisers find that they rely more on the other modules.
For instance, Jay Maffe, founder of Maffe Financial Group Inc., based in East Hartford, Conn., has been using eMoney 360Pro for 18 months.
"Variable annuities are receiving such scrutiny in the marketplace now that if your clients need them, you really need a comprehensive and flexible tool to do the analysis," he said. Mr. Maffe's practice has $450 million in assets under management and provides a mix of planning and products such as annuities to its clients. He, along with other advisers, pushed his broker-dealer, Equity Financial Advisors Inc. of Montpelier, Vt., to provide eMoney Pro.
"We pay $300 per adviser per month for servicing an unlimited number of clients," Mr. Maffe said.
Kevin Keefe, senior vice president of financial planning at LPL Financial, said that his company, with its diverse adviser base, has widespread interest in all of the new modules in the latest version.
LPL Financial last fall rolled out a customized version of eMoney 360 as part of its own WealthVision platform. With more than a thousand of the company's 10,000 advisers using the platform, the evaluation and vetting of the latest release is largely completed, and it likely will be rolled out into its own platform in May, Mr. Keefe said.
"A lot of our advisers are looking forward to the flexibility of the retirement income components," he added.
What Mr. Keefe said he finds most compelling, though, is the level of adviser relying on the software. "Based on revenue, the advisers using our version of eMoney represent the top 1% of advisers we work with," he said.
Having a flexible tool during not only the accumulation phase but also during the spend-down phase is important to advisers as well.
"The real problem can be the amount of assets advisers have to work with," research analyst Robert J. Ellis said, referring to the strain that the increase in longevity will put on making assets last throughout retirement. He is a senior analyst at Celent Communications LLC, a research firm based in Boston, and the author of a recent report, "Retirement Income and Distribution Planning," in which he evaluated 15 planning software tools.
"With people typically living much longer and therefore extending the length of retirement, planners need to rely on non-standard distributions or historical distributions and skew their results toward the adverse outcome," Mr. Ellis said.
This flexibility is one of the areas in which eMoney 360 excelled, along with a handful of other applications, according to Mr. Ellis' software evaluation. These included AdviceAmerica Inc. of Fremont, Calif., Naviplan from Emerging Information Systems Inc. of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and WealthStation from SunGard Inc. of Wayne, Pa. All of these applications scored highly in the Celent report in terms of their level of technology and breadth of functionality.
E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].
