Shake-up at eMoney Advisor

Fidelity-owned financial planning vendor eMoney Advisor is kicking off 2020 with significant changes to its strategy and leadership.

EMoney is moving away from a project to build a new multicustodial portfolio management, reporting and billing platform that would have rivaled Orion Advisor Services, according to multiple sources who asked to remain anonymous due to their relationships with eMoney.

[More: Orion sales rumors continue]

While eMoney CEO Ed O’Brien would not comment specifically on what the company is building or how far along any project is in development, he said that eMoney is always “looking at adjacent verticals.”

“I put that work into the category of 'eMoney evaluating opportunities to innovate and grow but we’re not going to pursue in 2020,'” Mr. O’Brien said.

Areas of the adviser fintech market that could have made sense for eMoney to expand are either saturated or have entrenched providers already there, he added. “We like our strategy that employs open architecture.”

In 2020, eMoney is currently focusing on its primary financial planning offering, data aggregation and improving service to advisers.

The company faces increased competition in the market. Envestnet acquired rival technology vendor MoneyGuide for $500 million in March and recruited eMoney founder Edmond Walters to build a new financial planning product targeted at ultra-wealthy investors under the name of Apprise Labs.

Orion acquired startup planning technology Advizr, and Advicent is invested in building what it says will be the next generation of planning.

“We need to make sure that we are the best planning platform in the industry,” Mr. O’Brien said. “As we think about our business, that means making decisions about what we don’t do as well.”

In addition, two leaders of eMoney’s business development team have left the company.

Stephen Langlois, eMoney’s head of business development and chief revenue officer, recently updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate he left eMoney earlier in January. The profile says he is now principal of a company called SRL Associates.

Jeffery Schwantz, who most recently served as head of enterprise services, has also left eMoney to return to Morningstar, according to sources. Mr. Langlois hired Mr. Schwantz as head of enterprise sales in 2017, as part of a push to expand eMoney’s presence with banks, insurance and large broker-dealers.

Mr. Schwantz did not respond to a request for comment. An eMoney spokeswoman confirmed his departure.

In an email, Mr. Langlois said he left for “personal reasons” and referred InvestmentNews to a LinkedIn post he wrote earlier this month. In the post, he thanked colleagues at eMoney and Fidelity, where he worked for more than five years before joining eMoney.

“As some of you know, I recently left eMoney and am embarking on a new chapter in my professional life,” Mr. Langlois wrote in the LinkedIn post. “So what’s next? I look forward to kicking-off a period of discovery and exploration in this new year (starting with some yoga in Mexico).”

Mr. O’Brien denied the shake-up is the result of slow growth or missed goals. The changes are reflective of eMoney moving away from a team-based approach to sales in favor of an individual sales manager strategy, he said.

“Folks at eMoney are talented and in demand,” he said. “Some of our very talented people move on to some of our best clients. That’s not a bad thing.”

There have been additional exits from the ranks of the business development team, as employees have either left or were laid off, sources said.

The departures total "less than 10 — as the result of an updated sales model as Ed mentioned — and some employees took on new roles within eMoney, so the number is even less," the eMoney spokeswoman said.

Acknowledging that the company's growth in 2019 wasn’t equal to previous years, Mr. O’Brien said eMoney still ended the year strong.

“The best testimony to our growth is we still added 12,000 users to our platform last year,” he said, adding that there are now more than 70,000 people using eMoney. Advisers also used eMoney to create 1 million new financial plans in 2019.

“Don’t believe anyone for a second that we’re not investing in the business,” Mr. O'Brien said. “But we’re investing very deliberately and in a very narrow set of capabilities.”