Bank of America already working on upgrade to its new Financial Wellness Monitor

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is already planning the next evolution of its Financial Wellness Monitor to be able to score investors' overall financial situation.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is already planning the next evolution of its Financial Wellness Monitor to be able to score investors’ overall financial situation.

This week, the company announced that it is rolling out the Financial Wellness Monitor report to enable its advisers to work with 401(k) plan sponsors and participants. The tool, which will be free to plan sponsor clients, calculates a score for plan participants. The score is based on an array of metrics, such as how much a client is saving, what the client is investing in and total loan balances.

The monitor will indicate, for instance, if a plan participant is too heavily invested in company stock or using target date funds inappropriately. “The tool can create an overall plan score as well as an individual participant’s score,” said Kevin Crain, head of institutional client relationships.

Next year, BofA plans to introduce a more powerful version of the tool — one that can take into account all aspects of an investor’s financial situation, Mr. Crain said. “It would look at the individual’s other assets such as their health care savings accounts or their [individual retirement account] assets,” Mr Crain said.

The bank doesn’t have a specific timetable for the rollout of the upgraded tool but hopes to launch it sometime in 2011.

A more comprehensive tool would be timely for BofA Merrill advisers, given all of the talk around retirement income these days, said Luis Fleites, vice president and director of retirement markets at Financial Research Corp.

“The question is: How are they going to collect all of the data about the participant’s other savings?” Mr. Fleites said. “That’s the challenge that everyone is facing these days.”