Features to focus on integration

Brace yourself for a slew of planning software with a panoply of new bells and whistles.

A look into the future of planning software shows that through the end of 2002 and over the next couple of years, providers will begin to focus heavily on helping advisers integrate unrelated programs on their desktops and on moving advisers more deeply into web-based applications.

Other planned features range from better graphics to enhanced network privacy.

The integration of diverse programs could do for financial advisers what Microsoft Corp.’s integration of Excel, PowerPoint, Word and other programs into its Office suite did for general business users, says David Dawson, vice president of marketing for Advent Software Inc. of San Francisco.

“Imagine being able to do that with the complex data involved in the financial planning business,” Mr. Dawson says.

The goal of Advent and many of its competitors is to “create a situation where end users can create an environment to their purposes, and this is a business where everyone has a different style,” he says. “But at the end of the day, all of those functions need to integrate back into core accounting products.”

More software makers also will offer to handle, via the web, much of the number-crunching activity – everything from accounting-related functions to updating ledgers with that day’s market performance – that so far has been done by downloaded software. As a result, the software companies will function more and more like application service providers.

“We want to help advisers get out of the information-technology-management aspect of running these applications on their desktops,” says John Purrington, product manager of the Centerpiece and GenTrade lines of software produced Performance Technologies Inc. in Raleigh, N.C. “That way, the adviser can redeploy his resources into growing his business.” Performance Technologies is a unit of San Francisco’s Charles Schwab Corp.

Josh Wright, president of Cheshire Software Inc. in Newton, Mass., says that “not everyone wants” ASP capabilities in their software.

“But going forward, and in a two- to three-year time frame, the majority of advisers will want web-based products,” he says. “If they’re using them now, they can still be horrifically slow because of the limitations of phone-based Internet services. But the more we have broadband capabilities, the more that issue will go away.”

Advent is developing products that include a “dashboard” on the user’s desktop, Mr. Dawson says. An adviser will be able to preset certain thresholds at which to be alerted about changes in accounts.

The dashboard feature is new on product versions this year and will be enhanced in future versions.

Not to be outdone is Techfi Corp., the Denver company that offers the online portfolio-management system AdvisorMart.com and Web Office, a Web-enabled product. Expected in the next couple of years are better synchronization and integration of its products with the Microsoft Outlook e-mail program.

Techfi, which is being acquired by Advent, also plans to improve over the next couple of years its capabilities with hand-helds, so an adviser “can synchronize client information, notes of previous discussions and current pictures of holdings into a Palm [file] for a client meeting or conference,” says John Halliday, Techfi’s vice president of sales and marketing.

And Techfi plans to beef up support for instruments such as mortgage- and asset-backed securities.

Performance Technologies, meanwhile, will continue to add to Centerpiece’s fixed-income offerings, reflecting advisers’ growing interest in that area. In the fourth quarter, Centerpiece’s scalability will ratchet up as the company’s conversion of its system to work with Microsoft Sequel server software begins to bear fruit, Mr. Purrington says.

Centerpiece also will begin to offer greater privacy controls for large advisory firms, “such as the ability for the end user to control who sees the program and who can edit it,” he says.