We know there is a virtual cornucopia of choices on what types of financial planning software to use in your practice. I've been on the
eMoney Advisor platform for over five years and have seen the technology evolve, adding new features and benefits every year. Each of the financial planning platforms have pros and cons and here are three ways our firm has used the eMoney platform to help increase our bottom line.
1. Get clients to do some of the work. Since eMoney essentially has a two-sided mirror as it pertains to the overall client dashboard, your clients have the ability to enter their own information. Part of the data-gathering progress in our firm is linking all the credit cards, bank accounts, investment accounts and insurance policies that carry a username and a password. The other part of collecting information is to ask the client to load in the value of their homes, cars, jewelry, automobiles and other hard assets. That will save staff time.
2. See the entire client picture. Firms you complete against (whether you know it or not), such as Personal Capital Corp., an online wealth manager, offer account aggregation software with the goal of managing your clients' assets after they can visually see the overall asset allocation of a client no matter where the assets are housed. You can do the same thing through eMoney and view a client's entire situation. This allows you to bring more-holistic advice to a client situation and makes it easier to collect more client assets.
3. Use the vault. Although eMoney charges too much for storage space, in my opinion, the vault (online safety deposit box) allows you to store important documents if you consider yourself the quarterback of your clients' financial life. Including this software within your overall fee structure is something that can be fantastic for you and your clients. We've seen how hurricanes such as Katrina and Sandy have all but wiped out financial documents for many clients — documents that will never be recovered. This feature is of tremendous value to your clients.
While I think eMoney's mobile app is still behind other account aggregation applications, the features and benefits of this particular financial planning platform can be something that can improve your practice and your bottom line. What do you think about eMoney, and what type of software are you using to expand your practice?
Ted Jenkin is co-chief executive and founder of oXYGen Financial Inc.
