narayan
We take pride in our financial planning work. It’s a big selling point for clients to hire us. It’s not just about investment management and telling people how their investments are allocated and what their long-term projections are. That’s important, but that’s only a little bit of the analysis. We really get in the weeds to figure out the best way to build a financial plan for our clients and how to monitor that and modify it over time.
My partner, Tim and I are primarily responsible for the technology stack, but we have a team of seven advisors with different backgrounds. A couple of them came from the insurance world. A couple of them came from the wirehouse world. Some started their own RIAs. We’re all constantly tinkering and looking things over [in the technology stack].
Over the last decade or so, it has been crazy with all the new technology coming out. Every day I’m hearing about some new program or software, which wasn’t the case for the first 10 years of my career. We’re always open to new stuff and looking for it. But we try not to fall into the shiny-object syndrome of going to something new when we might already have an area covered with the programs we’re using.
Financial Planning: RetireUp from InvestCloud, RightCapital, eMoney Advisor
RetireUp is super friendly to use and very easy to present to clients. Clients absolutely love the view you get in the projections. It’s easy to tell the story and show them, and then tinker with different projections in the meeting. What if you were to retire in two years instead of four? Or what if you need an extra $20,000 in spending? We can change it on the fly and see a clear example.
It’s not as sophisticated as eMoney or RightCapital or MoneyGuidePro. But it gets us to where we’re trying to go with the big, high-level projections, factoring in taxes, inflation and related areas. Every time we try to shift to something a bit more advanced, our clients always pull us back to RetireUp because it tells such a great story. It’s also lower cost than the other competitors. That’s not why we’ve kept it, but it is a selling point.
We tend to use RightCapital for our younger clients. It’s a very good competitor to eMoney and MoneyGuidePro, with the features you can do and the depth and breadth of planning.
We are also bringing on a new fee-only advisor who uses eMoney. So, we’ll be adding eMoney to see how it works and whether we might want to use it, or use it in some combination with what we’re already doing.
CRM: Advyzon
Overall, Advyzon is awesome. It can do just about everything under the sun. At times, though, it’s not as user-friendly as you’d like. When we were starting out and were a smaller team, we just didn’t have the time to devote ourselves to really learning it. But now that we’re larger and have a client service team, they use it and love it. They’re the experts.
The Advyzon team is also good at taking input, improving things and modifying and adding as needed. It helps us immensely when they make changes that help our practice.
It’s also important that they can do our billing. We had been moving from a hybrid broker/dealer, which did all the billing, and so when we went independent, it just made sense for us to get it all in one with the CRM and billing. They’re also much lower cost than some other competitors. It’s a great value for what you get.
Reporting & Portfolio Management: Advyzon, Kwanti, Nitrogen
We have some in-house portfolios, and we also work with a few TAMPs that use Orion. So, we’ll run Orion performance reports through those TAMPs, then run our Advyzon for the whole snapshot.
We also use Kwanti, which is really good portfolio analysis software, to compare what clients currently have with what is recommended. We might just use it behind the scenes, to test different portfolios and see how they’ve done, you know, and compare. We don’t show clients much of that. We do have a presentation where we analyze their current portfolio before they join us.
We also use Nitrogen to analyze a client’s risk in their portfolio. It’s really good and tells a good story for the client. It’s especially good for a new client, because we can run it, and then check it later and almost do an audit to show them progress. We might show them that their risk score came down because they were feeling like their investments were too risky—and that’s great.
In a perfect world, we would have one software that does all of this, but we haven’t found it yet. Even some of our income planning is done with a home-brewed spreadsheet we’ve tinkered with over the years, just because it’s super easy for the client to understand.
Trading & Rebalancing: iRebal
For portfolios that we run in-house, we use Schwab Advisor Center for trading and their iRebal software for rebalancing. For the two TAMPs we have assets with, they are responsible for all trading and rebalancing. Using TAMPs helps us scale our firm faster.
Document Management: Microsoft 365
We use SharePoint because we have the Microsoft suite. We transitioned away from Box a few years ago just because we had SharePoint. It actually was a cost savings because we were already paying for the whole suite. We have found SharePoint to be very easy to use and, obviously, using the other Microsoft products, makes it pretty seamless.
AI Services: Zocks
We had tested some of the AI notetakers out there, like Jump and a few others. We just kind of gravitated toward Zocks. We started using it about a year-and-a-half ago, and it has been phenomenal. It has been a game-changer for our second-chair advisors, who don’t have to take notes in every meeting but can really focus on the client, learning and adding value.
We can also ask the AI feature questions after meetings about the client. Like whether we discussed a Roth conversion with them. Or to remind us of how many kids they have. It can just spit out the answers and make everything more efficient.
Tax-loss Harvesting Services & Tax Planning: Holistiplan, Savvy Social Security from Horsesmouth
We use Holistiplan for tax analysis and Roth conversions. We upload client tax returns, and it does very deep tax analysis and helps guide the Roth conversion decisions we make. I would say 90% of it is for Roth conversions, but the other 10% is for more unique stuff. If clients own a business, or if they have a big tax year, how is it all looking, and how will it play out?
We use Savvy Social Security for Social Security analysis. It’s very straightforward, and it’s great. It can give five different scenarios as a deliverable for the client. We can talk through all the scenarios for them, and even if they are just taking our advice, we can show them why we’re recommending a certain strategy over a different one.
Trust & Estate Planning: Wealth.com
We started using Wealth.com a year and a half ago. We’ve got a lot of relationships with attorneys in our local area, but sometimes these estate planning attorneys—who generally do great work—don’t have strong follow-through. It’s much easier with Wealth.com because we can spearhead that back-end work for the client and can discount the pricing. We make it low-cost for them. We want them to get this work done, and then we can guide them and keep them on pace.
When documents are created by Wealth.com, we can sign and notarize them in-house, taking much of that work off their shoulders. That’s really the biggest thing. We’re not attorneys. We don’t give them legal advice, but we make sure they get the work done and coordinate all those documents within their plan.
As told to senior reporter Alex Ortolani and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of Wealth Management.
Want to tell us what’s in your wealthstack? Contact Alex Ortolani at [email protected].
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