It has been some time since I've come across a new financial planning software package that I can get excited about, but Figlo is such a product. It is innovative and easy to use. But what really sets it apart is its client-friendly graphical interface.

Technically speaking, Figlo is not new, although it is new to North America. The firm's roots go back to 1996 when Infa Group began selling financial planning software to financial advisors, banks and other providers in the Netherlands. Within a few years, the firm estimates that it had a 75% market share in the Netherlands. By 2006, the firm's software was being used by more than 12,000 advisors and more than 2 million consumers. In February 2011, Figlo opened its North American headquarters in Ontario under the leadership of Sam Vassa, CEO of Figlo North America.

The firm's mission statement resonates with many tech-savvy advisors today: "Our mission is to make personal finance comprehensible and accessible for every person in the world. With ongoing investments in software development and financial knowledge, Figlo will keep delivering compliant financial calculations that meet both consumer and advisor needs. We feel a social responsibility to keep investing in simple consumer interaction tools for the financial industry so that people get the right financial information anytime, anywhere, on any device."

In concrete terms, what does the mission statement mean? It means that Figlo offers a powerful yet consumer-friendly platform that includes goal-based planning, budgeting, monitoring, alerts and a consumer portal. The platform is designed to be accessible on all sorts of devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Another interesting and innovative aspect of Figlo is that the firm is now a virtual firm. In other words, all IT infrastructure is outsourced. As of January 28, 2011, the Figlo platform has been powered by Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing environment. According to Vassa, Figlo chose Microsoft's service after extensive due diligence. Figlo determined that Azure is flexible and robust and offers rock solid dependability at a reasonable price. Since Azure is cloud-based, it offers Figlo unprecedented scalability. As they take on new customers, they can add capacity on demand without negatively impacting performance.

Figlo Test Drive
I recently took a brief tour of the Figlo platform. I used a test site that did not include all of the platform's capabilities. Figlo is still tweaking its standard offering for advisors at this point, so a full review would be premature. Instead, our purpose is to introduce you to an innovative new technology. Although it is still being tweaked, I believe that the Figlo approach will cause many to re-examine the way financial planning is delivered to clients. That factor alone makes it worthy of further discussion.

While many financial planning applications offer the ability for advisors to collaborate with clients, Figlo is built from the bottom up as a collaborative tool. Since the focus is on collaboration, the interface is devoid of professional jargon; it is designed so that a lay person feels comfortable viewing it. The basic process is divided into four steps, each represented by a tab at the top of the page: Have, Want, Need and Do. Figlo calls this the Hawanedo advisory process.

The Have tab is where you enter persons in the household you are planning for, employment income, other income, pension income, assets, liabilities, expenses and insurance. The Want tab is where you lay out your goals. This could be anything from the purchase of a house to a recurring expense like a car purchase every four years to a defined benefit pension for a small business owner. The Need tab helps you plan for financing the "wants." For example, if you say you want to purchase a car in three years and there is no asset linked to financing the car, you can choose to save a fixed amount every month in a savings account for three years so that you will have the money available to buy the car.

The Do section is where you run one or more scenarios, settle upon a plan, print the plan and present it to the client. Once the plan is finalized, the application converts the "needs" covered by the plan into "haves," thereby signifying that funds have been committed to funding the needs.

All of the above sounds pretty standard so far, and it is. What sets Figlo apart is the interface. The system uses a card-based metaphor throughout. When you create a household, each person within the household is represented by a card. The card can contain a photo of the person, his date of birth, his gender, address, e-mail, etc. As you progress through the program, adding income, assets and the like, you link them to the appropriate household member. When you return to the card in the household view and flip it over, you see all of the items linked to that household member. Cards can be rearranged on the screen by simply dragging and dropping them into position.

As you move through the Have portion of the program, you go to the Work section and create a card for each job. A job card would include the family member linked to the job, the employment start date and estimated end date, annual income and other related information (including the logo of the employer). Pensions, other income, expenses, assets, insurance and liabilities all get similar card treatment in their respective sections. Since each item gets its own individual card, clients can more easily absorb the information.

The Wants section consists of cards and a time line. Many standard card templates are available. If you want to create a fund to purchase a boat, you select a boat card, flip it over, specify the amount needed, the frequency of contributions and the start date. You then drag the card onto the time line representing the date the money is required. If you do not have sufficient funds to pay for all of your wants, the time line will turn red. If you do have enough to pay for your wants, the line will turn green.

Let's assume you do not have sufficient funds to pay for your wants. When you go to the Needs section and click on a card, the application allows you to select a vehicle to fund any shortfall. For example, let's say you select a savings account. You would enter an interest rate, a start date and end date and the frequency of the contribution, and the program will calculate the payment required to address the shortfall. Perhaps meeting the goal requires a $500 per month payment but only $300 per month of cash flow is available. In that case, one can drag the goal to a later date on the time line, or you can put off some other goal by dragging it back on the time line, thereby freeing up cash for the goal you are working on. All calculations take place almost instantly on the fly, so you can see the impact of any changes on the graphical interface.

What Else?
Although setting up individual cards can work well for the self-service market or for adding a goal to an existing plan, it may not be ideal for professional planning purposes. As an alternative, when you set up a new client, Figlo provides a wizard that prompts you for typical client data and populates common cards for you. It can also create some typical scenarios for you that you might want to run for a client such as the death of one spouse or the other, disability, unemployment or critical illness. If you use the wizard, all of the appropriate cards are pre-populated for you and the various scenarios are also preconfigured.

Like some other online financial planning applications, Figlo allows advisors to share access with clients and prospects. When you set up a client in Figlo and provide the application with the person's e-mail address, Figlo sends out an invitation to log in. If you do not provide an e-mail address, no invitation is sent. If you want to add client/prospect access at a later date, or if you want to give multiple family members (or other authorized persons) their own log-in, you can do so manually with a few mouse clicks.

Figlo includes some other capabilities rarely seen in U.S. financial planning software. One is localization. You can choose a domicile from a long list of countries. If a client is domiciled in Japan, for example, you can choose to denominate all values in yen. Once you choose a default currency, you can still choose to value individual assets in another currency. So if you have a Canadian client that owns a house in the U.S., you can value everything in Canadian dollars with the exception of the house, which can be valued in U.S. dollars if you wish. It is also possible to change currencies for the whole plan on the fly. Exchange rates are updated regularly. You can view the rates being used and when they were last updated with a mouse click.

Figlo is also multilingual. Among the languages supported are English, Dutch, South African, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and many others.

A Work In Progress
Although Figlo is very impressive, it is still a work in progress. Some of the functions that advisors need are difficult to locate. For example, when I wanted to leave a client and go back to the client list, I could not immediately figure out how to do so; there's a little "person" icon on the bottom right of the screen, but if you don't mouse over it, you don't know what it does.

While multi-language support is great, Spanish and French, two languages likely to be in high demand in North America, are missing. Figlo expects to have them added by the time you read this.

Client sharing controls are nonexistent at this point. If you give a client access to a plan, they can change anything you've done. View-only access or some sort of limited access is going to be necessary.

Figlo offers probability analysis, but it does not offer the type of some of the sophisticated features of more established contenders. For example, it does not offer something like MoneyGuidePro's SuperSolve, which weights the relative importance of multiple goals when optimizing a plan; nor does it offer asset allocation tools from Ibbotson as does NaviPlan Select. At this point, it lacks sophisticated Roth scenario planning, sophisticated Social Security planning and many other higher end features, but these calculations are more straightforward, so one assumes they will be programmed in soon.

I ran into a few minor issues with the client setup wizard. For example, I could not leave the term insurance page without entering a dollar amount for term life. I suspect this may be due to the fact that I did not have access to the Manager Tools, which govern program assumptions and defaults, but in any event I'm sure the problem is easily remedied.

In time, Figlo will integrate with account aggregation providers, CRM packages, portfolio management packages, custodians and broker-dealers. Vassa says he is already in talks with a number of firms, and the platform's architecture should allow for rapid integration, but it does not yet exist today. As these integrations come online, Figlo will become even more attractive than it is today.

A Game Changer?
Figlo is probably not quite ready to compete with the MoneyGuidePros and the NaviPlans of the world for high-end planners, but it could already be very appealing to those targeting the mass affluent and the do-it-yourself market. In time, as Figlo builds out the platform I suspect it will compete at the higher end as well. Figlo has done a good job of building the underlying architecture; they now need to understand exactly what types of scenarios and calculations more sophisticated planners desire.

Although it has probably sold only a handful of U.S. licenses so far, Figlo is already having an impact on the thinking of software developers. At a recent trade show, the Figlo booth was jam-packed full of advisors, software developers and consultants. The excitement Figlo's interface generated among those who saw it indicates that there is a thirst for improved interfaces and a superior client experience. Whether Figlo can leverage their interface know-how into software sales remains to be seen, but at this point, I wouldn't bet against them.