A new software tool gives advisors' clients their own Web portal.

When Edmond J. Walters went shopping for a software solution that would answer many of his financial planning and client relationship needs four years ago, he figured it would take some work.

What he didn't figure is that it would be a career-changing undertaking that would take years to achieve.

But that is exactly how it turned out for Walters, who-shortly into his hunt for the "holy grail" of financial planning software-discovered his goal was more an illusion than something he could pick up off the shelf.

The typical problem was that Walters would find an offering that was good at one thing, but not good at another. There were good financial planning tools, for example, that didn't offer any help in dealing with clients. Or vice versa. It reached the point where you figure he would have just given up and made do with whatever he had. Nope.

Walters, it turns out, had a lot of technology professionals as clients. When he consulted with them, they said the things he wanted all existed-just not in one place. It was just a matter of putting all the pieces together.

"I finally said I'd build the darn thing," Walters says. Thus was born the effort that led to the creation of eMoney Advisor, and the company of the same name that's based in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken, Pa. The company's product: a completely Web-based platform that provides basic financial planning and client relationship tools, including aggregated account data, customized alerts, Monte Carlo simulators and personalized Web sites for clients.

While not a do-everything tool-it doesn't, for example, offer extensive client management features or the in-depth portfolio management tools of an Advent or Centerpiece-Walters claims it is a tool that can play a central role in the relationship between advisors and their clients.

"We made this bulletproof," says Walters, who is CEO and chairman of eMoney Advisor. "I built it for people like me, who are incredibly computer illiterate."

Since hitting the market about a year-and-a-half ago, eMoney has been gradually building up a following. The company now has slightly more than 1,000 advisors, including much of the field force of Mass Mutual, using the program. It expects revenues of up to $8 million this year, compared with $2.6 million last year. The software tool isn't cheap. Advisors pay $1,500 per year to use eMoney, plus $350 for each client who has access. The company sells client access in blocks of ten at $3,500 for each block.

Walters estimates that about 75% of his customers are independent RIAs, and adds that the bulk of the company's growth will actually come from client access, which advisors are typically folding into their standard asset management fee.

Walters says it's hard to provide a nutshell description of what eMoney Advisor is exactly, but in fact that seems to be true of more and more financial planning software tools lately. The drive to come up with an all-in-one software solution for planners has been forcing software companies to extend the features on their core products. Thus, you have a lot of client management programs offering portfolio management and analysis features, financial planning programs offering client management features, and so on. Trying to keep track of where software offerings begin and end can be dizzying, even to the more technologically sophisticated advisors.

Walters scoffs at the idea that his or any other software tool can do everything. "I used seven software tools as a planner," he says. "I just have a bias against one thing doing it all."

Instead, he sees eMoney as providing a platform for an advisor's bread and butter: financial planning and clients. "It's deep on financial planning and the rest is client relationship driven," he says. "We don't want to build every piece of the puzzle."

Another key to eMoney, he says, is that advisors are at the center of what happens at their Web address. They give the clients access. They can monitor the frequency at which clients visit their personal Web page. And they can control what features clients can and cannot use once they log onto their Web page.

Among the central features of eMoney are a home page with a customized logo for each advisor, aggregation of client accounts updated on a daily basis, investment analysis tools, and a "vault" that can hold 20 MB of electronic client information ranging from wills and estate documents to personal items. The home page also allows clients to check on their investments and the items inside their vault.

Many advisors use the product as a presentation tool, he says, sometimes putting their computer display on wall projectors during meetings with clients.

The look and feel of eMoney, in fact, may be its biggest selling points, says Jim Starcev, managing principal of Etelligent Consulting, a financial software consulting firm in Overland Park, Kan. Starcev says advisors he's spoken to who use the product are most interested in its use as a marketing tool. "It really is a Web portal for clients to go into," says Starcev. "It's got a lot of sex appeal. It's a very nice looking site with a lot of value-added features for clients. It's a strong marketing tool."

That's why, he says, eMoney could be appealing to younger, Web-savvy advisors and clients. At the same time, he notes that the $350-per-client price could be a turnoff for some advisors. "That's a pretty hefty charge," Starcev says.

Randy Davis, managing partner at Horizon Financial Group in Baton Rouge, La., says eMoney has turned out to be a valuable tool for one of the firm's important client groups: professional baseball players.

It's common, he says, for the firm's baseball player clients to use a laptop to log onto their eMoney Web pages while on the road to check on their accounts.

"It gives them the ability, while doing that, to call us if they have any questions, and when they do we're looking at the same thing they're looking at on the computer," Davis says.

Davis says his firm stumbled upon eMoney a year-and-a-half ago when it went on the same type of shopping expedition as Walters did before them. After some demonstrations, Davis says he walked away impressed with the product's ability to put all of a client's vital information in one orderly place. Clients also have made use of the "vault" feature, with some using it to make duplicate copies of old family photos in electronic form.

"The real gist of the system is you can input all their personal data, investment data and all the data about their assets and liabilities," he says. "For us, when a client calls, we can click on their account and anything that they ask us about is going to be right in front of us."

Putting all that data into the system is a lot of work. "It does take quite a bit of work to input the data, which I see as the only downside," he says. "But it's a fraction of the amount of work you eventually save."