On October 1 AdviceAmerica launched AdvisorVision 4.0 (https://advisorvision.adviceamerica.com), a Web-based financial planning platform available to independent advisors through an application service provider (ASP) model. The service will also be available through a number of broker-dealer distribution partners.

AdviceAmerica is not new to the financial planning software game. The company, which was founded in 1999, originally marketed financial planning tools to the general public. In the latter part of 2000, AdviceAmerica hired Robert Goss, former president and chief executive officer of the CFP Board of Standards, following Goss' resignation in the wake of the "CFP Lite" debacle. While no longer involved in day-to-day operations, Goss, now a professor at Brigham Young University, still serves as an AdviceAmerica advisor.

The company teamed up with Yahoo to offer some "lite" financial planning tools to the general public. These tools are still available at Yahoo Finance. Consumers in need of more detailed help are directed to AdviceAmerica's Web site. There, consumers previously could sign up for the full AdviceAmerica retail platform. Now, however, the company has modified its business model, licensing the retail program to financial institutions, which in turn offer it to consumers. According to the AdviceAmerica Web site, clients include Citibank, Patelco Credit Union (one of the largest credit unions in the United States with more than 195,000 members and more than $3.5 billion in assets), GTE Credit Union and NetBank.

As consumers, through their financial institutions, began to use the software, it became apparent that a more comprehensive program was needed; a complementary tool that financial service professionals could use. Hence, the development of AdvisorVision.

AdviceAmerica initially sold AdvisorVision to its institutional clients. On an enterprise level, AdvisorVision is compatible with the consumer software, so a client can use the software, develop a plan, and then "graduate" from the do-it-yourself model to the advisor-assisted model. With a client's permission, advisors can seamlessly access all the data in the consumer version through AdvisorVision and embark upon a collaborative planning engagement with the client.

AdvisorVision 4.0

AdvisorVision 4.0 marks a milestone in the evolution of the AdviceAmerica product line. For the first time, AdvisorVision is being offered not only to financial institutions, but also to independent advisors.. The ASP offering comes in three flavors: the Investment Planning Edition ($75 monthly/$750 annually), the Goal Planning Edition ($125 monthly/$1,250 annually) and the Comprehensive Planning Edition ($175 monthly/$1,750 annually). All three editions offer the following modules: investment and asset allocation, portfolio rebalancing, net worth, and Monte Carlo simulation (but only for the accumulation phase, not for withdrawals.) In addition, you get data from Lipper, connectivity to DST Fanmail, training and support. The Goal Planning Edition includes all of the above plus retirement, education, accumulation goals and debt management modules. The Comprehensive Edition includes everything in the Goal Planner Edition plus life insurance and long term care modules.

The connectivity to DST (with others to follow soon, I'm told) is important, because it means that advisors will be getting real-time information about client holdings, which will feed right into the financial plan. Data feeds from Lipper and other sources will ensure that the asset pricing is current. Links with data aggregators, anticipated soon, should round out the data feeds and keep the entire financial picture current.

The other big selling point for AdvisorVision is supposed to be that it is the "first Web-powered advice generation engine that goes beyond needs analysis to automatically generate actionable advice." In other words, you fill in the data, or have it fed in, and the program will generate recommendations.

Navigation

I recently tried the Comprehensive Edition. The interface has a clean look to it. Three tabs are along the screen's upper left labeled Clients, Planning and Setup. The Clients tab is where most of the initial data entry takes place. This includes personal and family information, goals and objectives, risk tolerance, assets (assuming they have not been brought in through a data feed), liabilities, expenses, life insurance owned, etc. This section generally works fine, but it has one annoying convention: It forces the user to hit the save button after entering data on a screen. Navigate to a different screen without saving, and bye-bye data.

The Planning Tab is where most of the financial planning takes place, but ironically, there's not all that much planning going on (more on that later). The Setup tab is where you enter the advisor's information, asset class risk and return numbers (but curiously, no mention of cross correlations) model portfolios and print options. You can also create filters, load XML and output to XML here.

At this point in the review, I'd generally describe the "Planning" part of the program in detail, but there's not much to describe. For the most part, the program does all the "planning" for you, based on the information and assumptions entered. In the asset allocation module, for example, you can choose from a number of model portfolios. But there is no explanation of the difference between them (one is simply stocks, bonds, cash; the next is the major asset classes; the third breaks it down to subasset classes), or the rationale for using one over another. There is really no way to optimize around one or more existing positions.

AdvisorVision includes all the core modules one would expect from a professional financial planning program, although some more specialized areas, like the ability to account for employee stock options, appear to be lacking.

Evaluation

AdvisorVision definitely has its strong points. Assuming that data is piped in, a "modular plan," such as a retirement projection or a college savings plan, can be generated in minutes. You even can complete a comprehensive plan in a short period of time, provided that you go with the default assumptions and recommendations.

The graphics look good and most are designed in a way that allows advisors to explain important concepts to clients. For example, the "Asset Growth Graph" shows a range of returns as opposed to a straight line projection. The efficient frontier graph includes a scatter plot of the individual assets, and Monte Carlo graphs are well done.

The negatives outweigh the positives, however. The whole platform feels more like a consumer product, albeit a sophisticated one, than a professional one. You fill in the data, the program spits out "advice." AdviceAmerica views this functionality as a major selling point, but I suspect that many mature independent advisors will view it as a negative, at least until they are given substantially more control over the process.

Unlike a program such as NaviPlan, which offers suggestions that the advisors may or may not want to incorporate into a plan, AdvisorVision does not give advisors the level of control over recommendations that one would expect. Independent advisors, as a rule, demand control over the programs they use. If an advisor feels constrained by NaviPlan or MoneyGuidePro, they are going to feel like a sardine with AdvisorVision.

In fairness, one can output a plan as an MS Word document, where it can be edited before presentation to a client, but changing text in this manner can be tedious. In addition, the reports contain a generous supply of graphics, which are difficult to alter.

I've never viewed the consumer version of the product, so I don't know if the advisor version was adapted from that or built from the ground up. But certain design touches, like the cute little icons next to the left navigation bar, are better suited to a consumer product than to a professional one.

While the interface is clean, navigation is not completely intuitive. For example, it first appeared to me that there were two methods of navigating the program: a "next" button at the top of the screen, which I though would move me screen by screen through the whole program, and a toolbar on the left that I assumed allowed me to jump from one section of the program to another. I was only half right. The toolbar on the left did in fact allow me to move around the various modules, but the "next" button didn't always take me where I expected it to.

Context-sensitive help, which AdvisorVision offers, is a good idea, but it needs work. The help section does not offer nearly the level of detail one would expect from an institutional program. More may exist, but I couldn't find it. The ability to easily search for help by typing a keyword would have been welcome.

I had trouble figuring out where the numbers that fed into the long-term care module came from, so I clicked on the context-sensitive help button. I was told that the numbers came from either the insurance or assets screen in the Clients section. Unfortunately, there was no Long Term Care data entry screen under the insurance tab, and it wasn't under assets either (I still haven't figured that one out). The help screen also contained a description of LTC insurance that might be helpful to a consumer or a novice planner, but which is totally useless to everyone else.

I also experienced numerous browser-related problems. I spend a good deal of time on the Web navigating professional sites, and I haven't experienced anything nearly as serious in a number of years. The first time I entered the site, I received an error message. Tech support insisted that it was generated by "spyware" on my test machine, but I have serious doubts about that. Nevertheless, I temporarily removed the offending file, and the error message disappeared.

The problems did not end there, however. I crashed Internet Explorer on a regular basis. It appears that the problem manifests itself primarily when trying to navigate through certain pages before they are fully loaded. I tried accessing the site on multiple systems with differing configurations, and the results were the same, so I feel quite confident that my problems were not related to a single computer. I even tried accessing the site with Opera (another Web browser), but that didn't work. Based on my limited interaction with them, I'm a little worried about the firm's tech support.

In summary, there are three fundamental flaws with the AdvisorVision offering for independents. First, independents have different needs than AdviceAmerica's enterprise customers. The enterprise buyers may want to severely limit a user's options, either because they do not have the technical expertise or because they value speed over customization. Independents value speed, but for them the ability to customize is essential. Unfortunately, it is difficult to customize either the recommendations or the client deliverables within AdvisorVision.

Second, AdvisorVision does not offer sufficient transparency. Independents want to know where the recommendations are coming from and how they are arrived at. Finally, the program is buggy. It crashed way too many times on too many computers for it to be a coincidence. Some of the problems may be attributable to the recent introduction of Windows SP2, but there is definitely a problem.

Does this mean that I think AdvisorVision is without merit? Not at all; if the bugs are fixed, AdvisorVision may provide a means of offering reasonably priced generic plans to those who could not otherwise afford one. Enterprise users will benefit from tight integration and account aggregation. For the typical independent planner serving high-net-worth or quasi-high-net-worth individuals, however, AdvisorVision has limited appeal.

Joel P. Bruckenstein, publisher of Virtual Office News (www.virtualofficenews.), is a leader applied technology for the financial service professional. Contact him at [email protected].