In September of 2014, Advicent, the developer of NaviPlan and Profiles financial planning products, as well as Advisor Briefcase, acquired Figlo. Founded in 1996, Figlo is a leading provider of financial planning software in the Netherlands, serving financial advisors, major banks and financial service providers. More than 750 companies use Figlo’s software to empower the financial futures of more than 2 million of their clients.

I’ve long been a fan of Figlo. I thought its user interface and some other elements of its application were very innovative. But for a number of reasons, it was never able to gain a foothold in North America. That’s why Advicent’s acquisition of the software rekindled my interest. Would Advicent’s long experience with building software for the North American market, combined with its years of marketing to this audience, finally enable the Figlo brand to achieve success here?

I suspect that we are about to find out. After months of intense developmental efforts, Advicent has released the initial version of the new and improved Figlo. While this is but the first step in a development schedule spanning the next several quarters, we thought it would be instructive to take a look at where Figlo is today and where it is expected to be headed in the future.

Before we discuss the new application, a brief discussion of Advicent and its Figlo strategy is in order.

Advicent traces its roots back to 1969, when the firm that was to become Financial Profiles began developing Profiles financial planning software. EISI, developers of the NaviPlan financial planning software, purchased Financial Profiles in 2006. In 2011, Zywave acquired EISI. In 2013, Zywave Financial renamed itself Advicent Solutions. Then in 2014, Advicent acquired Figlo. The net result of all this is that today, Advicent offers three product lines of financial planning software: Profiles, NaviPlan and Figlo.

Currently, Advicent has more than 100 enterprise clients. It serves more than 120,000 users in nine countries on four continents. On the independent side of the business, it currently has approximately 3,500 firms as clients. According to Cory Olson, senior product director of Financial Solutions at Advicent, there are two potential types of buyers for financial software today: institutions/advisors and consumers. Advicent targets only advisors and institutions.

Olson says that the firm’s competitors focus on one or more of the following areas: planning/advice; budgeting/personal financial management; asset allocation; and portfolio management. Various direct-to-consumer products target these same areas. The goal of Advicent with Figlo is to be able to provide advisors and financial institutions with a platform, or a suite of tools, that allows them to effectively compete with the digital, direct-to-consumer offerings.

When the platform is fully rolled out, enterprises and large RIAs will be able to deliver all of the following with the platform: an advisor dashboard, electronic fact finding, collaborative planning, analytics, client portals, peer comparisons, personal financial management, gamification, lead generation, two-way data integrations, a document vault and straight-through processing. Delivering all of these capabilities entails using up to four components of the Figlo platform. Narrator is the application builder that allows firms to choose which of the capabilities they want to offer, as well as the ability to customize each experience.

The Figlo financial planning application, the second component, can be totally customized using Narrator. These components are available for purchase today. The other two components, Figlo Personal Financial Management (PFM) and Figlo Business Analytics & Alerts, are due for release in December.

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