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.

I recently spent some time checking out the new retail version of Figlo Advisor, the default version that a single user or small office (one that does not want to customize) would use. It is impossible to do the application justice in the space allotted, but I’ll try to hit some of the more important features. The Figlo financial planning experience is divided into three steps. Let’s review each in turn.

1. The first step is the “Assess” category, and it starts with the data entry process. Figlo calls this the client inventory. There are a number of ways to enter data into Figlo, but for many users the client inventory wizard will be preferred. The wizard takes you through the 10 inventory categories where you must enter data: family members, work, pension, other income, expenses, assets, liabilities, insurance, goals and goal funding. Each entry you make is represented by a card, which can be exposed in the tile view. To accelerate the data-entry process, you can use the quick input method. This requires only a minimal amount of information to get results. It is appropriate for simple plans or for getting an initial take on a client situation. If you choose this input method, you can go back and enter additional details later.

The wizard is well laid out and easy to follow. For many fields, where there might be a question about what to enter, a question mark is visible next to the field. Mouse over the question mark and an explanation of the required information appears.

Within each category, there is a plus sign. You click it to create a new entry/card. For example, if you click to add an asset, a menu of asset types appears—such as 401(k)s, vehicles, checking accounts, art, etc. When you select an asset, fields appropriate to that asset appear.

Once you’ve completed the first nine categories, the final one is to assign assets to goals. You can make an asset available to all goals, none or something in between. You can also assign an asset as a primary goal. If an asset is unassigned, or unassigned to a goal, it can’t be used to fund unassigned goals.

Upon completion of the initial data entry process, you can view the data in multiple formats. One is the “Lifeline.” This is a time line that illustrates major milestones. You can toggle back and forth between a goal-based view and a cash-flow-based view. The line is color coded (green, yellow or red) to illustrate the status of the plan at various periods of time. Below the line are three charts that can be customized to show things like expense-based budgets over time, net worth over time and the like.

2. The next step is called the “Solve” category, and it is meant to solve for any problems or shortfalls. To the novice user, the Figlo terminology can be a bit confusing. For example, in Figlo, suggesting that a client save more or spend less is not a “solution”; it is a “measure.” “Solutions” are new products, such as loans, investment products and insurance products. Assuming you’ve already created a goal in the inventory or in the “Assess” category, you then click “solve,” select the goal you’d like to address and then select a solution from the next screen. Only solutions applicable to the goal you select will appear.

When you select a solution, such as a goal that requires savings or an investment, a box appears that shows the shortfall in dollar and percentage terms.
The application then populates, by default, the total amount needed to fund the goal. So if the goal is 10 years out and you know the total needed, you enter the necessary fields (start date, rate of return, frequency of additions, if any) and the initial deposit will be calculated.

Measures work in a similar fashion. When you click the “Measures” icon, you can select the goal that a measure will be applied to and then create a strategy, such as regularly investing in a brokerage account.

With a click, you can model events, such as the death or disability of a family member, to view the impact on a current or an alternative plan. You can also easily create reports that compare the current plan and another plan.

The “goal gauge” in the Solve section is interesting. The top portion of the gauge shows you the probability of success. It also shows the 10th percentile and 90th percentile to provide a framing of possible outcomes. (Many other applications do something like this.) The bottom portion of the gauge shows the client’s current and suggested risk tolerance. If the suggested risk is lower than the current risk, you can move the risk arrow. This will recalculate the probability of success based upon a lower risk portfolio. In the case of retirement, if the resulting probability of success is not satisfactory, sliders to the right allow the advisor to increase savings or delay retirement to see what the impact would be on a plan.

3. The “Achieve” portion of the application is concerned primarily with reporting results to the client. As the reporting and client portal features are in the process of being upgraded, we will not be discussing them at this time.

My Take
The new Figlo is a work in progress. It may be unfair to pass judgment on Figlo Advisor at this point, but the platform looks promising, so it is appropriate to monitor it now.

I like the fact that Advisor is totally customizable. If a firm does not have the expertise to do it, it can contract with Advicent to do the customization through a consulting arrangement. This is, perhaps, the greatest differentiator for Figlo: the ability to use Narrator to create what amounts to your own totally custom version of the software, one that will be unique to your firm.

The Inventory Wizard is very well designed and intuitive. It allows even novice users to populate the necessary plan data quickly and efficiently.
The goal gauge operates somewhat differently than other Monte Carlo simulation modules do, and it should enable advisors to illustrate the trade-off between risk and return.

Figlo Advisor currently requires Silverlight to run, though Advicent says that it can also run properly on Internet Explorer and Firefox. Next year, Figlo advisor will move to an HTML 5 platform. At that point, it should work with any major browser. Figlo Client and Figlo Leads are already built on HTML 5.

As of this writing, the education cost database is not yet operational, nor are the new net worth/cash flow reports, variable annuity functionality or the Roth 401(k) functionality or long-term-care insurance. They should all be operational by the time you read this. In December, the new Figlo client app and the new Figlo Advisor Dashboard will be released.

I’m not totally comfortable with the way goals are assigned or how the spending occurs. If you don’t assign an account to a goal, it doesn’t get spent. This can lead to errors if advisors add an account and fail to assign it. I’d probably default to assigning accounts to all goals, with the option to deselect one or more goals. And when I do so, I’d like the program to fund my most important goal first. For most clients, that would be retirement, but it might be something else. Also, when accounts are assigned to all goals now, the goals are funded chronologically. That is not the outcome most clients will want. You can, of course, assign an account to a single goal, but doing so does not allow you to optimize your goal-funding automatically. The application should do this for you.

When you log on to the application, you can view a client list and a prospect list. Currently, the only way you can get a prospect on the list is to also subscribe to the Figlo Leads module. You can’t enter prospects manually, integrate with other prospect generation tools or import them from another program. Firms that already have a lead generation program might not appreciate this limitation.

Overall, the Figlo suite of products looks promising. Larger organizations that adopt Narrator, Figlo Advisor, the Client Portal and the Leads module will have a great deal of latitude in crafting what looks to the client like their own financial planning platform. Business analytics will further strengthen the offering. Combined with a modern digital investment platform, it will offer an online experience that today’s consumer-facing digital firms cannot match. When you add in the expertise that the advisors bring to the experience, you just might have a winning combination.

It is early in the game, though, and it remains to be seen whether Advicent can successfully execute all of its plans. Still, the Figlo platform is the most significant development from Advicent and its predecessor companies in quite some time.