The development team includes three developers and two designers (one of whom is a UX designer). They run an Agile process with daily standup meetings and two-week sprints.
To identify the next steps, the company establishes effective communication with every client in order to obtain feedback and understand their needs. While building a new financial planning module, Advicefront is setting up a community of financial planners in which the company can show them new apps, receive their feedback, discuss, and come to solutions that are genuinely innovative and easy to understand for end-users.
“Usually, advisors want to sell a level of complexity, and we think the end-user needs clarity and reassurance, so it’s a trade-off that we have to have.”
Despite the fact that the company doesn’t currently have a mobile app, they know how important it is to have a responsive interface and be attractive no matter whether the client is using a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. This is why Advicefront has designed the platform from a mobile-first perspective.
Flexibility for advisors and their clients
The Advicefront platform has been designed to appeal to financial advisors, their clients, and the children of their clients.
“Creating relationships with millennials, with the sons and daughters of clients, that’s crucial for advisors. All the data shows that if they [the children] don’t have a relationship with the advisor, they take the money once they inherit [it] and go to their buddy or move out.”
The platform is conceived to be a modern app that attracts millennials and helps to build a trustworthy relationship with advisors, to give a household approach to the management of wealth.
The platform provides flexibility in terms of multiple personal use per goal and multiple goals per portfolio. The platform allows several people to have the same account or the same goal. Users also have access to all of the tax records pertaining to the strategy the advisor creates.
“That is something we picked up really early on, that the advisors want that kind of flexibility, so we designed it.”
Future expectations
Today, the company is mostly focused on the financial advisory side but it provides some tools for end-users. However, the platform will continue to serve as a set of tools for financial advisors and won’t transform into a robo-advisor for end-users.
“We want to facilitate the relationships between clients and advisors in the best way we can with technology, supporting advisors with marketing, etc. But it is all about the advisor.”
Final thoughts
Advicefront is a young and fast-growing technology company that helps financial advisors and improves the end-user experience. From the very beginning, the team refused the temptation to build a robo-advisor. But by creating a platform for advisors, they have kept end-users in mind and made the platform easy to use and efficient. The company provides a number of iterations to make as many tools as possible available to all platform users. The platform is thereby filling a gap between advisors and their clients, and automating time-consuming processes including client onboarding, collecting and analysing data, generating reports and recommendations and management of portfolios.
Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and co-owner at INSART, FinTech & Java engineering company. Vasyl is also author of the WealthTech Club blog, which conducts research into Fortune and Startup Robo-advisor and Wealth Management companies in terms of the technology ecosystem.