Financial advisors are supposed to have the training and experience to provide great financial advice—but they have tools designed to provide advice only under certain times and conditions.
In part, that’s because traditional financial advice tools are designed around portfolios and markets, and the ideas of quarterly reports and annual meetings, said Carl Richards, recently minted "chief evangelist" at Elements, a financial planning app.
“Real financial advice happens in conversations,” said Richards. “No one ever has a financial planning problem. I have never had a client come to me and say I want a financial plan. They come to you with financial questions, and the ability to answer those questions quickly and quasi-on demand is sorely missing.”
Richards, a prominent financial planner perhaps best known as the “Sketch Guy” financial columnist at the New York Times for a decade, signed on as Elements’ spokesperson because he sees the app as filling that critical gap in advisors’ capabilities.
Elements bills itself as a financial monitoring application. At its core, Elements is a client portal mobile app that provides them account aggregation and financial tools akin to web- and mobile-based personal finance apps.
Clients and prospects can answer questions in the platform to record 12 key “financial vital signs” that can then serve as jumping-off points for nudges or financial plans. Elements has recently added the ability to create a “one-page financial plan” using client input in the app.
“When you go to the doctor, the first thing you do is have your vital signs taken,” said Richards. “It’s crazy that we don’t have that for financial advisors.”
Richards said that it takes about three minutes to complete the financial vital signs.
Advisors can interact with clients and prospects within Elements, said Richards, allowing them to deliver quick but accurate answers to financial questions “on the fly.” Rather than paperwork, or a desktop computer screen, or laptop computers, Elements allows advisors and clients to interact using just their phones—so financial questions can be answered with Elements on the golf course or at dinner with clients or prospects.
“Elements gives me a quick, simple way to engage clients’ questions quickly and allow me to serve anyone,” he said. “As an advisor, when I am out, people ask me financial questions, and it’s frustrating because the answer is almost always it depends. That’s the perfect answer. If I had two years of tax returns, 24 months of brokerage statements and the DNA of their youngest child, then maybe I could answer the question.”