FinLife Partners will also access United Capital’s Honest Conversations exercise tool, a goals-setting process that helps end-clients establish planning priorities based on their MoneyMind results. Clients establish five generic household priorities, which advisors can customize to keep track of what each priority means specifically for the client.
Ahead of meetings with an advisor, clients can be prompted to engage in the Honest Conversations process to score how satisfied they are with their progress on each priority, which the advisor can then use to establish an agenda.
After being fed into Salesforce, the information can be made available as a ‘Client Guidebook,’ a point-in-time snapshot of a client relationship that can be offered to the client digitally through advisor-branded online portals and applications and can be printed for review or archiving.
Advisors can view all of their client relationships and assets on a unified dashboard that allows them to drill down into the individual clients and metrics.
“Our approach on the planning side of things embraced more open architecture than our previous tools,” Capelle says. “If advisors have done some planning with a client already, they might be wed to some of the tools they’re already using, so we’re really trying to integrate with some of the planning software already out there.”
FinLife Partners comes with a cloud-based office solution that enables scale and efficiency through automation, which allows firms to concentrate on high-value work, Capelle says.
The digital platform integrates custodian feeds, e-signature, open architecture financial planning software and data aggregation with investment platforms like Envestnet Yodlee and Morningstar ByAllAccounts into a single sign-on environment.
“We have a team that looks at different pieces of financial technology and integrates the best of what they see,” Capelle says. “We’re taking their efforts and bundling them with our different services that are technology enabled. For independent advisors, this helps solve the challenge of selecting from the universe of technology providers, and then figuring out how the technology integrates with their processes.”
The tools, systems and infrastructure for FinLife Partners are ready for implementation, but according to Capelle, the firm has not settled on a pricing model — some combination of a flat cost for software implementation plus a portion of increased revenue is being considered.