As a financial advisor, your main focus should be using your experience and knowledge of the financial industry to help your clients reach their financial and retirement goals.
By using the latest software solutions, you can more effectively deliver recommendations and advice, and provide customers with a more personalized experience.
There are so many different types of software to help you run your business that it’s easy to get lost in the options.
You’re doing this to optimize your processes so you can do better work. Yet at one point, sourcing out new tech turns into a distraction instead.
We’ll try to fish you out of the sea of confusion and back to solid ground using this list of must-have software for financial advisors.
Types of Software for Financial Advisors
The tools we mention in this article either create a better client experience, enhance your ability to reach your client’s financial goals, help you focus on doing your job, or offer a little bit of everything. Each type of software serves a different purpose and can be used to achieve different goals.
Here are seven types of software every advisor should use to enhance their financial services.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses manage customer data, automate and streamline client communication, track interactions and sales data, and create targeted marketing campaigns. CRM software helps you keep track of your client information and communications, as well as sales data.
This allows you to better understand your clients and build stronger client relationships. Additionally, CRM software provides you with valuable customer insights that can help you tailor your services to meet client needs and provide a more personalized experience.
There are many different CRM solutions available on the market. While your requirements will vary depending on the system you currently have, you’d generally want to find a CRM created specifically to support financial advisors.
Developed originally in 1986, Gorilla was the first CRM for financial advisors – ever. It’s most recent installation, Gorilla 5, is a user-friendly OS-independent CRM built by people who have decades of experience in marketing and growing financial advisory businesses. Having this kind of feedback during the production process turns Gorilla 5 into a platform that’s specifically designed with goals-based workflows to make your life easier. Find out what else Gorilla 5 offers (along with pricing) here.
Financial Planning Software
There’s a range of financial planning software programs you can pick from — and some might not have similar functions. For example, tools targeted for planning personal finances are generally simpler than those for planning corporate finances or wealth management.
To find a financial planning software that fits your needs, the first thing you need to do is determine what you hope to accomplish with the software and outline what kind of features you need to achieve that.
Your specialization also comes into play here – in other words, who are you marketing to will affect your software needs. Are you an advisor that targets 401(k) management for hospitals? Maybe you go after business owners that are 56+ years old, or you target women and how to be a financially independent female. Whatever you choose, what software you use may differ from others.
Do you need a financial planning tool that can help you during the planning process to build sophisticated financial plans and analyze portfolios? Do you need software that can generate retirement, estate, and education planning – all in one platform? Do you need a solution that can visualize financial plans so you can educate your clients?
Once you know your basic requirements and budget, you can begin to shop around.
Some of the best financial planning software options include Naviplan, Moneytree, RightCapital, MoneyGuidePro, and eMoney Advisor.
MoneyGuidePro from Envestnet is a sophisticated financial planning solution with a comprehensive set of tools. It offers advanced planning features such as holistic stress testing, an online fact finder, retirement planning tools, a client portal, and more. One feature that stands out in MoneyGuidePro is its Play Zone. It’s an interactive tool that allows clients to adjust plan specifics within their control and see how it affects their financial plan.
eMoney Advisor is a comprehensive financial planning software that allows advisors to create and manage integrated financial plans for their clients. It features a comprehensive toolset with integrations to robust third-party services to cover the gaps. There’s also a client portal where your clients can see their entire financial life 24/7.
Portfolio Management Software
With your client’s investments scattered across different savings accounts, investment products, and institutions, you’ll definitely need some help managing your clients’ portfolios.
Portfolio management software helps you tie all the updates together and simplify the investment management process. With this type of software, you can easily manage multiple portfolios at the same time, compare investments and portfolios, and conduct portfolio analysis.
A popular portfolio management software is Orion Portfolio Management. This software helps advisors track and monitor their clients’ portfolios, analyze investments, and understand their clients’ risk tolerances. Orion also offers features like portfolio rebalancing and tax loss harvesting, which can help advisors increase their clients’ returns.
Trading/Rebalancing Software
Trading and rebalancing software is essential for financial advisors who want to stay on top of the ever-changing markets — especially if you also offer investment management. This type of software helps advisors keep their clients’ portfolios properly balanced, which is crucial for achieving long-term investment success.
When choosing trading and rebalancing software, there are a few key features to look for:
- Robust portfolio analysis tools so you can easily identify any imbalances in your clients’ portfolios.
- Automation options for the rebalancing process to save time and ensure that your portfolios are always properly aligned with your investment goals.
Investment Analytics Software
Investment analytics software is essential to make sure that you get comprehensive information on securities and other investments. Beyond feeding you market information, investment analytics solutions help you decide if your recommendations align with your client’s goals and values.
A popular option for this type of software is Morningstar. Morningstar helps you find in-depth data across 600,000+ investment offerings. It has a suite of packages dedicated to researching, analyzing, and recommending investment products for your clients. Some of their features include real-time investment data so you can make decisions based on the most recent information.
Risk Tolerance Software
There are many software programs available that can help financial advisors determine an investor’s risk tolerance without bias.
These programs typically use a questionnaire to gather information about the investor’s goals, time horizon, and attitude toward risk. The software then uses this information to generate a risk profile for the investor. Using this risk profile, you can create a portfolio that’s appropriate to their risk appetite.
A popular program for risk tolerance is Riskalyze. Instead of a risk profile, Riskalyze uses a questionnaire to quantify the risk to a single number. This helps you explain your client’s risk tolerance and reframe the conversation to focus on how you can help clients make smart investments. A few other features in Riskalyze that help you with this include stress tests, retirement maps, and account monitoring.
Document Management Software
Document management software helps financial advisors store, manage, and retrieve documents. It can improve document security and access control, enable version control, track changes, and make it easy to share documents with clients and colleagues.
Going paperless with document management software helps you access your client’s documents wherever you are. It also reduces the risk of losing important client documents.
There are a lot of document management software out there, such as DocuWare and eFileCabinet.
Bill Good Marketing is Ready to Help
These seven types of software platforms are the tools most financial advisors use to simplify their processes.
If you need more help organizing your processes and integrating them into your current tech stack, take advantage of Bill Good Marketing’s coaching program. We’ll make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
We take the guesswork out of growth. Get a custom-built strategy and implement these best practices to expand your business. Give us a call at 888-495-7303 to get started.
