This opened the door for MoneyGuide, launched by PIEtech, also in 2000, to provide technology focused entirely on goals, making it more accessible to advisers targeting individuals who aren’t ultra-wealthy. Walters admits that it wasn’t good at goals-based planning. I decided I would build it.” Goals-based planningĮMoney initially focused on cash flow analysis for the high end of the market, and Mr. “I looked for a solution and I couldn’t find it. Walters remembered thinking as he came up with eMoney. “How could I provide them with a view of all of their assets and their information, updating every day?” Mr. His approach helped eMoney become the centerpiece of many advisers’ technology ecosystems. He envisioned a tech platform built around planning that would include things like a digital document vault, a client portal and account aggregation. Walters believed the technology should make financial planning an interactive, collaborative experience for advisers and clients. The plans produced were static, paper-bound reports. Before 2000, financial planning software stood alone rather than being int- egrated with the rest of an adviser’s technology, making planning difficult to scale, Mr. “Planning has been an evolutionary trend in financial service, but the recent confluence of macro trends has really accelerated it to almost revolutionary,” Mr. The shift to AUM-based fees, along with aging client, new regulations and the commoditization of investment advice over the past 20 years have helped push planning into the mainstream. Until recently, it was also labor-intensive, and only worth the trouble for the wealthiest investors. In the past, financial planning was often little more than a tactic that brokers employed to gain assets. “I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that every consumer financial services sector is looking into financial planning, from banking all the way to insurance firms.” Planning goes mainstream “During these market changes, if you can prove that certain goals they have stay unaffected … you can stop them from making irrational decisions,” said Ugur Hamaloglu, partner at Ernst & Young. Firms see planning as a way to build relationships with new, next-gen clients and increase the loyalty of current clients before the next crash. Making financial planning more accessible creates opportunity beyond the traditional wealth management industry. “We’ve talked about moving towards planning, but this is the year there’s really an effort to push the market.” It’s the software that can sit across all of those wings,” said Dennis Gallant, senior analyst at Aite Group. “Banking, insurance and wealth management all intersect, and planning is the glue that ties them together. “You want employees who come to work, they feel engaged not only in the work itself … but having fun at work is one of our values.” He believes it’s all necessary to foster the innovative spirit many feared would be crushed under the bureaucracy of a $2.4 trillion asset manager. This is more than window dressing to Ed O’Brien, eMoney’s CEO, a Fidelity veteran who succeeded Mr. Walters, less than a year after inking the deal with Fidelity.ĮMoney’s headquarters in Radnor, Pa., is far more Silicon Valley than Boston, with free snacks, Segways, video games and Patagonia sweater vests instead of suits and ties. eMoney is even prouder of how it has maintained the culture of a technology startup, despite the sudden departure of its charismatic founder, Mr. Its aggregation engine, a critical ingredient in the company’s success, has pulled together 13.7 million accounts and $2.3 trillion in assets. Since then, eMoney has produced 2.5 million financial plans and 2.1 million client portals. The deal was a sign for many that traditional institutions finally saw digital, planning-led financial advice as the wave of the future. Fidelity Investments acquired eMoney in 2015 for $250 million, a blockbuster purchase that shocked the industry - and not just because of its price tag. EMoney, which began as an idea of Edmond Walters, a former financial adviser, is now one of the largest, most successful companies in adviser-facing fintech.
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