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Financial professionals rely on financial planning tools and software to work efficiently and accurately. Some of these tools are as old as the PC itself, while a new generation of financial services tools is also competing for your attention.
But with so many of these tools offering wide-ranging, overlapping feature sets, choosing the right mix of tools is a time-consuming process for investment advisors.
These seven financial advisor tools will give you an edge in meeting your clients’ needs for financial advising, portfolio management, and more. These tools will help you streamline workflows, unlock insights, and exceed your and your clients’ financial goals.
Types of tools financial advisors need
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Today’s financial advisors need more than just financial acumen or trading prowess. They also need planning software and other tools to help the business run more efficiently.
As you engage in portfolio and project financial management, you’ll need the right mix of tools to help you succeed. But there are way too many options out there for even the most tech-forward financial advisor to try them all. To narrow down your search, start by focusing on the functions that are most important to your firm.
We see four categories of tools for financial advisors: financial planning, market analysis, risk assessment, and project management.
Financial planning software
Financial planning software is practically a given today. While it’s possible to keep track of assets and investments using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, many financial advisors find this old-school approach limiting — especially when it comes to scaling their firm.
The right financial planning software gives you a central hub for planning, reporting, and basic analysis of products you’re considering adding to client portfolios.
When your business is running smoothly, you have more freedom to focus on strategic decisions and client acquisition, not details and busy work. Financial planning software is also ideal for keeping track of your own bottom line, factoring in your project consulting fees, operating expenses, and profits and losses from investments.
Market analysis
Financial markets are constantly moving. Sometimes a lack of speed or a missing insight is all it takes to miss out on the next substantial investing opportunity.
Market analysis software helps advisors make decisions more efficiently by consolidating market information, performing calculations and projections, and more.
Risk assessment
Risk assessment is key for building portfolios for customers that align with each customer’s relative risk tolerance and the approach to preserving their wealth. Risk analysis happens outside of software tools, of course, but modern tools (like those we’ll discuss a little later) can do a lot of the heavy lifting. These tools can also alert you to data-driven trends and warnings that would be difficult (and perhaps even impossible) to identify using manual methods.
Project management
An unsung hero and a behind-the-scenes workhorse, project management software helps employees of a firm manage the details that come with excellent client management. In both financial planning and accounting project management, the right software tool allows team members to plan, schedule, visualize, and run projects and manage clients more efficiently.
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Below, we’ve collected seven of the most powerful software tools for financial advisors, including options in each of these categories.
1. Teamwork.com - Project management
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Teamwork.com is a platform that’s perfect for handling the operational needs of your financial advising firm. With visually beautiful modules for resource management, project planning, client onboarding, time tracking, and much more, Teamwork.com helps you save time and money by making your operations more efficient.
To be clear, Teamwork.com isn’t where you head for financial advice or investment management. You won’t use Teamwork.com to invest clients’ money, purchase assets, or research the next hot commodity. You’ll just use it for nearly everything else operations-related, freeing up time, brainpower, and focus so you can excel at the financial components of your business.
You’ll also find integrations with the other operational tools you’re already using in your tech stack, giving you the ability to automate many aspects of your project management and task planning in one place.
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2. eMoney Advisor - Financial planning
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One of the more popular products in the space (with roughly 28% market share in 2023), eMoney Advisor is financial planning software and customer relationship management (CRM) software all in one.
The financial planning component helps you visualize, plan, project, and otherwise interact with current and future investment scenarios. And, because of how eMoney Advisor is built to be client-friendly, you can do all of this in conjunction with your clients, bringing them into the process building trust, and increasing long-term loyalty.
The eMoney client portal gives clients access to information about their investments and finances in a self-serve portal, which is a big win for your firm: with a little education, clients can answer many routine questions themselves, freeing your firm from mundane client management so you can focus on the real work of financial planning.
3. Money Guide Pro - Financial planning
Hundreds of thousands of financial advisors rely on Money Guide Pro (or its higher-level counterpart, Money Guide Elite) for their financial planning software needs. With tools for estate planning, risk management, net worth statements, custom report templates, among numerous other features, Money Guide Pro is the industry leader for a reason.
Like eMoney, Money Guide Pro includes an engaging client portal that allows clients all sorts of self-service tools. One standout is the Play Zone, a simulator or sandbox where clients can create all sorts of “what if” scenarios and see what the likely outcomes would be.
Advisors also get some great customizable options, so you can adjust which features and elements your clients can see.
4. Bloomberg Terminal - Market analysis
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Equal parts legacy and modern, Bloomberg Terminal changed the way professionals interacted with financial markets starting more than 40 years ago, way back in 1981. Bloomberg Terminal used to be a physical terminal, a dedicated piece of hardware. But as PCs evolved over the course of several decades, the physical terminal gave way to a software-based experience any advisor can run on their own device.
Bloomberg Terminal licenses come with a dedicated physical keyboard with color-coded keys for executing common actions.
If you think all of this sounds a little dated, well… you wouldn’t be wrong. Still, Terminal gives you access to an unparalleled number of markets, industries, companies, and securities. There are also powerful data and analytics tools here as well as collaboration tools. And with a network 350,000 strong, there are plenty of professionals to collaborate with!
Bloomberg Terminal also offers the ability to set up sophisticated multi-asset trades and orders, one of the reasons why many professionals continue relying on this tool
5. Morningstar Direct - Market analysis
This market analysis tool includes strategic tools for market research, product creation, positioning, marketing, and distribution. It’s built for asset and wealth managers and firms on a small to medium scale. Morningstar Direct boasts efficient data delivery in numerous formats, including raw code, and it gives you access to the contextual data you need in just about any market analysis scenario.
A unique analytics feature set allows you to glean the best from your own proprietary data and Morningstar’s vast data stores. Combined, these data points and the stories they tell can help you solidify your investment decisions and justify those decisions to clients or stakeholders.
6. Tolerisk - Risk assessment
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Fiduciaries take a different approach to risk assessment compared to other financial advisors, and so they need a different tool. Tolerisk is designed specifically for fiduciaries and bills itself as “the fiduciary standard in risk tolerance assessment.”
Risk assessment is complex, and most of the time, your clients don’t want to (or have the skills to) engage deeply with that complexity. Tolerisk simplifies these complexities into easy-to-understand visuals and summaries. It provides peace of mind and clarity to your clients without losing the complexities on the back end: you can still dive as deep as you like into your risk assessment data, saving time, improving outcomes, and ultimately growing revenue through better risk assessment.
7. Nitrogen - Risk assessment
Nitrogen is a risk assessment and client engagement platform trusted by many firms, large and small.
Their results speak for themselves: according to their own reporting, 75% of advisors who switched to Nitrogen grew their book of business by at least $1 million in the first 90 days. And average lifetime growth? A cool $23 million.
As far as the risk tolerance component goes, Nitrogen does this by bridging the gap between what you know (and the financial language you speak) and what your clients understand. Simple, user-friendly concepts like a risk number instill confidence and clarity with your clients, whether they’re looking for retirement income security or rebalancing an aggressive investment portfolio.
Nitrogen also includes other features many financial advisors rely on, including:
Proposals
Portfolio analytics
Retirement planning
Engagement
Lead generation
Firm controls and oversight
Get your analysts’ projects running on time and on budget with Teamwork.com
Financial planners and advising firms rely on a wide range of finance-oriented tools, including risk assessment, financial management, market analysis, and more.
In this regard, financial advising isn’t like most other industries. But underlying all the number-crunching, you’ll still find a mountain of administrative work. Clients need management and outreach, and projects have to get planned, scheduled, and executed.
That’s where Teamwork.com comes into play.
Teamwork.com is incredibly useful for helping you plan and organize your work to have more time and headroom to find the next hot stock.
With powerful project planning and task management tools, Teamwork.com enables you to plan and execute work of just about any kind. From ABM campaigns for client development to task tracking for day-to-day work to long-range planning, Teamwork.com is the platform you need.
See more of what Teamwork.com can do for your business now - get started now for free, view our comprehensive pricing plans, or book a demo today.
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