Plug 'N Play

But while Money Tree may be gaining new fans, it plans to keep running the company in the same tight fashion as it has for the past 30 years, when Vitkauskas started writing spreadsheets in Lotus in the 1970s. After enough people clamored for it, Connor says, Vitkauskas started offering the program for sale around 1981. Still working as a CFP, Vitkauskas continues to believe in the value of personal service and flew to Chicago this fall to run a full-day training session for clients.

Connor likes to brag that Money Tree is almost as old as Microsoft, which was founded in 1975. However, bloating to Microsoft’s size is out of the question. “We’re at a good size,” says Connor. “Because we’re very small, we’re responsive. People ask us for changes, and we’ll try to do that. Not everything, of course, but if we can, we do it quickly. Once you get much bigger than us, the software gets lost in the business.”

SunGard: Retirement Income Scenarios

Catalano of Raymond James’s choice of SunGard for its simplicity is just what the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based firm had hoped when SunGard designed At Retirement, a financial planning module that fits into its Planning Station product, about four years ago. The company is continuing along the same trend with its upcoming release tagged RISE, for Retirement Income Simulation Expert.

A big trend a few years ago–and still continuing–has been adding retirement distribution tools into planning software. Nearly every program offers some sort of option on helping investors make decisions for the investments in the retirement years. There are Monte Carlo calculators, plus various distribution models, and goal planning tools.

SunGard has designed RISE to work with another new trend, or more accurately a product trying to limp back into financial planners’ and investors’ good graces–annuities.

RISE allows advisors to generate different income scenarios by plugging in the percentage of an investor’s capital they believe should be invested in annuities. But instead of running several reports, several different times, SunGard tried to simplify the process as much as possible for both the advisor and the client by running them all at once, in simple, easy to read, and more important, easy to compare reports. “It actually looks at the same data set of At Retirement and allows planners to set up to nine scenarios and run them side by side,” says Brent Grimm, head designer for Planning Station. “We think about it as visual simplification. They can see all nine scenarios at once either on the screen or in print.”

Although advisors have been chatting about annuities for some time, there is no doubt that many investors are still suspicious when they hear that word. “Five years ago if your planner said you should invest in annuities, you were told to run,” says Grimm.

SunGard hopes that’s not true anymore, and has made heavy investments of its own in developing RISE, trying to lure its Planning Station clients to try the software by making it as easy and attractive as possible. Because the program works on top of the At Retirement module, RISE just grabs data automatically from the module after the advisor plugs in the desired percentages. Decide that 24% of a client’s assets should be shifted to annuities, and with one click that scenario is generated, with the calculation–and the data entry–automated in the background.

Like other software firms, SunGard is also trying to give advisors’ clients more access to tools, and to make it easier for the planner and investor to interact. Still, SunGard gives ultimate control to its clients by letting the advisor decide whether to have the tools stored behind a log-in, or on a Web site front page where prospects can play with some simple calculators that might end up attracting them into a face-to-face meeting. “Interest in that has gone up three or four times in the last year,” says Troy Hirschi, product manager for Planning Station. “Our clients say their customers want to do more work on their own.”

But RISE is where SunGard is betting much of their future–and its clients seem to feel the same way, according to the company. “We put the mock-ups and specs in the hands of many of our customers,” says Hirschi. “So many asked to be involved in the development that we actually had to exclude some.”

Financial Profiles and EISI: Moving Forward

If an advisor is looking for a perceptive program, along with one that practically promises fewer clicks on the keyboard, the folks behind Financial Profiles believe they have the answer. Its newest release, version 8.0, will allow its clients to pick and choose between the modules they want to run–which kind of plan, for example, or the level of analysis they want to generate. Then, the program will ask only for the data needed for that report. “Today the advisor has to be smart enough to know which input screens they need to fill,” says Jim Hardeman, director of product management at Financial Profiles. “The new version will only present the necessary input screens.”

The Carlsbad, California-based team behind the upcoming release was very focused on streamlining the workflow for its clients. “We wanted them to be able to get in and out of the program easily,” says Hardeman.

Similar to its competitors, Financial Profiles also set out to give new bells and whistles to what it calls its asset disposition tool–how planners and investors model income and assets during the retirement years. Again, simplicity was critical when producing the scenarios, and percentages, on the likelihood the retiree could achieve his goals. “We wanted the output, of what the client is presenting to the end customer, to be easy,” says Hardeman.

Recently purchased in September, Financial Profiles, now a division of the Canadian financial software firm EISI, is undergoing some changes of its own, not to mention keeping on schedule with the upgrades and tweaks to its financial planning program. The group admits that it’s been asked by its new owner to make some adjustments to the upcoming release of version 8.0 of its Profiles + planning software, including trying to create a bridge of sorts that will allow clients of both Financial Profiles and EISI’s own financial planning program NaviPlan to share data.

EISI is also pushing development forward. An upgrade to its current 10.1 release is due in January, and its new version 11, now in testing, should be available at the end of the first quarter in 2007, says Linda Stracham, VP of marketing for NaviPlan.

Like MoneyGuidePro, NaviPlan version 11 is designed to hide much of the heavy lifting in the background. For an advisor, the platform does faster calculations, automatically producing new values as soon as a new number is entered into a field on the screen. Want to change a client’s asset allocation to bonds from 30% to 35%? An advisor switches the numbers, and new values are generated without even having to re-run the program.

The company also conducted a usability study last year and found its clients wanted changes to the screen design. They decided a face-lift was in order, playing with its opening screen sequence by providing a wizard to walk an advisor through the steps more quickly and easily. Users can also get files imported from other programs without having to convert them, and can choose to generate a report at any step of the program–instead of having to wait until the end. The key design decision was to give the advisor tools she needed, but let her make the final decisions in the end. “We tend to take the tack that we suggest alternatives and it’s up to the advisor to implement them,” says NaviPlan’s Stracham. “Financial planning is an art, not a science.”

Of course, the danger with technology is that with every new advancement a software firm is tempted to try and one up itself. Each step forward provides new features, which is good, but sometimes the improvements are just extra clutter that hides the main objective: Getting the program to do what a user wants it to do. In some places, extras are great. But in a software program meant to help an advisor craft a meaningful plan for his client on how to save for his golden years, anything that detracts from the main task can end up frustrating the planner and, even worse, confuse his client. As any advisor knows, presenting a blur of graphs, charts, and reams of papers to a client has the danger of producing glazed eyes rather than a signed contract and a long-term relationship.

Often the best design and the best options are the simplest ones. A client is going to make a choice to invest based on his trust in his advisor–not a series of bytes that whirl around in black box. “Certainly the software can pull money from different sources and it often has a strategy,” says financial planner Kim Jones. “But you, the planner, have to know what are your concerns, and the client’s concerns. You can’t just plug numbers into a computer. You also have to use your brain power.”