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Retirement Planning > Spending in Retirement > Income Planning

RetireUpPro Offers Real-Time Income Planning

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A new end-to-end retirement income planning platform called RetireUpPro has launched to help financial advisors in an increasingly regulated environment.

The RetireUp retirement planning software and RepPro, an automated form and application filing platform, partnered to create the new platform, which uses technology to expedite the operational workflow of an advisor’s business and puts the client in the driver’s seat of their own financial futures.

RetireUpPro originated as a response to the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule.

As the rule was approaching a year and a half ago, Jim Richards, director of the board at RetireUpPro and managing partner at Annexus Ventures, realized that Annexus “needed to acquire some resources or support some resources” to accelerate its development there.

“That was the sense of urgency. Everyone was panicking,” he told ThinkAdvisor. “As we saw broker-dealers and such investing millions of dollars, [we thought] why don’t we help fix the problem for a lot of distribution, not just one particular entity?”

So around that time, Annexus Ventures made strategic investments in RetireUp and RepPro with the vision to couple these technologies and create an integrated end-to-end retirement planning solution with an overarching compliance workflow.

Despite Labor’s fiduciary rule delay, Richards said he feels good that this platform has been built.

“The goal here, whether DOL happens or it doesn’t, it’s about helping someone grow their business efficiently in an increasingly regulatory environment,” Richards told ThinkAdvisor. “Whether that’s DOL or some other regulation that comes out from another regulatory body, it doesn’t matter. This entire platform was built to have full transparency and record every aspect of the advisor-client interaction.”

Every feature, from the visuals to the advanced data analytics, is aimed at making retirement planning understandable, accessible and personalized for the client. The goal of RetireUpPro is to put the clients on the same side of the table as the advisors so they can uncover challenges and work together in real time.

RetireUpPro’s real-time modeling software simplifies complex data and instantly illustrates a client’s most critical income risks – building a personalized income plan in 30 minutes or less. Together with the client, advisors can explore “what if” scenarios and test-drive various pre-modeled products using the client’s own portfolio data.

“There’s an approach today that is, well, based on all of these assumptions: based on X% return, based on you retiring at this age, based on all these assumptions, this is what might happen,” Richards explained. “When in reality, nothing ever works out that way. I might want to retire two years earlier, or I might have a life event that changes, and everyone has these circumstances. Right there with the client, we can explore those situations in real time.”

The new platform also allows for streamlined back-office workflow. Data integration, built-in logic, and a fully automated filing system expedite administrative tasks while reducing human error. RetireUpPro cuts the application process time down by auto-populating the an average of 60% of the necessary forms

For Patrick Kelly, who is CEO of RepPro and president of RetireUpPro, he’s seen firsthand how RetireUpPro can affect an advisor’s business because he’s an advisor who uses it.

Kelly is an advisor, along with his parents, at Kelly Capital Partners.

“The number one thing – before we started using RetireUp – we were spending at least three or four hours on plans, maybe more,” he told ThinkAdvisor. “We’d build out excel spreadsheets and hack it all together back-office by ourselves. And it really was getting to the point where … how could we actually take a firm that’s only three advisors and see more clients? We just don’t have the time to build out 40 financial plans in a month.”

Implementing RetireUp and RetireUpPro helped speed that process up.

“I can get through that thing in 15 minutes and have a full financial plan,” he said.


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