The Future of Advice, According to eMoney

“Delivering strong investment returns obviously still matters, but that’s just one part of what financial advisors can do for their clients today,” McKenna said.

Technology providers, the eMoney execs emphasized, can both foster and benefit from the shift to fee-based planning. This will require steady innovation and investment focused on what clients say they want from a planning platform.

Here are highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

THINKADVISOR: How is eMoney navigating this moment of increased market volatility and economic uncertainty stemming from tariffs, inflation and interest rates? Is there much of a direct effect, or is it more of a question of supporting clients?

SUSAN MCKENNA: There’s no question that 2025 has been a highly dynamic time for the financial planning industry and the advisors that we serve and support through our platform.

In a way, and I imagine you’ve heard the same thing from advisors themselves, moments of heightened uncertainty like this one only elevate the demand for tailored and responsive advice. The same is true when you look at the tax policy debate that has unfolded in Washington.

All of these trends and events raise new questions for advisors and their clients, so we try to do whatever we can to support them. We also work very hard to make sure our platform keeps up.

MATTHEW SCHULTE: I would say that’s spot on. Take the big tax policy debate. As you can imagine, we have watched the ongoing developments in Washington very closely, because we need to be able to update our platform in a very responsive manner. We need to be ready to update our simulations, to accommodate all those things that change with a big development in Washington like the tax legislation.

In that sense, it’s a wonderful thing to be a web-based platform. We can respond to the new law and make all the necessary updates and changes very quickly.

It’s funny, because I just celebrated my 25th anniversary at eMoney. Back when I first joined, the world worked a lot differently. Yes, we were always a tech-based platform, but to make updates like this you had to literally encode and send hard-copy discs to people, and they had to manually upload the data in order to update their planning platform.

We’ve clearly come a long way.

THINKADVISOR: Can you tell us about some of the key platform enhancements eMoney has rolled out since we last spoke in July of 2024, when the firm was coming off a record year of growth and client acquisition?

SUSAN MCKENNA: Yeah, there’s been a lot that I could point to, but one really exciting thing was the rollout of the premium client portal back in April. It’s essentially an enhanced version of eMoney’s longstanding client portal, which allows clients to view their finances in one place, aggregate accounts and securely store documents.

The thinking behind the enhanced portal is to deliver a more interactive and personalized approach. We do that, for example, through custom-tailored home screens for advisors’ clients that highlight the data that is most important to their approach and configured to their preferences. The advisor feedback has been great so far.

They also really like the new mobile app we’ve rolled out as part of the portal enhancement. It’s got an updated planning interface, along with features such as support for biometric verification and customizable notifications. Overall, the goal is to give advisors a way to build and support smarter, more data-driven financial guidance at scale.

THINKADVISOR: Two other recent headlines from ThinkAdvisor.com covered the new integrations with Wealth.com and LPL. Can you talk us through how deals like that come to be?

MATTHEW SCHULTE: Sure, to start with, I would highlight the fact that we’ve had a close working relationship with LPL for 15 years now. We’ve always been a vendor in their ecosystem.

That presence was important, because they recently approached us and explained that they were looking to sunset an internal planning tool. They wanted to know, could you guys help us replace that?

It turns out the answer was a clear yes, because the WealthVision Essentials platform is designed to enhance advisors’ services across both the independent and institutional channels.

With Wealth.com, the story is really about establishing a new integration with eMoney that aims to help advisors deliver more accurate and timely legacy planning services to their clients. Upon launch, advisors will be able to eliminate manual data entry and ensure real-time synchronization of financial data across both platforms.

We’re very excited about both of these initiatives and the opportunity to do more stuff like this in the future. Susan, what would you add?

SUSAN MCKENNA: I would echo all of that, but to me it’s also a reflection of the advisor industry at large grappling with the one big technology question: Do we build something or do we outsource it and partner?

It’s a real balancing act, and we here at eMoney deal with the same question ourselves in terms of developing our platform to meet the evolving needs and expectations of our advisor clients.

For us, we’ve really based our value proposition on sophisticated financial planning, but there are also peripheral areas where other firms have really plated their flag in the ground, so to speak. Every time we consider a new service area to invest in, we’re going through the exercise of asking some key questions. The obvious first question is, is this something that we think would be additive to users of eMoney?

If the answer is yes, you move to the next step. Should we build this ourselves, or is there already a best-of-breed solution in an area that we don’t think we’re personally going to be able to match with a reasonable amount of time and investment. In some cases, the answer is that we should do it internally, while in other cases we should probably partner.

It’s been a real benefit to the industry that most providers — including ourselves — are focused on building their tools and services in a way that allows third parties to plug into our APIs in a truly seamless way.

THINKADVISOR: Would you add anything to that, Matt?

MATTHEW SCHULTE: I think Susan is spot on, and it’s cool to reflect on how far the industry has come in my 25 years at eMoney. In the last decade-plus, we’ve made a concerted effort and invested substantial resources into our technology modernization efforts, including building more advanced APIs and making sure our platform can speak to the outside world.

The goal has been multifaceted. First of all, we are striving to “componentize” as much of our platform as we can. So today, while we can certainly deliver that end-to-end financial planning desktop experience to an advisor, we can also break apart our capabilities and deliver different pieces to their organizations — whatever they might need to complement their internal tools and resources.

If you reflect back on, say, the early days of eMoney back around 2000, it was hard to even envision that type of a capability. Back then, it was new and innovative to just have a technology-based platform in itself. Today, the ability to instantly share data back and forth, and the ability to componentize pieces of our platform, makes for a really powerful capability.

Pictured: Susan McKenna and Matthew Schulte