Seven-step financial planning process: Steps 5–6

The CFP® board has outlined a seven-step financial planning process to help guide CFP certificates through the planning process with their clients and prospects. In this series of four blogs, I am going to show you how Advisor360°'s platform helps facilitate this process by providing efficiency and an enhanced client experience.

Last week, we discussed how to select, analyze, and develop your client’s goals. This week, I will discuss how Advisor360°’s Goals and Model Management features will be a tremendous help with steps five and six, presenting and implementing your client’s financial goals.

Step 5: Presenting the financial planning recommendation

The fifth step is presenting your financial planning recommendations. At this point, we have gathered the financial plan data, we have analyzed their goals, and we have a success ratio. We have shown them what it may look like if they rebalance their assets and how that affects their total situation. Now we want to go to the next phase, which is offering an investment recommendation and implementation workflow. You do this by presenting two reports:

1. Goals report

   This will highlight all the financial planning assumptions, the goals success rate and hypothetical cash flow, and net worth charts and tables. This also includes a high-level implementation plan showing any recommended asset allocation changes.

   
2. Proposal report

   The Proposal tool isolates the asset allocation and investment recommendation portion of the plan. This allows users to look at one or many investment accounts and model different asset allocation strategies with a household allocation roll-up. The Proposal tool also offers back testing of your current and proposed portfolios.

This is typically part of an implementation workflow and can be used with both new and existing clients. This may be a tool you revisit as a user makes contributions without running a new financial plan.

Step 6: Implementing the financial planning process

The sixth step is where we implement the financial planning process that we have created with our client using our new Digital Onboarding and Model Management tools.

1. Digital Onboarding

   Digital Onboarding is a newly released capability that lets advisors open an account in one online experience. It is completely integrated with our contact management system and model management system, allowing users to seamlessly open accounts in a digital experience and deliver the necessary paperwork for e-Signatures. Workflows and Advisor360° alerts can help monitor this process and schedule implementation.

   
2. Model Management

   Once a strategy has been implemented, our Model Management capability helps our advisors and their staff manage portfolios—whether that is client-specific rules such as security restrictions or monitoring all portfolios for asset allocation drifts.

This week, we discussed how Advisor360° is critical in helping you present and implement your client’s financial goals. Next week, it’s onto step seven: monitoring progress and updating the plan.

Patrick Noonan is Product Manager for Wealth Management and Insurance. Backed by his years of experience as a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), Patrick defines and oversees product features that improve broker-dealer, advisor, and investor performance and efficiencies in the banking, investment, and insurance industries.