PlanPlus Global Blog

Shawn Brayman, director of financial planning methodology, Morningstar. I know not everyone would rate academic conferences as one of their must do activities, but as 2020 winds to a close, I am thrilled with the role Morningstar played in continuing traditional thought leadership and picking up the mantel from PlanPlus/FinaMetrica. Evidence-based solutions driven by great research is the common cultural thread that was the foundation of becoming part of the Morningstar family this year.

Sarah Newcomb, director of behavioral sciences, Morningstar. Uncertainty is everywhere, and uncertainty is stressful. In fact, human experiments have repeatedly shown that people tend to prefer even physical pain to the psychological stress of uncertainty. Financial uncertainty is especially stressful because our money is tied to our hopes, dreams, and sense of safety.

Morningstar’s Christine Benz, director of personal finance, and Jeff Ptak, head of manager research, interviewed Tim Mauer, the director of advisor development for Buckingham Wealth Partners, for Morningstar podcast, The Long View. Mauer coauthored The Ultimate Financial Plan: Balancing Your Money and Your Life with Jim Stovall, and he also wrote Simple Money: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Finance. He’s a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council and is also a regular contributor to CNBC, Forbes, and Time/Money.

Jason Stipp, director of product management, financial planning, Morningstar. We’re happy to announce that the FinaMetrica 10-question RTQ, response readout, and Suitability Score is now available in Morningstar’s Investment Planning Tool (IPT) for Advisor Workstation as well as through our Enterprise Components channel for integration to third-party platforms.

Morningstar’s annual Investment Conference will take place as a digital event beginning Sept. 16–17, 2020. The event will be an immersive online experience that features all the key benefits you love about our flagship industry conference, bringing together industry leaders and investing experts to discuss the latest developments and share new perspectives on the market.

Gain the tools you need to help guide your clients and facilitate the investment strategy selection process for Morningstar^® Managed Portfolios^TM by matching clients’ risk tolerance score to a fund. In doing so, you’ll be able to make an equal comparison between risk tolerance and investment risk. The FinaMetrica three factor risk profiling methodology is a six step process:

It’s industry consensus that the landscape of financial advice is evolving—specifically, the role of the advisor in the eyes of the investor.

In order to drill into what these changes are, and how advisors should prepare in response to them, we interviewed members of Morningstar’s Advisory Board—a group of financial professionals who help set the future product direction for the financial advisory segment by representing the voice of our clients, their peers, and industry leaders. Largely, they agreed that investor expectations for financial professionals have increased in intensity.

At Morningstar behavioral finance isn’t just a buzz word, it’s baked into our software to help empower investor success. Our dedicated behavioral science team leverages research and psychology to improve the user experience of our software and deliver better outcomes for its users.

In fact, Ryan Murphy, Samantha Lamas, and Ray Sin just won the 2020 Montgomery-Warschauer Award for their paper “Goals-Based Financial Planning: How Simple Lists Can Overcome Cognitive Blind Spots,” the highest honor awarded by the Journal of Financial Planning. The research found that asking people to self-report their investing goals is insufficient, with about 26 percent changing their top goal when prompted with a menu of other goals, and 73 percent changed one or more of their top three! These insights in the hands of advisors help prepare them to have more productive financial planning conversations with clients.

Steve Wendel, head of behavioral science for Morningstar, shares key highlights on Goals-Based Financial Planning: How Simple Lists Can Overcome Cognitive Blind Spots:

Professional Accountant and Institutional Sales Head transitions to Investment Advisor and Portfolio Manager to help individual investors protect and grow their wealth. “My business and financial background has allowed me to offer a key differentiator to my clients – I engage with them at a deeper, more personal level and research and analyze their portfolios…

Professional financial advisors understand the importance of aligning clients’ risk tolerance with their long-term objectives. Unfortunately, the trade-off is too often an unacceptable compromise — reduce the objectives to stay within a client’s risk tolerance range or have the client take on a level of risk that is beyond their comfort level in an effort…