Be informed by the latest news, insights and opinions on things that matter to the financial advice industry.
Today, Morningstar, a global firm specialising in independent investment research, information and technology, announced plans to acquire PlanPlus Global. This includes our full product suite, which is comprised of FinaMetrica Profiler, a global risk-profiling tool renowned around the world, our financial planning solution ProPlanner (formerly Planit) and ProTracker, our powerful portfolio monitoring tool. PlanPlus Global…
PlanPlus Global today announces the addition of a new module – ProTracker™ – to its SuitabilityPro™ suite of products. ProTracker is a powerful portfolio monitoring tool that continuously ensures advisors’ clients remain suitably invested over time. It will help advisory firms ensure there are robust processes in place around the provision of ongoing advice. It…
FinaMetrica has been awarded the Best Risk-Profiling Service for Advisers in the 2020 Professional Adviser Awards. Thank you to our employees for your hard work, and also to all our clients for trusting in our product. Read more here
PlanPlus Global today announces the launch of its new goal-based planning module, ProPlanner – further enhancing its powerful financial advice software solution, SuitabilityPro™. The new suite of SuitabilityPro products enable a fully integrated suitability advice process that connects the world’s most academically valid risk profiling solution with multi-award-winning financial planning software and a new, soon-to-be-released…
There are numerous factors that every advisor must consider when objectively assessing a client’s risk tolerance. And if the concept of risk wasn’t already complex enough (as it considers a multitude of facets, including tolerance, capacity, composure, perception, and literacy), the variety of available tools to measure risk tolerance – from written questionnaires to various…
Gain the tools you need to help guide your clients and facilitate the investment strategy selection process for Morningstar® Managed PortfoliosTM 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…
Although investment challenges like those experienced in 2008 and early 2009 can result in consumers losing substantial amounts of their investment capital for a time, many consumers lost their homes in the same period as a result of questionable lending practices or a failure by consumers to understand and plan their borrowing decisions.
New generation models of assessing a client’s profile for investment purposes differentiates among factors like the client’s tolerance for risk which is a psychological trait, the client’s required risk which is a how much risk a client might be required to take to achieve desired goals, and risk capacity which is how much risk the client can afford to take.
The current evolution of “suitability assessment” of investment portfolios has differentiated between risk tolerance, a psychological construct; risk required, a financial construct of the return required to achieve specified goals; and risk capacity, the risk that the investor can afford in the event of a downturn. Application is usually for advisors to recommend more conservative portfolios in the event that the risk capacity of the investor is deemed to be less than the risk tolerance and risk required.
There is a strong desire in the financial services sector to be able to address the uncertainty of a projection or forecast for a client’s financial plan based on two primary factors – mortality risk and rate of return risk. The primary methodology for handling uncertainty has been and remains Monte Caro Simulations for investment returns and randomization of mortality assumptions based on mortality tables. This paper hypothesizes that it is possible to construct an algorithmic replacement to Monte Carlo Simulations
The Common Rule (CR) for order of withdrawal of investment accounts prescribes deferring tax as long as possible. Research has shown that it is possible, in some cases, to reduce taxes and maximize terminal wealth by withdrawing tax deferred funds earlier at lower tax rates, rather than realizing this taxable income at later times and at higher marginal tax rates. This approach is often referred to as ‘topping up to band’ (1B).
Oct 8 – Exceptional Advisor – Toronto, Ontario, CA Oct 15 to 16 – AFS Annual Meeting – Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Oct 15 to 18 – FPA Pre-Conference Events – Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Oct 17 – NextGen Conference – Manchester, UK Oct 17 – Private Client Event Oct 18 – Private Client Event Oct 24…
Sep 8 to 11 – Private Client Event – St. Louis, USA Sep 11 to 13 – Bob Veres Conference – Omni Nashville Hotel, Nashville, USA Exhibitor and Speaker – Matt Glasgow and Shawn Brayman will attend Sep 11 from 1:30 to 2:30pm – Bob Veres – Shawn Brayman Presentation – From Tolerance to Solution:…
Jun 2 to 5 – CIFPs Annual Conference 2019 – Vancouver, British Columbia, CA PlanPlus is a proud sponsor of the CIFPs Annual Conference 2019 to be held at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, BC., Be sure to attend Shawn Brayman’s presentation From Tolerance to Solution: Latest Research and Practical Examples on Wednesday, June 5th…
