There are several financial planning software solutions available to financial planners in Australia. The main providers that are used by most financial planners give you a full suite of planning tools in one complete platform.
This mainly includes a client management system, modelling applications, and specific modules for each advice area like Investment, Super, and Risk Insurance, which are all linked together to allow full financial plans and strategies to be created for a client.
The industry norm now is to use complete software packages. However, what is recently taking shape is financial planners are realising the downsides of relying on one complete platform for their office. The major downside is every platform always has a weak point for their users. For instance, the modelling module in certain planner platforms may not suit the financial planner’s particular advice process, and what happens is planners use certain tools from one platform, and other tools from other platforms. Due to the fact that the platforms are not integrated with each other because they are competitors, this results in a great deal of data re-entering and operational inefficiencies for a financial practice. This is now common for many financial practices and raises the natural question of why can’t a financial planner choose their favourite software for each advice area, and have them integrated with each other so the planner does not need to re-enter data all the time? Imagine, a financial planner being able to choose their favourite client management tool, for example Salesforce, and having it integrated with their Risk Insurance modelling tool?
This is something Omnium (an expert in Risk Insurance technology for planners) is pioneering in the Australian market. We make our data for Risk Insurance modelling accessible by any other system. For example a financial planner can choose to use a CRM solution from Microsoft, or emerging CRMs like Zoho (zoho.com), and we can integrate our Risk Insurance modelling solution with the CRM, so the data from each software will transfer across without the financial planner having to re-enter data. What this creates is, the financial planner inserting the client’s information into their CRM during a fact find, and then launching a Risk Insurance illustration right from the CRM without having to manually replicate that data needed for the Risk Insurance illustration forms, as the data will travel into the insurance tool automatically. Also, it then allows the insurance illustration or SOA produced within Omnium, to be automatically sent back to the client record in the CRM.
We believe this is the future of financial planning software, and it is already taking shape as you can see with Omnium’s integration capabilities with CRMs. Even though the software market place is not fully integrated as it could be, it is heading towards that direction. With more financial planners demanding integration across different software the faster this will take place. The time will pass when the majority of financial planners have to rely on complete software platforms, as this isn’t in the best interests for all financial planners.
