In the fourth of a series of six animated phone calls, John Gay of Frisco Financial Planning in Frisco, Texas, explains why he likes using Moneyscope.
Just like last month’s call with Phil O’Connor, what you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Cashflow planning - bringing money to life
Richard presented at today’s IFP Financial Planning Day 2012 and we thought we’d share the slides for those who couldn’t make it or just want to take another look.
At the IFP Conference last October, Richard focussed on the role of cashflow forecasts in assessing risk. Building on this, Richard’s talk today illustrated the ways in which cashflow planning can be used to help bring clients’ financial situations to life; whether this is as part of detailed financial planning, for clients who are saving for a specific goal or in order to address the wider issue of risk.
With experience across a number of different cashflow forecasting tools, Richard also explored a number of different systems available to help advisers in this area. It goes without saying that Moneyscope was included but Richard also takes a look at the other tools available to meet varying adviser needs and preferences.
Note: The slides may take a moment or two to render. During that time you may spot the odd rogue number in slide titles before they appear correctly.
Meet Phil O’Connor of Whitewell Financial Planning based in Bolton, Lancashire. Phil features in the third of a series of six animated phone calls in which users of Moneyscope explain why they like using it.
Just like last month’s call with Philippa Gee, what you hear is what Phil said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Michael Kitces: Is our financial planning software improving our productivity or destroying it?
We really enjoyed reading this post by US financial planner, Michael Kitces, in which he asks whether increasingly complex financial planning software is:
- Consuming more of a financial adviser’s time than is desirable en route to the generation of a client’s financial plan?; and
- Deterring clients, who would like to work on the creation of their financial plan with their adviser, because the software appears so impenetrably complicated to the untrained eye?
Our own view is no secret because we’ve posed the question before about ‘Who is financial services technology for?’.
We’ve also talked about the irony that financial planning technology awards appear to measure the quality of technology by the number of features packed into it, rather than the usefulness or ease with which those features can be used (see: ‘We’re one year old today and are proud to have failed to win a single award’).
But we particularly like Michael’s point about software being designed so it’s easily used by clients and advisers alike.
We won’t pretend that we set out to design Moneyscope to be used by our users’ clients (because we didn’t) but it seems that Moneyscope users aren’t afraid to let their clients loose on Moneyscope on their laptop, iPad or tablet during meetings anyway - like this example or this one.
And, like Michael, we think that this can only be a good thing for both clients and advisers.
After all, the ability of software to enable clients and advisers to work collaboratively on lifetime cashflow forecasts must, surely, contribute to a greater sense of partnership and common purpose?
Just imagine if all financial planning software was designed so it was intuitively easy to use, regardless of whether you’re an adviser or a client working alongside an adviser - that’s bound to lead to software which aids adviser productivity isn’t it?
Late last year, we posted the first of six animations featuring Moneyscope users.
Here’s the second. This time we’ve recorded a call with Philippa Gee of Philippa Gee Wealth Management based in Church Stretton, Shropshire.
Just like the call with Gary Phillips, what you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Not so long ago, we asked for volunteers who would be willing speak to us - over the phone - and let us know what they like about Moneyscope.
So here’s Gary Phillips of Phillips Financial Planning in Newry, County Down; the first of six advice professionals who feature in six individual animations that we’ll occasionally publish over the next few weeks.
What you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
We let people like Gary know what we hoped to achieve by recording the call - to help people who don’t use Moneyscope understand why people who do use Moneyscope do - but, as far as the content of the call was concerned, well we left that up to Gary to decide.
We’d like to thank Gary for taking the time to talk to us, and for letting us use the audio from the call for this animation.
And, while we’re at it, we’d also like to thank Philippa Gee of Philippa Gee Wealth Management, John Gay of Frisco Financial Planning in Texas, USA, Paul Richardson of Concept Financial Planning, Phil O’Connor of Whitewell Financial Planning and Pete Matthew of Jacksons Financial Services - for kindly offering their time to contribute to the project.
By the way, if any of our featured advisers ever fancy a change in career direction, we’re certain that they could all cut it as broadcasters if they ever wanted to!
Citywire: How to pick the right cashflow modelling tool
Richard’s comments about the UK’s Institute of Financial Planning (IFP) chief, Nick Cann’s recent remarks about the use of cashflow modelling tools, have just been published at Citywire (click the headline above to see the story).
At the IFP’s annual conference a couple of weeks ago, Nick announced that, for a financial planning practice to achieve IFP accreditation, cashflow modelling would be a must. In some quarters, that was interpreted as a signal to sign-up to cashflow modelling software.
On the one hand, we obviously think it’s great that there’s a widespread debate about the role of cashflow modelling tools like Moneyscope; on the other hand, we think that Nick’s point is much more significant than software.
In fact, we think the point that Nick’s making is more to do with the principle driving the adoption of cashflow planning rather than a plea for everyone to sign up to a piece of software.
So, much as we’d love every financial adviser in the UK to suddenly sign up to Moneyscope, we actually think that Nick’s simply saying that it makes good sense, as part of a financial planning process, to provide clients with an indication of their likely cash position in the future.
But you don’t have to subscribe to software in order to routinely apply cashflow modelling in your practice. In fact, as Richard says in the Citywire article, ‘It’s perfectly possible to do a reasonable cashflow forecast if you know your way around Excel.’
Nothing beats a bit of bespoking in order to get software to do exactly what you want it to.
In fact, Moneyscope started life as an Excel sheet so that Richard could find a simple, swift and easy to use means of generating cashflow forecasts.
The availability of applications like Moneyscope simply means that you don’t have to build an Excel spreadsheet from scratch yourself and someone else keeps it bang up to date, that’s all.
Assessing risk and the role of cashflows
Post by Richard: I delivered a presentation at the IFP Conference yesterday which is featured in a story at Citywire/New Model Adviser.
In fact, there have been a couple of comments posted drawing attention to the apparent absence of assessing a client’s capacity for loss and risk, the other risk factors involved and how an adviser needs to find a way to simplify the explanation of complex scenarios to make them easier to understand.
The main thrust of the presentation was to show how cash flow planning can be a valuable part of the process to work out what return - and therefore what level of risk - a client needs to take to achieve their objectives if, indeed, they need to take any risk at all.
Delegates who attended the session that I led at the IFP will realise that I did address these issues during my presentation but, unlike me, journalists don’t have the luxury of covering every detail of a presentation because they just don’t have the space to do it.
So - as well as publishing the slidedeck that I presented yesterday - I thought this post might serve as a bit of an addendum to the Citywire report by making it clear that attitude to risk is different to capacity for loss, and that advisers need to consider both issues as part of a robust suitability process.
I hope you enjoy the slides.
We’re one year old today and are proud to have failed to win a single award
It’s Moneyscope’s first birthday today and, while an award would have been a nice gift, for the second time this year, we haven’t quite cut it as far as official gongs and plaudits are concerned.
In last night’s Aberdeen UK Platform Awards, we spectacularly failed to scoop a gong (although we were chuffed to bits to hear - in this morning’s article at IFA Online - that the judging panel said that Moneyscope ‘works beautifully’).
And in Money Marketing’s e-Excellence survey of Financial Planning Tools for investments earlier this year, Moneyscope only warranted a rating in three out of 45 possible categories of features.
So you’d be forgiven for thinking that we should be sulking in a corner (and we’ll admit that we did think about sulking momentarily) but - do you know what? - it turns out that we’re actually quite proud of ourselves. And the reason lies in the wisdom of the ‘works beautifully’ words of the Aberdeen UK Platform Awards’ judgement.
After all, the big idea when we set out was to create a refreshingly straightforward way for financial advice professionals to calculate client’s lifetime cash flow; an invaluable asset for great financial advice that is swift, simple and easy to use.
In other words, we wanted to see if we could establish a new standard for lifetime cash-flow analysis software, so we asked ourselves: “What’s the least we need to do to deliver the most useful forecasting tool for both advice professionals and their clients alike?”
So the e-Excellence survey proved that we’d stripped out at least 42 nice-to-have features that might otherwise take up MoneyScope users’ time.
And the Aberdeen UK Platform Awards judgement underlined the fact that Moneyscope’s stuck firmly to its principle of swift, simple and easy to use, and avoided the temptation to add more and more features.
So we’re taking our complete failure to win an award as a compliment.
We believe users want stuff to work beautifully and, if that means falling short of the criteria required to win an award or official stamp of approval, then that’s fine by us.
If, on the other hand, we fell short of the criteria that our users demand, we’d worry.
As it is, we may be gong-less but, on our first birthday, we’re happy to know that we work beautifully for Moneyscope users like these.
