Today's Decisions Impact Tomorrow's Finances: Let Data And Reporting Tell The Story

In many ways, an advisor is a client’s bridge to their financial future. Using the tools at your disposal, you aggregate all parts of your client’s financial life and show them what is in store for them if nothing changes.

For many clients, the information generated during the financial planning process is enough to change behaviors, build trust with their advisor, and increase confidence that they are doing the right things financially. The decisions made in the short term should support the plan you are developing with your clients when they view everything from a holistic perspective. For this plan to feel truly cohesive, the connection of past performance, current investment allocation, and communication tools must be tightly coupled. SS&C’s Black Diamond® Wealth Platform focuses on bringing the topic of financial planning front and center within the platform to help strengthen the advisor-investor dialogue and let you all look to the future.

As Shuang Chen, Co-Founder and CEO at RightCapital, said in a recent press release, “Financial planning drives deeper conversations with clients around important life goals. Being able to show financial plan details right from the Black Diamond Client Portal and mobile app means even more opportunities to collaborate with and strengthen client relationships." In addition, the connection to clients in the portal adds valuable context to the strategy advisors are recommending. Through this year and beyond, the planning topic will grow within the Black Diamond platform to be a prominent fixture in the Client View application and PDF Reports.

While additional reporting features help drive the conversation, the product development team recognizes that it is only a part of the picture. Each financial plan is custom for the unique circumstances that clients are facing, and the tools used to highlight that personalization must be up to the task. Building on Black Diamond’s existing framework of data feeds, this year, the team will focus on expanding the types of accounts and assets we cover from a data perspective, allowing advisors to represent their client’s futures like never before.

It is not a new problem for advisors to manage multiple avenues of investments and insurance products. Historically, this work had to be completed and tracked in different systems with little to no consistency across the platforms. However, for firms looking to scale their planning departments, the challenge becomes, “How do we continue to hire enough people to aggregate this information into an easy–to-understand client deliverable?”  While this manual process can work for a short time, technology needs to bridge these disparate systems and standardize the inflow of data.

The goal of planning is to show clients how the decisions they make today can impact their financial lives in the future. Through a combination of data aggregation and purposeful reporting, the Black Diamond platform empowers advisors to clearly tell the story of where their clients are going.

To learn how the SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Platform can support your advisory firm, request your personal demo, call 1-800-727-0605, or email info@advent.com.