EISI continues to be a leader among the top financial planning software vendors, reports Celent

EISI’s NaviPlan and Profiles software were again ranked in the top quartile among financial planning technology vendors in Celent’s ABCD Vendor View report.

Celent LLC, a research firm in Boston, recently compared 11 financial planning software vendors and examined their ability to meet advisors’ financial planning and technology needs. Their report provides a detailed analysis of each vendor’s advances in technology, breadth of functionality, customer base, and depth of client services. EISI’s dedication to providing financial planning and advice management software and services to all segments of the financial services market earned it top marks in each of these areas.

NaviPlan offers the best of the best

Of NaviPlan, the report states: “A number of features have been added to the latest versions of NaviPlan. Some of the major areas included usability improvements, scenario enhancements, plan review and progress report, retirement distribution enhancements, asset allocation enhancements, and improved Monte Carlo performance.” The report noted key benefits provided by NaviPlan including the easy-to-navigate user interface, wide range of reporting options, extensive data integration capabilities, powerful planning solutions, and scalability.

The report also provides the industry with a sneak preview of NaviPlan Select, EISI’s latest technical advancement. NaviPlan Select combines the best functionality of both NaviPlan Standard and NaviPlan Extended into one, powerful platform, which will make NaviPlan easier to maintain and provide advisors with more planning capabilities in a single tool. NaviPlan Select is scheduled for release in Q3 2009.

Profiles is praised for ease-of-use, workflow, flexibility

Profiles Forecaster and Profiles Professional are described as having a “wizard-like” workflow for their ability to guide advisors through a step-by-step series of input screens.

Says Isabella Fonseca, Celent senior analyst and author of the report: “Profiles clients praise the software’s ease of use, easy-to-understand, easy-to-present output, integration abilities, flexible architecture, and scalability… At all levels of planning, the program provides flexibility with regard to the level of detail of the inputs.”

EISI’s development plans for the Profiles line includes improvements to the retirement distribution planning features, What-if scenarios, Web performance, long-term care and survivor modules, and ability to integrate with CRM solutions.

Advice Fusion to revolutionize the advice-delivery process

News of Advice Fusion, EISI’s new wealth management platform for enterprise clients, is also announced. Writes Fonseca: “This new platform is a suite of applications and services aimed at enabling firms to better manage the advice delivery process and enhance relationships between advisors and their clients. It leverages the strengths of the NaviPlan and Profiles product lines for advisors and adds a new consumer facing application and tools for enterprise users to manage leads and monitor enterprise wide workflow activity.”

Access Celent’s ABCD Vendor View Report

Celent’s ABCD Vendor View shows the relative position of the individual software programs. In terms of client base, each separate contract with a client was considered as a single client. This means that a contract with a two-person planning shop is equivalent to a relationship with a major firm. To gather information for its report, Celent looked at help desks, training, online tutorials, and best practices conferences.

Members of Celent's Wealth Management research service can download the report. Access an abstract at: Celent.com.