SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Platform: Financial Planning at Scale

Working with a client to build a financial plan can help advisors understand more about their client’s values and increase the client’s confidence in the overall advisor relationship. Ultimately a plan can help kick-start better financial habits. So why wouldn’t every advisor want their clients to have a financial plan?

For most advisors, financial planning is complicated to perform at scale. First, high costs can be associated with the time required to generate plans one time, annually, or semi-annually. Each client has unique objectives that may require the expertise of third parties or other technology. Lastly, if clients are not managing their plans in real-time, keeping them on track with their advisor’s recommendations can be challenging.

We believe advisors bridge this complex environment into a cohesive strategy, and technology is needed to support advisors in this mission. And the right technology enables advisors to do the things that drive their business forward and improve the client experience.

As the SS&C Black Diamond® Wealth Platform team has worked to develop powerful financial planning tools, we focused on three core tenets to drive scale to an advisory firm’s planning operations:

• Centralized
  Clients must be able to easily access their financial plan data via the Client Experience portal. Clients will be much more willing to interact with information in a familiar setting they regularly use. Additionally, when a financial plan is centralized as a part of the client portal, it becomes much easier for clients to communicate life events and other meaningful news that could impact the plan’s success. Finally, more trust is built within the advisor-client relationship when the advisor is a central contributor to the decision-making process.
• Consistent
  Clients expect a professional and cohesive experience when they log into their portal. When financial planning data seamlessly integrates with performance data and communication tools, it creates buy-in and confidence in the plan. Additionally, it is easier to work with data across multiple providers when the information is normalized and consistently formatted. Within Black Diamond, we have created an exciting new way of extracting data from planning providers, transforming it into a normalized structure, and loading it into the platform that goes beyond a simple integration. This consistent database structure empowers us to continue to design innovative enhancements to financial planning.
• Comprehensive
  Just as important as it is to scale personalized financial planning to many clients and prospects, financial planning technology must scale the depth and breadth of unique solutions for a single client. For example, uncovering potential needs such as rebalancing, income replacement strategies in retirement, account opening, estate, and tax planning can all impact the following steps a client needs to take. Therefore, the fewer places a client needs to go to keep track of tasks, the better their client experience.

The SS&C Black Diamond team fully supports the financial planning lifecycle. Starting with RightCapital, a true two-way integrated partner, the platform will pull in key financial planning data and directly push account information back in a continuous loop. In addition, through our proprietary normalized integration process, this data is more connected to the communication and reporting workflows.

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