BOZEMAN, MT SEPTEMBER 17, 2021
AdvicePay, the leading fee-payment-processing platform designed exclusively for financial advisors, announced today the launch of significant workflow automation enhancements which will empower enterprises to compliantly manage the entire fee-for-service financial planning engagement process in one unified platform, from start to finish.
For the home office of enterprise financial services firms, managing the many process components of the growing volume of fee-for-service planning has become a growing challenge of their back office and compliance efforts, typically involving separate systems and multiple spreadsheets. Furthermore, as the adoption of the fee-for-service financial planning models has been growing rapidly among their financial advisors, enterprises are finding new operational bottlenecks and manual workflows that are limiting their ability to scale fee-for-service planning.
Now, with the latest AdvicePay workflow platform enhancements, enterprise firms will be able to automate the entire lifecycle of fee-for-service financial planning engagements, including originating planning agreements, capturing digital signatures, matching agreements with invoices, reviewing financial plan deliverables, and processing client payments electronically, while ensuring that financial plans are actually delivered to clients for the fees that were paid – all in one comprehensive system from AdvicePay.
“AdvicePay began as a solution for advisors to automate billing and payment processing for hourly, subscription, and retainer models, in order to scalably and compliantly manage a growing volume of financial planning fees while avoiding the manual workflows created by paper checks,” said Michael Kitces, veteran financial advisor and co-founder of AdvicePay. “Now, with the continued evolution and increasingly-wide-scale adoption of fee-for-service planning, enterprise firms have been looking to AdvicePay to combine all of their disparate compliance and operational aspects inherent in fee-for-service financial planning models and bring them into one central system to better scale their growth – which we are now delighted to deliver with the enriched AdvicePay Enterprise platform.”
The latest enhancements to AdvicePay enable home office professionals to design and deploy their own. custom compliance and operational processes by inserting their rules and requirements into a powerful workflow engine. This delivers both transparency and comprehensive insight into the entire engagement of an advisor with the client. For example, some enterprises require that an agreement must be signed before issuing an invoice, while others require that financial plans are reviewed in advance before issuing invoices. Now, with the latest enterprise workflow enhancements in AdvicePay, these firms are able to customize these processes and automate them from one central, compliant system that can be accessed on-demand.
“We are thrilled to be able to automate more of the many operational and compliance aspects involved in fee-for-service financial planning,” said George Karris, Head of Strategy & Advisor Experience at Cetera Financial Group. “This allows us to better scale financial planning, enabling us to allocate even more time and resources to training, supporting, and promoting fee-for-service planning as an integral part of our advisors’ businesses.”
“The enterprise space has been a key market for AdvicePay, as we have specifically designed the platform to scale across thousands of advisors,” said Alan Moore, CEO and co-founder of AdvicePay. “With these last-mile enhancements, we now are uniquely positioned to help organizations customize their fee-for-service processes, bringing the key efficiencies and automation needed to help them successfully adapt to new business models.”