InvestCloud's Chief Strategy Officer bares thinking behind 80 new features added to NaviPlan
Earlier this month, InvestCloud – a global wealth tech platform company with implementations across more than 40 countries, accounting for over US$6 trillion in client assets – announced the massive investment it has made this year to NaviPlan, InvestCloud’s advanced financial planning engine in North America.
This year, the firm introduced 80 brand-new features to its digital planning tool. It also further integrated NaviPlan into the InvestCloud Digital Warehouse, thus allowing all client and financial data to be aggregated as advisors transition certain clients from goals-based plans to cashflow planning supported by personalized, AI-driven recommendations.
“Introducing 80 new features might seem excessive,” Will Bailey, InvestCloud’s Chief Strategy Officer who was also part of the founding team, told Wealth Professional. “But the beauty of NaviPlan is the depth to which it allows one to do financial planning.”
With the enhanced product offering, U.S. and Canadian clients will see extended functionality across the most challenging planning scenarios, including estates, trusts, equity compensation, and insurance planning. Among the key new features, the NaviPlan solution is now better able to handle probate fee calculations and estate surplus planning scenarios, along with upgrades to its premier tax planning software module.
“Our iProgram technology at InvestCloud has allowed us to map out over 7,000 unique user journeys,” Bailey says. “If you're an advisor or an asset manager, it’s crucial for you to have that unique experience in the relationship between yourself and your client. All of that comes together to allow us to support client growth, client retention, and operational efficiency.”
When InvestCloud acquired NaviPlan in 2021, the excitement centred around NaviPlan’s industry-leading capability to give end clients on the high-net-worth to ultra-high-net-worth band of the wealth spectrum to gain a better understanding of their financial picture with a cash flow planning focus. That made it a key product and crown jewel in InvestCloud’s Digital Planning offering, helping to support everyone across the wealth continuum.
“We've been really excited about being able to invest in NaviPlan, and make changes to NaviPlan to support both the US and Canadian markets,” Bailey says. “Enabling advisors to ... have more robust and easier-to-use financial planning features to support those high-net-worth and very high-net-worth individuals.”
According to Bailey, InvestCloud strategically decides on updates based on feedback from over 140,000 advisors that use its financial planning tools. The firm also draws on insights from its product team, which keeps a trained eye on the next generation of challenges to confront financial advisors, as well as ongoing developments in the wealth market.
”The reality is to handle the challenges that advisors have around financial planning, you have to be meticulous.” Bailey says. “What we want to do is to enable advisors to be able to use the right tools at the right time again to handle those incrementally more sophisticated needs as people move throughout the wealth continuum … we can seamlessly transition a user between a goals-based view of their plan, a cash flow-based view of their plan and move them back and forth based on the reality of where they are today.”
