Tool uses metrics such as net income, living costs, investments, and insurance coverage to assess financial health
Equisoft has launched a new benchmarking tool that offers insurance and wealth-management industry professionals an alternative way to measure their clients’ relative financial health.
Using Equisoft’s research into big data and artificial intelligence, the tool promises to let investors easily compare their financial well-being against a group of their peers, which is determined based on similarities in geography, age, gender, marital status, and income.
Once a peer group is established, the tool uses metrics such as net income; cost of living; debt levels; investments in various account types; and protection through life, disability, and critical illness coverage. From there, it generates an overall risk score and general recommendations for the investor and their financial advisor to discuss in more detail.
“While it remains critical to assess whether an investor is mathematically on the right track in terms of their savings and protection needs, we thought it would be valuable to offer a complementary approach to gauging financial well-being,” said Jonathan Georges, vice president, Wealth Management Solutions at Equisoft.
The new benchmarking application draws from volumes of data amassed by Equisoft, including data collected through the company’s other software applications with clients’ consent, as well as anonymized and aggregated data from third-party sources. With filters based on advanced mathematical models, the application sorts and classifies the information to perform high-quality statistical calculations.
According to François Levasseur, Equisoft’s senior vice president for Canada, the tool also complements Equisoft/plan, the firm’s financial planning software, as well as its portfolio design and analytics software Equisoft/analyze.
“It helps educate investors as it relates to their financial situation and hopefully gets them more engaged in discussion with their financial advisor,” Levasseur said. “From the financial advisor's perspective, the tool can help speed up the discovery process and help them uncover more client needs.”
A Canadian version of the publicly available benchmarking tool can be accessed at myfinancialbenchmark.com.
