How can financial advisors leverage technology to both engage clients and ease their own workload? Docupace acquired PreciseFP in September 2021 to empower advisors with innovative client-facing data gathering and best-in-class engagement suite. Docupace Chief Marketing Officer Ryan George discusses the power of these tools with Don Whalen, CFP®, President and co-founder of PreciseFP. Here are the highlights of their conversation.
Fact Finding Made Easy
Fifteen years ago, Whalen and co-founder Sebastian Skwarek started PreciseFP to improve fact finding for financial advisors. “At the time we were sending out paper-based questionnaires,” Whalen says, “and the client would begrudgingly get us that document back, and sometimes it was legible, sometimes not, but we would take that document and we would edit, put it into our CRM manually, manually type it into our financial planning tool, then we would scan the document, and then we would walk it over to our shredder and shred it. It was a terrible experience… and it was a terrible experience for our clients.”
Whalen points out that most advisors don’t focus on client-facing tools to improve their own productivity — but that’s exactly what PreciseFP’s FactFinder does. In addition to gathering client data in a smooth and customizable interface, it also allows advisors to “put their best foot forward,” Whalen says. “I would argue it’s somewhat offensive to send a generic questionnaire to a recent college graduate, and send that same questionnaire to a retired couple. The needs are very different.”
Tailoring the intake questionnaire to individual client needs allows the advisor to make the experience a positive one for the client, instead of a chore that demands completion. “We like to say your client does your data entry for you,” Whalen jokes.
Easily Engage More Prospects and Clients
PreciseFP’s innovative engagement tools allow advisors to break through to clients and avoid generic emails and logistically impossible phone calls. “The experts say to stay relevant, we’re supposed to [touch base with] our clients twelve to eighteen times a year,” Whalen notes. PreciseFP’s template library makes it easy to reach out to clients at vital points throughout the year, such as during end-of-year tax planning.
Engagements can be minutely tailored to client needs, as well as showing advisors when the communication was opened and if the client has made progress on any forms. Additionally, information gathered by engagement tools will be automatically funneled into the client’s larger data profile. For instance, answers to a client’s risk tolerance questionnaire can be automatically integrated into the investment policy statement.
Advisors Can Endlessly Tailor Templates to Meet Specific Needs
The template library, as well as the extensive knowledge library and user wiki, offers advisors turnkey solutions for their client data and engagement needs. But for advisors who want to drill down further, PreciseFP allows almost infinite editing of data fields, template construction, email frequency, and hundreds of other features.
Additionally, PreciseFP integrates broadly with a number of other platforms. “We like to share data,” Whalen says. Custodians, APIs, and other third-party tools are easy to connect to PreciseFP for both advisors and clients. And, as Skwarek notes, that flow of information is bi-directional: “Precise FP is used to get that content, get that information that you need and fetch that to the tools that you use.”
Moving to paperless data solutions tracks with what most advisors say they want for their wealth management practices — as George points out, a 2020 Fidelity study found 65% of advisors wanted their work to be fully digital, and as paperless as possible. PreciseFP powers that transition with cutting-edge tech and seamless integration. “We really provided a million dollar platform at a fraction of the cost,” Skwarek says.
