Insights
Vasyl Soloshchuk
CEO at INSART
22 December 2020

Tony Leal: We learned to redefine what it means to be prepared

Tony Leal | MoneyGuide

Tony Leal is president of Envestnet MoneyGuide. Tony has been at Envestnet MoneyGuide since its inception in 1997. As president, Tony is focused on overall growth strategy, execution and operations. He also has technical and management responsibility for the development of the MoneyGuidePro® systems, enterprise customer satisfaction, and is the system architect for all integrations and customized versions of MoneyGuide products.

Since our interview for Fintech CTO Club last year, MoneyGuide has experienced a merger with Envestnet. Could you please share how this event impacted your development department? 

Tony Leal: Back in 2019 when we had the opportunity to partner with Envestnet to deliver financial wellness solutions to a broader client base and deepen industry integrations, we knew this was going to propel our business, ultimately providing financial wellness to a larger audience. Our development team’s work has expanded to not only deliver advanced-planning techniques within the software, but we have also integrated MoneyGuide’s technology into many of Envestnet’s other business and partner platforms.

Our digital tools and solutions today empower advisors to deliver more personal advice to clients. From these deeper conversations, advisors help clients create unique financial plans based on individual goals. 

Most people I meet, talk about the importance of a financial plan; however, it’s amazing how few people actually have a financial plan in place. In 2019, more than 2 million financial plans were created using MoneyGuide.  Being in the Envestnet ecosystem will allow us to reach even more advisors and end clients. I think we’ll see the numbers of financial plans grow as consumers turn to advisors for help managing their long-term goals and finances in today’s market.

 What technology does your planning analytics tool employ? 

Tony Leal: Our planning analytics tool is a collaboration between MoneyGuide and Envestnet Analytics. The tool enables advisors to easily filter and see overall client data broken down into key segments. The planning data empowers advisors to better demonstrate how critical the plans are to customer success. For example, an advisor can filter clients by age and look at which clients may be approaching retirement and identify smart moves for them to make within their retirement accounts. This new feature allows advisors to seamlessly uncover important information for their clients and ultimately allow them to make the right financial moves.

According to Anthony Kukulic, VP, Product & Engineering at Envestnet Analytics:

“Envestnet Analytics uses an end-to-end solution that allows our data analyst team to bring solutions to market much faster than typical development. We are able to consume data from any source, perform ETL, and publish visuals within one technology stack and integrate with MoneyGuide.”

How this technology contributes to making the life of MoneyGuide clients easier

Tony Leal: Users can easily segment, target, and track clients by where they are in their planning journey and get actionable opportunities from your existing book of business.

  • Plan Pulse™: auto-updates a plan’s Probability of Success on a weekly basis, allowing advisors to proactively notify and counsel investors when opportunities arise to improve their financial outlook.
  • Client Opportunities: segments plan data to give you actionable lists to engage clients and increase your book of business.
  • Recommendations (Coming Soon): a tool built to capture, display, age, share, and sync actionable data points for advisors.  These data points are specifically curated by our team so that the advisor can spend more time advising the client and less time analyzing data.

When we talked a year ago with you, you said the most effective way to grow is to learn from failure. What impact has the lockdown made on MoneyGuide and what points have you learned from this situation?

Tony Leal: We learned to redefine what it means to be prepared. The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for basic financial knowledge around budgeting, savings and risk management that an individual can readily access. It’s provided opportunities to engage clients more frequently through virtual planning.

We believe a professional advisor and a digital planning platform is the new way forward.