Will eMoney’s New Planning App Help or Hurt Advisors?

The new Incentive financial planning and wellness app launched a week ago by Fidelity Investment’s eMoney is raising questions about how it will impact advisors overall, according to several wealth management and technology experts.

Although eMoney plans to address its “initial efforts on working with advisors and advisory firms that focus on the employer retirement plan market, we see it reaching much, much further in the future,” said Jess Liberi,  the firm’s head of product, while unveiling the app during the recent online eMoney Summit.

Despite the firm’s initial focus, Gavin Spitzner, president of Wealth Consulting Partners, says it seems as though the app could indeed “just as easily be leveraged by” traditional wealth management advisors, too.

If advisors are able to “harness” the app’s various solutions to “become more embedded in the day-to-day financial lives of their clients in a meaningful way, then these solutions have value,” he told ThinkAdvisor Monday.

However, “more broadly and looking out to the long-term impact, there is a threat in the sense that advisors not involved in workplace solutions will see more competition, as the firms powering those solutions are looking for ways to capture rollovers and provide other types of advisory relationships,” Spitzner said.

But, “regardless of how it’s distributed and by whom, the challenge remains to power these solutions with sufficient data and personalization so as to make them useful over an extended period of time,” he noted.

“If not, we know client engagement levels wane, and the app collects dust,” Spitzner warned. Still, “given eMoney’s history of compelling client portals, they should be well-positioned to deliver engaging tools,” he added.

Basic Financial Planning 

Although some may see Incentive as “a threat to advisors … , it could be a positive as well,” according to Joel Bruckenstein, head of Technology Tools for Today (T3).

“To the extent that it gets underserved populations engaged in planning, it may be a good thing,” he told ThinkAdvisor. “There are a lot of consumers that need basic financial planning advice but who are not prepared, for whatever reason, to engage with a planner just yet.”

In addition, “as people become engaged with the app, they will often find that they uncover more complex needs that require the assistance of an advisor,” he said.