Envestnet unveiled five new analytics features, a toolset it’s calling Envestnet Advisor Analytics, according to an announcement made at the firm’s 2019 Advisor Summit. The tools will provide advisors with benchmarking insight into how they are performing compared with their peers, along with information on product trends and assistance in monitoring client investment performance and goals. The announcement comes on the heels of moves by the firm into advisor-facilitated loans for end-clients, the launch of an insurance portal and a major foray into financial planning with its acquisition of MoneyGuidePro’s parent company, PIEtech.
Data and analytics are again being featured prominently at Envestnet’s advisor summit, almost two years to the date from the firm’s launch of its Envestnet Analytics toolkit, itself a pairing of two acquisitions: Wheelhouse Advisors and Yodlee. Originally, the tool was meant to provide advisor benchmarking and help advisors offer clients guidance on their spending and credit usage, according to Frank Coates, executive managing director of Envestnet | Yodlee. It ended up being more embraced by asset managers who utilized it to understand the scope of product distribution and usage, according to Bill Crager, co-founder of Envestnet and chief executive of the firm’s wealth solutions division.
The new toolset will provide advisors with a weekly report of “curated” data that includes peer registered investment advisor activity, product trends and seasonal market shifts; and will include a widget with views of third-party data feeds, fee and performance comparisons; a dashboard from LifeYield, displaying the firm’s TaxEfficient score, a measurement of tax efficiency; and practice-level analytics and peer benchmarking analysis for both independent and RIA clients, as well as enterprise clients, according to a statement announcing the news.
The toolset is all about business intelligence, said Crager. “It's a productivity tool. It's an optimization tool for advisors to grow their practices; to understand what's happening in the industry around them,” he explained. “It's more of an analytic or an intelligence that sits on top of the database.”
The toolkit builds on Yodlee’s data infrastructure to provide context from the aggregator’s data scientists, according to Crager. The tool also incorporates elements of Abe AI’s natural language processing and voice features, with the end goal of enabling the advisor to verbally interact with the tool. “The staging of it—and where we're getting to—is the integration of the parts of Envestnet,” he said. “Pieces are beginning to be integrated.” To emphasize the firm’s vision of cohesion, Advisor Analytics will be integrated with, and offered alongside, MoneyGuidePro, and it will be introduced to Tamarac clients, he added.
Tamarac users may be asking themselves about the analytics they already have access to and how this will be different. Crager calls that just the “beginnings on an analytic,” explaining that a deeper integration via Advisor Analytics would unlock more powerful insights for Tamarac users. Users of Envision IQ, a “clean” dataset, albeit without an “insight layer,” also stand to benefit from the introduction of the new features, he said.
While this may be the first example of a tool that unifies some of Envestnet’s latest acquisitions—by timing—it’s not necessarily the first example of the firm designing and creating an analytics tool. Analytics at the firm have been talked about for years, and Envestnet Analytics’ introduction in 2017 was intended to provide performance benchmarking, among other benefits.
“We’re making it easier for advisors to manage their practices by providing actionable and digestible insights in a way that’s as simple as interacting with an Excel file, widget and weekly newsletter,” said Coates. While the tool has been unveiled at today’s summit, the official launch is scheduled for next month.
