Financial planning software developer RightCapital has released its Snapshot feature, which gives advisors a customizable, highly visual one-page financial plan that can be used as a client landing page or printable PDF, according to the firm. The new feature, previewed by WealthManagement.com, is available for the thousands of advisors using the tool, and stands as a replacement for third-party tools like Canva, Excel or other homemade methods used by advisors to create one-page plans for clients.
Personalization is integral to the feature. When it was piloted with approximately 100 advisors, each advisor came up with her or his own one-page plan, said CEO and co-founder Shuang Chen. “We went through a six-month customer discovery phase and quickly realized that everyone’s one-page plan is different,” he said. “We received a lot of feedback and created something that’s highly customizable.”
Advisors can add and remove widgets from the full financial plan, such as net worth, tax reporting and even add in messages that might include family information or advisor firm values. The one-page plan is easy to print as well, in case an advisor wants to create a paper copy for clients who might want to stick it to their refrigerator.
RightCapital's Snapshot
Travis Gatzemeier, a financial planner and founder of Kinetix Financial Planning, said the one-pager not only serves as a summary of the financial plan but can also be used to initiate brief check-ins, instead of full-blown financial planning meetings. His $3.5 million AUM firm is based in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Flower Mound, Texas.
Prior to the availability of Snapshot, Gatzemeier used Canva software to create one-page financial plan summaries he calls “Scorecards.” He would use a combination of screenshots, texts and video messages recorded via Loom to update his clients on their financial plans. With Snapshot, part of the manual process for providing those client updates has been eliminated, he said.
Another advantage of the one-pager is keeping financial planning conversations focused on the topics advisors most need to discuss, said Jonny West, a financial planner at Better Planning Better Life. An associate of LPL Financial, West has approximately $33 million in assets under management at his Long Beach, Calif.–based firm.
“We are inundated with information and what people really like is succinct summary,” West explained. Snapshot “gives a very succinct summary of where things stand. And I can highlight where we want to focus and the actions we need to take to help them achieve their goals.”
To be sure, RightCapital isn’t the only financial planning software developer with one-page financial planning capabilities. Envestnet | MoneyGuide offers a “digital plan summary” called “My Snapshot” and eMoney Advisor offers a summary with “retirement plan score, scores for other goals, and asset allocation” called “The Plan Summary Report.”
Envestnet MoneyGuide's Snapshot
But that doesn’t mean the features are widely used. Gatzemeier is familiar with eMoney Advisor, but didn’t know about the one-pager offered by that service. West initially started using MoneyGuide before switching to RightCapital. He wasn’t aware of the digital summary offered by MoneyGuide.
eMoney Advisor's Plan Summary Report
RightCapital has been growing in popularity since it was founded seven years ago. According to a 2021 technology report by Kitces.com, the financial planning software “seems to have fully moved from an up-and-comer to an established vendor within the financial planning software category,” according to the author of the report, Derek Tharp, a senior research associate at Kitces.com.
RightCapital has “substantively passed much-longer-standing competitors like Moneytree and NaviPlan” among independent advisors using financial planning software. RightCapital has 19.7% of market share according to the report, compared with 30.3% for MoneyGuide and 33% for eMoney Advisor. “This is driven primarily by the significant growth of RightCapital in the broker/dealer channel in recent years (up from a negligible market share with broker/dealers in our prior studies of planning software adoption), where MoneyGuidePro was historically the market leader.”
As a smaller, less established software firm RightCapital has been forced to innovate to compete, Chen said. “We're a little smaller and we're a lot more flexible than our competitors,” he said. “We out innovate our competitors. That's the only way we can win market share from those large competitors.”
