AdvicePay, the leading fee-payment-processing platform designed exclusively for financial advisors, announced today the release of “Deliverables,” centralizing enterprise compliance reviews of financial plan deliverables to streamline and make more efficient the financial plan oversight process. Deliverables allows enterprises to systematically track, report, and manage the financial planning deliverables that their financial advisors produce, to ensure both quality control, compliant advice recommendations, and ensure that financial plans were delivered when clients are engaged in project, subscription, or retainer financial planning fee models.
Recently, regulators have brought an increased focus on ensuring that clients are getting value for the fees that they are charged, especially with respect to subscription fee and retainer models, with an expectation that firms document their financial advice activities and validate that a financial plan was delivered to the client in exchange for the fee that was charged. Currently, though, most enterprises have not been able to systematize and automate this record-keeping requirement, resorting to complex, error-prone spreadsheets with manual updates.
“Over the past decade, regulators have increasingly scrutinized advisors charging AUM fees to ensure that they are providing services for the fees they charge and are not engaged in ‘reverse churning’. Now as fee-for-service financial planning is on the rise, it is no surprise that regulators are similarly scrutinizing that clients are receiving financial planning services for the upfront or ongoing financial planning fees they’re paying,” said Michael Kitces, veteran financial advisor and co-founder of AdvicePay. “Having anticipated this reaction, we have been hard at work to release AdvicePay’s Deliverables as a best practices approach to help large enterprises manage this review process, by extending our industry-leading payment processing technology to provide a systematic and automated system for enterprises to scale their fee-for-service financial planning in a compliant manner.”
Deliverables makes the financial plan review process more efficient by creating a centralized hub and one place to submit all fee-for-service business. Oversight is enabled by making plan delivery and payments easy to track, manage, and report upon, ensuring that plans are delivered commensurate with the fees being charged, and that nothing slips through the cracks or gets lost in transit. By providing the key validation to regulators that the financial plan was delivered for the fees that were charged, Deliverables enables enterprise firms to avoid regulatory fines and negative headlines for “fee-for-no-service” claims.
“From the very beginning, we designed AdvicePay to be so much more than just a payment processing platform,” said Alan Moore, co-founder of AdvicePay. “The wealth management industry is always evolving, with business and regulatory requirements changing constantly, so our nimble, agile, and flexible technology foundation is once again proving its strategic importance with the release of Deliverables. We look forward to working with our enterprise clients to further tailor and customize the platform so they can continue to grow, compete and succeed in an ever-increasingly complex and competitive industry.”
This article originally appeared on PRWeb.
