- Custom Portfolios and Security Selection
- Web Advisor Upgrade
- ABIA Conference, Phoenix AZ
- Financial Planning Association, San Diego CA
- Corporate Training Sessions
- Meet our New Representative
- PlanPlus Releases Web-based Financial Planning Software for Students and Educators
- Message from Lynne Copithorn, CFP. VP-Product Development & Training
Custom Portfolios and Security Selection
While identifying the target asset allocation from a strategic perspective is important, the actual action steps to implement that target asset allocation involves the selection of specific investments. The Web Advisor Security Selection screen enables you to make specific product recommendations to your client.
Once you have set up the necessary accounts where the securities need to be purchased, you are ready to choose the securities that will be deployed in each account. This can be done by Picking a Portfolio from Pre-Defined Choices as a group or by Picking Individual Securities where the products you want to deploy will be chosen one at a time. Combinations of both methods may be chosen as well.
The option to select a group of products, individual securities or both makes portfolio and security selection easier for advisors, while providing the means to distribute the funds according to the client's asset allocation target.
Security Selection
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Web Advisor Upgrade
PlanPlus is pleased to announce the release of Web Advisor Version 4.75. This newly upgraded version includes a number of exciting new features.
Enhancements have been made to the Security, Access and Administration section. Administrators can now control which documents are available to each level of user.
Advisors are now able to provide specialists (ie. head office planner, estate specialist) with access to specific client files through the new Secondary Advisor feature. Jurisdictional support has been extended to include Mexico, the United Kingdom, the U.S.A. and Australia.
More on upgrade...
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ABIA Conference, Phoenix, AZ
Shawn Brayman, President of PlanPlus, was the guest speaker for the Annuity Best Practices session at the annual convention of the American Bankers Insurance Association in Phoenix, Arizona. The session focused on mechanisms for measuring the value of fixed income annuities when compared to portfolio investment options like bond funds. In particular Shawn presented the result of mortality weighted IRR calculations, the Implied Longevity Yield developed by Dr. Moshe Milevsky in conjunction with CANNEX, and finally, a Monte Carlo forecast that illustrates the likelihood of maintaining target incomes if you replace the fixed income portion of a portfolio with a single premium immediate annuity (SPIA). This Monte Carlo illustration is just one of the new features in Web Advisor version 4.75.
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Financial Planning Association, San Diego CA
PlanPlus joined over 3000 delegates to this years Financial Planning Association conference in San Diego in September with a booth and a new tag line "Planning for the World". Although the majority of delegates were from the US, about 10% were from a total of 20 other counties with many Canadians present. The PlanPlus Web Advisor left many delegates from the international community amazed - never having seen or even contemplated the possibility of a single multi-lingual planning tool that could support over 14 countries.
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Corporate Training Sessions
PlanPlus hosted a series of weekly Web Advisor Corporate Training Sessions over the summer. The focus of these sessions was to help Corporate Administrators become efficient users of the administrative functions of the Web Advisor.
If you are a Corporate Administrator and were unable to attend these sessions but would like some in depth training on the administrative functions of Web Advisor please contact us by clicking on the link below.
Training
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Meet our New Representative
Patrick Yap is our new PlanPlus representative working out of Malaysia to provide support in the region.
Patrick is a cheerful and customer oriented person, having more than 10 years experience providing front- end system support to customers in an insurance software development company. Two years ago, Patrick began providing system support to financial planners and today is in charge of PlanPlus sales in Malaysia. Focusing on customer satisfaction, Patrick welcomes your questions and feedback and looks forward to hearing from you. Patrick may be contacted via e-mail at patrick@planplus.com.
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PlanPlus Releases Web-based Financial Planning Software for Students and Educators
PlanPlus Inc. has just released a Web-based financial planning software for use by students and educators. The software provides students with a variety of planning analyses including net worth, asset allocation, cash and tax management, insurance needs, goal planning, and more. A simple password and UserID allow the student to access the tools in their browser, along with some basic eLearning modules and a student workbook with many examples of how to solve problems.
Read on...
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Message from Lynne Copithorn, CFP. VP-Product Development & Training
Web Advisor - The Development Process
Financial Planning to a large degree is an art as much as it is a science. Because of this fact, every advisor across the world has their own views on how it should be done and what's important when addressing their client needs.
As a software developer, PlanPlus has the challenging task of sifting through all of the ideas and requests from our users to identify those that have the broadest appeal to our users in general. This is difficult since each user feels that their idea has merit. While they usually do, the job of incorporating new features is a huge undertaking for us. Whenever a new feature is scheduled for release, the ball starts rolling on a very long drawn out process which includes:
- The initial design specifications on how the feature will work.
- A preliminary review of our existing architecture to see how the feature will interact with the existing processes and features of the system.
- Initial development of the required data entry screens.
- Modifications to the databases to allow us to save any new data now being collected to support the new feature.
- Creation of any new documents or reports, or changes to existing ones that result from the new feature.
- Phase 1 testing of the feature to see that the screens and databases collect and save data properly.
- Phase 2 testing to see that the new feature that uses the new data entry fields operates according to specifications.
- Phase 3 testing to ensure that the documents and reports work with a multitude of scenarios.
- Phase 4 testing which is full regression testing to ensure that the new feature does not interfere with any existing features in the system.
In looking at this process, perhaps it will help users understand that incorporating a new feature isn't as simple as just adding a few fields onto a screen. My role as VP - Product Development is to review features critically to determine if and when they will make it into our schedule.
As mentioned above, every advisor has their own ideas, which are driven by their operating style. This operating style has often evolved over their career based on the tools they have used in the past. While we always want to improve the Web Advisor to be as effective as possible, users must also be willing to modify their operating style to some degree to allow them to take advantage of new and more powerful tools. We all find change difficult and thus sometimes expect new tools to mimic everything our old tool did. This of course is not practical since any system that is available to a wide cross section of users must be flexible and usable by everyone and not be restricted by the past. Certainly a very challenging job to reach a balance.
So that's the story of how development occurs in our world. Our best source of new development direction comes from our users so please always feel free to submit your ideas and requests. These will always be reviewed seriously and often will end up in the software at some point in the future. But don't be discouraged if you don't see all of your ideas appear, as it's definitely a difficult if not impossible task to keep all of the people happy all of the time. Our goal is to keep most of the people happy most of the time and if we can accomplish that, we figure we are doing all right!
Lynne Copithorn, CFP. VP-Product Development & Training
Wealth Enhancement Academy Workshops - Nov. 16-18 Vancouver; Jan. 18-20 Markham
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