News
Taking on the middle market
Emerging Information Systems Inc. (EISI) pioneers
an affordable 'corporate solution' for middle
market financial planning firms, reports Gavin
Adamson for Investment Executive.
“We’re launching NaviPlan Central with a hosting partner,” says Mark Evans, President and CEO of EISI. “It essentially gives an enterprise solution to the smaller broker-dealer network in Canada and the U.S.”
The NaviPlan Enterprise Solution, which is sold by EISI to large-scale financial institutions (such as Investors Group Inc. in Canada and Morgan Stanley in the U.S. ), is a customizable financial planning platform. Its various components, including the database and calculation engine that drives NaviPlan functionality, operate on a number of servers. Maintaining this kind of a technical environment is typically unfeasible for small firms with business needs similar to those of major enterprises. NaviPlan Central changes that.
NaviPlan Central is an ASP (Application Service Provider) platform that hosts NaviPlan financial planning software, a centralized database, and additional business resources online. This secure, cost-effective solution provides data integration, centralized data storage, and workflow management tools to help small firms address compliance issues.
Management oversight and compliance capabilities are both touchstone issues in today’s market, writes Adamson. Evans says: “Quality of advice is a big issue... If you have 100 people in your firm, being able to have a universally applied tool that has compliance rules built in is important. It gives you greater confidence that your people are not generating plans using Excel spread sheets or other tools that aren’t approved by the organization and that put you in jeopardy for client losses or poor advice.”
Matt Schott, a senior analyst at Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup Inc., an industry consultant, says EISI’s strategy makes sense: “It’s as though [the advisors] are at a bigger firm. They get the same suite of products and service even though they could be in a one- to four-person shop.”
TowerGroup’s Schott calls EISI one of the top providers in North America.
Read the full Investment Executive article.
