There have been a lot of things happening behind the scenes at PFYT lately, and we wanted to take a minute to let you in on some of them.  I sat down to write about a few of them, and began with a yellow legal pad and a pen, and started making a list of the different items.  An hour (and three pages) later, I realized that it was too big a task for a single message.

As a result of that, I am just going to give you a quick glimpse at some new capabilities we have rolled out, and while doing that, give you a little commentary on some of the initiatives we have been working on.  In order to cover the three pages of upcoming enhancements, I am going to be posting regular updates on these going forward, so stay tuned for deeper dives. 

If you ever saw the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunition you might have heard about their invention of Post-it Notes.  The real story is that a researcher names Spencer Silver at 3M was trying to create a super strong adhesive and failed.  He created a really weak adhesive instead.  It came right off of things quite easily.  Later, a colleague started painting the adhesive on strips of paper for use in marking a book, and Post-it Notes were born (story HERE).

I bring up this story because Plan for Your Tomorrow is a bit of a research project, in addition to the other aspects of the company. We experiment with delivery models, we build things that we think we might want to use, and some of them end up being a bust, and others pay unexpected dividends.   You may have noticed (or maybe not) that we make all of our own “collateral” pieces, and write our own content.  You may not know that we design and develop a certain percentage of the software that lies behind the scenes in our business, either building on top of established systems, or building from scratch, where we can’t find anything to build on.   We are designing a business to exactly suit our clients, and the things they ask for, and the services we see that they need.  We try to think of interesting ways to be of service, and create tools that we think will help out. Inevitably, sometimes the result is Post-it Notes instead of Gorilla Glue (or its financial services equivalent).   

So, we spend a fair amount of time looking at what we do, trying to see how me can make things more efficient, more repeatable, more customizable, more transparent, more innovative….or some combination of all of the above.  Sometimes we have to take a step back to see things clearly, and sometimes we have to ask around for feedback.  Sometimes we need to parse a bunch of data to see what it tells us.  Those three activities, over the course of the last six months or so, led us to reboot our digital platform, and to a roadmap for their future enhancements.

Blog Reboot

First, we realized we needed an update to the concept that drives our blog.  We were too focused on heavy-duty content, and not using it effectively as a simple means of communication.  Take it from me, having to write a 5 or 10 page “think-piece” each week is a bit of a grind.  This is not to say that we will not still publish this kind of material, but rather than being the primary emphasis, we are making it a secondary component.  We are going to primarily use the blog to communicate what is happening with us, and what we are hearing from clients, and to briefly shed light on issues common to us all.  We received wide feedback on this, and spent several months studying various data measures, and we think this is going to be a better use of the technology.

Performance Reporting Update

Second, we are ending our relationships with Morningstar and Black Diamond Reporting, both of which were fine, but neither of which served us as efficiently as we would have liked.  In an age where information needs to be portable, neither of these providers helped us to help our clients in an arc of constant improvement.  Morningstar is notoriously monolithic, and would not be able to integrate with our other software providers until at least 2020, according to their estimates.  Black Diamond did not offer the range of capabilities and reportage that we wanted.  So we have been incubating new providers for personalized performance reporting that we believe has the depth of reportage of Morningstar and one of the most pleasing and flexible user experiences around.  They are called Orion Advisor Services, and you will be hearing more about this in the next few weeks.

PFYT Planner—the full unveiling

As you probably know, we have been doing a soft launch of our interactive financial planning tool the “PFYT Planner.”  We have been using this time to make sure that we understood all of the moving parts, and now we are ready for the full launch.  This will be rolling out over the next few weeks, alongside the Orion Portal.  Because of their integration, you can see your Orion performance reports in your Planner Vault.  Expect more information on this over the next few weeks.

Other things also occupied us recently, we rebuilt our client service system and case management system from scratch, we have been test driving the app versions of some of our resources, investigating a single-sign on solution for our clients, and we began to lay the groundwork for a client resource site, which we envision as a place where case management, copies of all of our print materials and self-service resources would be available for people who want them.  We also launched a new management initiative featuring a very efficient portfolio design and management system, and hooked up with a few more technology partners as a way to drive more access, efficiency and convenience for all of our clients.  So there really is a lot to share. 

Every week, I am going to pick one aspect of this ongoing process, and I will tell you about it in more detail.  We will feature particular aspects of a technology feature, or a capability we are looking to build out, and I will tell you why we think it is going to add something to the lives of our clients. 

If you haven’t done so, you should follow us on Social Media, you will get our thoughts on current events and some other "behind-the-scenes" happenings from our lives.  And it is fun.  Did mention this stuff was supposed to be fun?