How Switching from MoneyGuide Gave This Advisor More Time for Clients

Scott Frey: My impression of MoneyGuidePro, coming into the industry...my first impression was that it was a relic of the nineties. It looked 10 years old, 10 years ago. And the UI was unintuitive to say the least. I thought that it, it functioned fine, but it was not a place I loved living in day-to-day as a person using the software.

That's a relatively minor complaint compared though to its impact on client relationships. The biggest problem with MoneyGuidePro was that you had to explain it and those meetings in the planning process where you get to actually have impact and make a key decision that changes the course of someone's financial path are very few. And actually that time is incredibly small and valuable. And it was readily apparent from the beginning that we were spending a lot of that most valuable time explaining how programs worked and answering questions. And sometimes in the worst case scenario, we were having to argue for the episteme of the program. We were having to explain that the program was indeed reliable. That was in large part because of UI that looked unintuitive or, when we would play with it in front of the client, was hard to understand.

And, that sometimes failed us at critical moments at the culmination of planning. I think those failures are sometimes hard to register because the information was not incorrect that was being displayed. But, if it's not convincing and it doesn't lead to behavioral outcomes, it doesn't really matter. And there's a lot more than correctness to planning software.

Scott Frey: And as soon as I saw RightCapital, and I saw that the UI had been created by somebody who had lived through the two thousands, the value is really self-evident.

The ability to come to complex information and not have to explain it is such a powerful thing. I don't spend time explaining RightCapital beyond maybe a few minutes explaining what the pages are and just showing them. I don't have to explain what's on a page. The client can see and digest so much faster. There's less on the pages in general, and the slider system is intuitive. It doesn't really matter if I'm dealing with someone in their twenties or their nineties — it's better for understanding. We just get to spend more time talking about what really matters, which is usually something behavioral, not something numerical.

It's odd, but in planning, a lot of times there's six to twelve weeks worth of effort in the planning process and coaching that builds up to the delivery of a couple of key facts. And then you often have such a short timeframe with those key facts to actually affect client outcome behavior in the future. What RightCapital did was extend the amount of time that I have with each client, from maybe a couple of minutes to a few minutes, or ten minutes. That is really felt by me, the practitioner. I think I'm able to effect change more positively because of it.

I would go back to what I said initially: the difference of five minutes of being able to stay on the most important thing that can affect a client outcome versus getting ten can make the difference between them affecting change and not. It can make the difference of being able to show situational awareness or different versions of plans, if you can iterate those a little bit faster. RightCapital allows me to go in and load a bunch of different situations ahead of a session with a client. That ability to be mutable — even just the server lag times alone, the responsiveness of the site — all those things add up to time.

Scott Frey: I can't imagine asking all of my staff, all of my advisors, to live and breathe every day in bad UI. That's a tax on their energy, time, on their eyes, on their sense of clutter. It's a stress tax incurred. It's hard to put a numerical value to it, but it's definitely felt.

I made more than a few of my tech decisions and my tech stack based purely off of: would I want to actually spend time in the software or not? And I think that needs to be considered more often by leadership, because oftentimes it's purely a cost decision, or it's a matter of transitionary stress. But there are other stresses being incurred at slower rates, or less visibly, that are just as meaningful.

Then again, I would go back to, I think RightCapital actually is listening to their clients, and I don't know how to put a price on that. That's incredibly important.

Scott Frey: There was no transition process. We built from scratch. It was intensive in that way, but not entirely dissimilar from what we do anyways. I rebuild plans so regularly that it didn't feel incredibly new or overly burdensome. It's in the natural course of things that plans get rebuilt for clients every few years because of life circumstances changing, inflationary pressure on income, regulatory change, all sorts of things.

It took a while. I think there was some friction with clients who were comfortable in MoneyGuidePro and thought, why do I have to go through a change? But I don't think it took convincing once we were in the program, once they saw that this was going to be their continued experience and they would have access to it. That's one of the things — in general, eyes on plans have gone up significantly from the move.

My impression is that people go to their custodial outlets for investment information far more than they go to their planning software. But in general, more people are downloading the app and thinking about where they are on their road to retirement, using RightCapital as the gauge, in an independent fashion that I didn't really see with MoneyGuidePro. So I think that's good.

How often people look at their plans is something that I personally, as a practitioner, go back and forth on. I'm not sure that looking at your plan every month is good for you. I doubt it. I doubt behavioral economists would like it if clients did that, especially in volatile times. But that they can, and that they feel empowered to go find that information and look at it without me and glean something valuable from it, is a power I want all my clients to have.

Scott Frey: I had one client who was very sensitive about what software we use, because he was in software. And I think that MoneyGuidePro, which was the first program he planned with us within, left him incredibly nervous. I've watched that evolution of faith in him in the move to RightCapital. He is willing to consider Monte Carlo as a part of his decision making matrix in a way that he never did with MoneyGuidePro.

Scott Frey: I looked at RightCapital and I knew how it worked basically from the beginning — not because I'm really smart, but because it was laid out so sensibly. I don't think you have to train people on the software. I think you have to train people on the concepts they're in, and that's a wonderful thing.

When I think about scaling my practice, I want to spend a lot of time coaching advisors within my firm on how to become much better with clients, in a variety of ways more important than technical. Teaching them about software is hopefully a very minimal amount of time compared to the coaching that goes into more outcome-oriented advisory tasks.

The vast majority of what we're doing is behavioral. If you can reduce, in an advisor, the amount of technical overhead that is sitting on their brain — that is between them and being completely present with a client, getting to their stated values and goals — that is incredibly valuable.

Scott Frey: MoneyGuidePro, I think was a little bit monolithic, in that it had been around for a long time, it was deep into its engineering cycle, and when we went to MoneyGuidePro with problems, we got a "we've got bigger fish to fry" message.

RightCapital, and especially in its infancy, took feedback as well as a technology company has, in my experience, as well as a service provider has. And we got to have a lot of input.

I remember, probably a dozen times writing into the RightCapital team asking for features and then finding out that they were going to show up and then having them show up. That kind of collaboration and ability to take input has built a lot of trust for me. There's an attitude and cultural element that that reflects that made me a lot more willing to partner with them again when I created my own firm.