Spend Less and Get More with XYPN's Tech Stack

If you’re familiar with XYPN, you may have heard about our tight-knit community, top-rated compliance support, and our steeply discounted tech stack (every solution in our tech stack is included with membership at no extra cost!) tailored specifically for financial advisors.

You may also know membership has a fee—specifically, $434/month. And as a financial planner, the dollars and cents have to, well, make sense. Maybe you're planning the launch of your firm and crafting your first-year budget. Or perhaps you've been running a well-established firm for many years and are looking for ways to increase efficiencies and spend less. Either way, if you want to join XYPN and stay long term, membership has to be a valuable investment for your firm.

Well, what if I told you that you can get more than $434 in value every single month? And what if that value was from our technology stack alone, apart from the many other services and resources that are included with membership? That’s exactly what XYPN has created with our core technology stack, an included benefit that more than pays for the cost of membership in value.

XYPN’s tech stack is curated to be the core technology that any financial planner, whether you’re just launching a firm or you’ve owned your own firm for 20+ years, needs. If you adopt just seven of our core technologies (or join XYPN and transfer accounts you’re already using), you'll get $543.25 worth of technology every month for just your membership fee. Let’s explore.

Financial Planning

As a financial planner, you need software to help you do your job. But what do you really need? Our included tech stack offers two solutions to make you a more successful financial planner: RightCapital and fpPathfinder.

Financial Planning Software – RightCapital

There’s a lot to choose from in financial planning technology, but RightCapital offers everything to make it the core financial planning software for your firm. It enables you to help clients project their retirement costs, maximize their Social Security benefits, and even help with tax planning. A huge selling point for RightCapital is its extremely easy-to-use interface, which makes it easy to generate financial plans and free up your time to do what you do best--work with clients. If you focus on cash flow and budgeting in your practice, the upgraded Premium version (just $25/month) offers account aggregation for your clients, making it an interactive tool you can use to make your clients goals a reality.

A few XYPN members work closely with RightCapital to make sure their voices are heard and needs are met. And with over 2/3 of XYPN membership using RightCapital, you have more than 800 other advisors ready and willing to answer your questions and get the most out of the software.

Savings per month: $125

Financial Planning Flow Charts and Checklists – fpPathfinder

No matter how great your clients are, they will always throw you curveballs, creating new questions to answer and problems to solve. Even with all of the industry credentials you can add to your name (looking at you, Michael Kitces!) and a supportive community of advisors, it can be a huge mental relief to have a tool to help walk you through those decisions and situations to ensure you’re acting in your client’s best interests and not forgetting about a strategy or method for their situation.

fpPathfinder was built (and co-founded by Michael Kitces himself) to help navigate those situations. It offers checklists and workflows to walk you through a huge range of different financial planning scenarios. If your clients have faced anything from caring for aging parents to dealing with identity fraud, fpPathfinder offers you a tangible, specific workflow to make sure you’re giving your client the best advice you can as unexpected situations arise. 

Don’t see a checklist for the situation you’re looking for? fpPathfinder is also constantly responding to customer feedback and requests—you can submit a request for a specific workflow that’s missing from their current offering on their website.

Savings per month: $8.25

Investment Management

Portfolio Management and Performance Reporting - Capitect

Maybe you want to (or already do) manage investments for your clients, but you’re missing a technology solution to manage their portfolios. And you want to provide them with performance reporting, but you don’t need something like the behemoth that is Orion.

That’s why we’ve included Capitect in our core technology stack. Capitect makes performance reporting for your clients a breeze, giving you the ability to quickly generate charts on performance and asset allocation. It gives you the platform to craft portfolios to fit your client’s needs. And, if you’re looking for a billing platform and are willing to spend some money to upgrade, they offer you the ability to easily bill on your client’s assets. Capitect also integrates with RightCapital and TD Ameritrade, making it a seamless addition to the XYPN tech stack. 

Savings per month: $125 for your first 20 client households

Firm Tools

Payment Processor – AdvicePay

AdvicePay serves a core function in your firm—it’s how you get paid for ongoing or one time fees. But even though getting paid is fun (and necessary to run a successful business), it isn’t always easy to do as a financial advisor. The difficulty of navigating regulatory requirements to avoid triggering custody when billing, and the absence of a solution that worked for advisors like those in our Network who offer real financial planning per a subscription model, is what inspired XYPN’s co-founders to create AdvicePay.  

AdvicePay launched in 2016 as the first compliant payment processor for financial advisors. AdvicePay lets you choose how you want clients to pay (ACH or credit card), and can handle ongoing monthly or quarterly fees, as well as one-time upfront planning costs. 

My own financial advisors actually use AdvicePay and I can say from first-hand experience as a client that it’s a software that I don’t even have to think about (in a good way!). I get notification emails of my upcoming transactions but haven’t even needed to log back in once in the past year after agreeing to my monthly transactions.

Savings per month: $50, plus .5%-.6% on transaction fees

CRM – Wealthbox

As you launch and continue to grow your firm, a customer relationship management (CRM) technology becomes more and more essential. Through XYPN’s tech stack, you get access to Wealthbox, a CRM built for financial advisors. Wealthbox allows you to easily manage your contacts, giving you one place to record client meetings and keep track of and follow up with prospects. Like RightCapital, Wealthbox invests heavily in their usability and beautiful front end, making it simple to have your entire team jump into the system. Wealthbox also offers task and workflow management, to make sure your processes scale as your firm does. As an XYPN member, you’ll also get access to template Wealthbox workflows built by our Advisor Education team, to make client prospecting and onboarding a breeze.

Wealthbox is one of the most highly adopted technologies in the Network, currently used by 76% of XYPN members. If you run into a question or issue, not only can you reach out to Wealthbox’s support team, but you can use our member forums to gather helpful tips and advice from your fellow members.

Savings per month: $35

Compliance

Compliance Task Management – Smart RIA

Compliance can be one of the most daunting tasks and responsibilities to take on as a new firm owner. Figuring out what tasks you need to do, and when you need to do them, to ensure you’re following the policies you published in your Compliance Manual or Written Policies and Procedures isn’t easy. That’s exactly why we include Smart RIA in our core tech stack.

Smart RIA is built to make your ongoing compliance tasks and duties more manageable. It takes your yearly compliance calendar and breaks it into individual tasks with their own recurrence and due dates. The best part? Our Compliance Team created tasks specifically for XYPN advisors, so when you first log in, your next year of compliance work is laid out for you. 

Savings per month: $50

Archiving and Data Monitoring – XY Archive

XY Archive is a unique addition to the list as the only XYPN proprietary software we currently offer. XY Archive was launched earlier in 2020 to fill a need in our member’s tech stack—an easy-to-use archiving technology. As a financial advisor, from the second your firm launches, you need to archive any client communications or advertisements. Having a technology system in place to do it for you makes your life much easier.

XY Archive also helps you review the correspondence coming in and out of your firm through the Data Monitoring feature. You can easily generate reports of your review activity if you ever need to demonstrate how you’re reviewing your firm’s communications. 

Another pain point for archiving technologies is the expense. XY Archive gives you website archiving and up to 8 different social media or email accounts as part of your archiving bundle, all included in membership.

Savings per month: $150

The Takeaway

Leveraging and saving money with our tech stack work is just one of the many perks of being an XYPN member. And while the community, compliance support, and education available to you are equally as important, they’re a little harder to put a price tag on. As for the tech stack, the math is simple. You save, and you save big.

And saving that money is easy. If you currently use these tech tools but you’re dreading the process of transferring your accounts to our discount, rest assured it’s pretty darn painless. After you join XYPN, you’ll start saving money right away—it’s really that easy!

About the Author
As a Product Owner, Taylor leads XYPN's Technology Department. She's passionate about leveraging technology to make the lives of financial advisors easier (and her own!), and driving new technology solutions in the financial services industry.