Updating The Financial Planning Process

First Command made made many strives to update its tech stack and modernize it's services to better meet the needs of their existing clients and to make themselves more appealing to younger military members.

The Problem

In part of this effort First Command evaluated and decided to bring on a tool to streamline:

1. Modernizing the financial planning process to focus on the client's financial goals
2. Changes to the account opening process
3. Make it easier to update client's financial information

Project Overview

I worked alongside product management, business analysts, system architects, financial planning, wealth management, financial supervision (who manages financial audits), training team, and our Salesforce team.

To support the updates to the financial planning process, I engaged with the following:

• Conduct a change management workshop that included the home office and advisors to review the ideal state of 3 key processes.
  1. Account opening
  2. Updating information in Salesforce
  3. Documenting proposals for financial audits
• Design an Opportunity in Salesforce for documenting account details of high net worth clients, discussed between advisors and the wealth management team.
• Create a competitive analysis between the current and future version of the account opening for high net worth clients.
• Define, and create journey maps for, the new account opening process for high net worth clients alongside system architects, business analysts and product management.
• Observational research of advisors in the pilot for the new financial planning tool. The research findings were given to product management to ensure a smooth rollout, and the financial planning team, who was updating their process of coaching advisors on how to engage with clients.

Workshop Overview

I worked with the Financial Planning department on a workshop to assist with change management across the home office and advisors. The goal was to understand the advisors processes, ensure the third party tool would meet their needs, and social those needs across the home office.

The agenda of the workshop was:

• Review current processes of receiving approval of financial proposals (required for financial audits before opening accounts), opening accounts, and updating Salesforce.
• Discuss current pain points
• Conduct impact and feasibility sessions to help product management socialize requirements before the rollout.

Data Aggregation Findings

The big concerns of advisors was how to reduce how often data is manually updated, document when data was updated, make it easier to more easily update data held outside the company, and improve how we document military related data.

Proposal Generation Findings

The big concerns of advisors was how to reduce double work between different tool that document information for financial audits, and to receive clear instructions on how to engage the wealth management team for certain types of financial products. The latter is an important change as the new tool allowed a higher level of customization in accounts for high net worth clients.

Account Opening Findings

The big concerns of advisors was to receive more training opportunities, better support from the home office while engaged with clients, and better feedback when financial proposals are denied by supervision. The latter change would help advisors more quickly fix issues, which affects how long it takes to open an account for a client.

Reflections

The workshop was primarily driven for the business to communicate details about the new third party financial planning tool to advisors. This created a lot of limitations in terms of what could be done to the tool to have it embedded in their process. However, this workshop was a step forward as a way for the business to better understand advisor's workflows and communicate changes in a more tangible way. The primary thing I would have changed if possible, was that similar workshops should be conducted more at the market research phase to help inform purchasing decisions.

Observations

After the workshop I partnered with another researcher to observe meetings between advisors and clients to see how the new financial planning software impacted their discussions. We learned some of the following:

• The rollout did not include two-way data communication between our database and the new tool, which resulted in double data-entry that advisors found burdensome.
• The advisors who run offices wanted more concrete feedback on how the new planning process can help new advisors build rapport with clients and grow their book of business.
• There were previous recommendations that were not included in the new process, particularly around how budgeting can help clients with debt.
• Advisors largely liked the tool and the change to make a financial plan more goal oriented helped them better understand the client, and helped the advisor's discussions to be more tailored to clients.