It's not often that a pilot program involving a mere four financial advisers yields $100 million in assets under management in 12 months, but that was the good fortune of Massachusetts Mutual Insurance Co., which has seen fit to accelerate the rollout of a wealth-planning tool from eMoney Advisor to many more of the advisers under its umbrella in the hope of replicating that success.
Michael Zebrowski, an avp at MassMutual, explains that the process got under way after requests from the firm's top financial advisers. "The market was moving toward a wealth-management solution, and we didn't have a solution," he says. "It was a long process, but the outcome of the pilot was undeniably a success."
Not only has eMoney helped advisers increase assets under management, it's demonstrated customer retention of 95 percent and boosted the number of products sold from 1.2 to 3.2 per financial plan, Zebrowski says. And in the finest of tradition of "success begets success," MassMutual has started to use the eMoney tool to recruit more high-end advisors. "It's helping us to diversify the distribution system," he says.
The product is a Web-based, wealth-planning tool that offers a comprehensive, aggregated view of a client's financial portfolio, as well as features and functions intended to enable better servicing of a client's needs. With AdvisorPlatform, advisers can proactively manage their client relationships by identifying strengths and weaknesses in asset allocation, keeping accounts up to date, and monitoring significant changes in clients' financial status.
Besides MassMutual, eMoney Advisor is used by First Commonwealth, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Century Business Services, says Edmond Walters, CEO of eMoney Advisor. "We believe you better be able to give a holistic view of investments, he says. "And you better be able to diagnose, not just sell products."
Matt Schott, senior analyst at TowerGroup, says eMoney's product offers two big selling points. First is that, through a relationship with CashEdge, eMoney can not only aggregate a client's financial information from disparate sources, it can also aggregate that data into an "advice workflow" so financial advisers can make umbrella recommendations. All information is updated nightly.
It's a powerful tool, Zebrowski says, that "helps us to go after assets that are 'held away.'" For instance, one of MassMutual's advisers was monitoring a customer's accounts and noticed a sudden $30,000 drop in the brokerage account. Even though it was an account managed by a competitor, the adviser sent an alert to the client. It turned out the competing broker would take another four days to notify the client of the same drop. The upshot: MassMutual won that account.
The second major advantage of the eMoney offering, says Schott, is that it allows MassMutual to collaborate with a client's other advisers, including lawyers, accountants and brokers. This capability allows MassMutual to, rather stealthfully, become a wealthy individual's primary financial adviser-a coveted role. "This collaboration is a real significant part of the story," Schott says.
By combining eMoney features like a client financial home page, the vault, and 24x7 access, MassMutual has aided clients in sometimes unusual ways-or at least in ways not normally associated with a financial institution, says Zebrowski. But in a time when firms seek to be a "destination point," these extras have proven beneficial.
For instance, clients traveling overseas who had lost their passports were able to access necessary documents via MassMutual to help them apply for new American passports at the U.S. embassy abroad. Zebrowski also cites a client with a rare blood condition who, when rushed to the hospital in Aspen, CO, one day, was able to grant her doctors access to her medical records held in eMoney's Vault.
MassMutual, known for selling and managing insurance services, is enjoying such success providing wealth-management service that it only underscores the enormity of untapped potential in the sector. "Part of what I wanted to do was jerk the chain of both banks and brokerages, which are duking it out over the fence, and say, 'There is also a third party doing some significant business," says Shaw Lively, a Financial Insights analyst who recently profiled MassMutual.
It's unusual, Lively says, for institutions the size of MassMutual to adopt a deep, enterprise-wide wealth-management product. Many financial services firms are not comfortable sharing proprietary data with a third party like eMoney; and, secondly, large firms have often put in place some wealth-management offerings, so there's resistance to one like eMoney's, which renders existing products obsolete. "But for firms that haven't made this investment yet, this is a very viable option that can very definitely work," Lively says.
If other large financial institutions are slow on the uptake, that's just fine with MassMutual, which is already making plans to enhance services it will add. "In the future, we want to make it even easier to read, and we want to add performance reporting that is more detailed and comparative," Zebrowski says.
Continually pushing forward is mandatory, he says. After all, the firm no longer just sees other insurers as its primary competition, but financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch and American Express as well.
