Preview of Coming Attractions
Happy 2025! The year ahead portends to be eventful for Financial Planning Hawaii. Here is a sneak preview of some of what’s in store.
Meet the Future… My youngest son, Brody Robinson, is completing his sophomore year at Northeastern University in Boston and plans to join Financial Planning Hawaii upon his graduation. As part of his apprenticeship, he is already being indoctrinated into our service model and processes, and I am beginning to introduce him to clients informally. Until he obtains the requisite licenses and registrations, he will remain in his current position as one of our Marketing Director’s minions.
Coming Soon - Advyzon!... We are rolling out a new online platform that will significantly enhance our service model. My motivation for subscribing to Advyzon arose out of unhappiness with our long-time third-party performance reporting software, Black Diamond. However, Advyzon offers so much more than award-winning performance reporting. Advyzon’s single sign-on integrations with Schwab, Fidelity, and eMoney will also allow us to streamline the delivery of statements and tax documents and provide clients with a much cleaner overall user experience.
Clients will access Advyzon through the existing Client Portal on the FPH website. We are mapping over our Schwab and Fidelity account and performance data and hope to have the integrations completed by June 30th.
NFS Migration to Fidelity… As announced in 2024, we are asking all clients with accounts on the Fidelity National Financial Services (NFS) platform to migrate to Fidelity’s Institutional Wealth Services (IWS) platform instead. The primary purpose of this transfer is to eliminate the irritating annual account fees and nuisance “ticket charge” commissions and give clients a more modern online user experience. Our investment advisory fees and expenses will remain unchanged.
For reference, NFS is Fidelity’s platform for dual-registered independent brokerage and investment advisory financial advisors, while IWS is exclusively for independent investment advisers. At this time, virtually all of our revenue is derived from investment advisory relationships. We only have a handful of clients who still have commission-based brokerage accounts. My financial planning practice has also evolved to the point where the commission-based product sales model is antithetical to our fee-for-advice, fiduciary-at-all-times service model.
We will contact all NFS brokerage clients individually to explain the difference between brokerage and investment advisory client relationships. We will not be able to continue to work for any clients who wish to remain on the NFS platform. Clients who wish to remain on the platform will be introduced to an advisor at JW Cole who will be able to work with them moving forward.
We have begun the migration process this month (January 2025) and hope to complete the transfers by June 30.
The Best is Yet to Come
Although these three items are a preview of coming attractions, the reality is that the financial planning business is perpetually in a state of disruption. I am constantly managing our business model to ensure that Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii continue to stand apart in the crowded personal finance market space. For more on this, I encourage readers to check out my related post – If Costco and Hermes had a Baby.
John H. Robinson is the owner/founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. He is also a co-founder of fintech software maker Nest Egg Guru and the new personal finance website NestEggPF.com.
