How document storage and collaboration tools are integral to holistic financial planning

Holistic financial planning and wellness requires a more diverse range of inputs to get to a 360-degree view of clients. It is different to traditional financial planning where the focus, as the title suggests, is on specific areas and goals such as investments, pensions, tax or insurance.

Holistic financial planning, meanwhile, looks at all aspects of a client’s personal and financial life and makes a financial plan on how best to support those goals and promote lifelong financial wellness. 

To do that there needs to be a broader range of information available to the planner. The more information - both structured and non-structured or contextual - the planner has, the better the overall result will be. So that’s more information that requires collecting, organizing and keeping. 

All of this information also needs to be shared to a wider, but controlled audience. This could mean relevant third-party professionals that look after specialist areas like philanthropy, social enterprise, succession, the family business and the like. But it also extends to other family members or business partners who might need to play their part in the lifelong holistic planning process.

More information and more people can only mean one thing;  more organising, and the risk of data leakage, resulting in exposure of extremely sensitive client data. Indeed, this is something that falls neatly in the ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ box. 

If you have disparate methods of communication with documents and other information stored in several different places, each with different permissions it makes it nearly impossible to get a good overview of the client and pretty much impossible to add in the holistic and wellness aspects. You are only ever looking at a part of the picture. Any inferences or wellness or lifestyle aspects would be done on an incomplete set of information thus negating the whole point of offering holistic financial planning. 

Document storing and sharing platforms
If, on the other hand, you are able to store and share documents and information around a client, and with relevant professional third parties and family members in a smooth and secure way then you can make your life and that of the client so much easier. 

This is where an effective document storage and sharing proposition comes in.

And the way forward is digital collaboration. This was given a hefty boot in the right direction by COVID which accelerated take up from advisors and clients alike. The devil, however is in the detail and having the right tools to manage virtual collaboration and digital workflows is key.

Wealth managers can and should look for strategic partnerships with document management providers to make the very best of what is available.

SideDrawer for one, has put time and thought into the underlying nature of document management and the need to define and categorise different types of data and documentation. It has also made sure that the platform is easy to use for both advisor and client.

SideDrawer has unique workflows that reduce admin time by up to 50%. It is multi-directional, and does not require much effort to maintain security protocols, password protection, or have an administration burden.

The collaborative tools allow clients, their family members, and their other professionals to all see documentation in a secure way and our guided organizational structure and workflows provide scalability not possible through any other document management platform.

It also has an Info Request functionality which allows advisors to streamline the discovery process, by gathering data and documents from clients within a single platform. This provides for a very convenient client experience, allowing them to complete the requests on their time, and come back to the repository at a later date to access their submissions and documents. 

In short using a platform adds to adviser efficiency and leaving more time to spend with the client. This is adding to the overall holistic service model and trust proposition, as clients feel they are truly receiving a bespoke, personalised and compassionate service offering where everyone is pulling together.

Clients also benefit because a platform that is well designed and structured is easy and intuitive to use. If everything is in one place and easy to access then take up is greater.

If a platform is easy to use then clients can input more and more information into is so that family members know exactly where everything is, business partners and other associates also have limited access. More than that though the more information storage and collaboration portal can hold then the more truly holistic the service provided can be which is, at the end of the day, what the client is paying for.

This blog is also published on The Wealth Mosaic site.

About SideDrawer
SideDrawer is an API-based document management platform that improves the client experience around collaboration and organization for businesses of all sizes. Our SaaS product is used by advisors, planners, executors and other professionals to securely collect and share sensitive client data and documents. Our infrastructure agnostic APIs are truly scalable, allowing fintechs and enterprises to save significant development resources on non-core, but critical document management workflows. For more information, please visit: www.sidedrawer.com or download our mobile apps on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, or sign-up at my.sidedrawer.com.