Moneytree Software, a Muncie, Ind.-based company owned by software developer Accutech Systems Corporation, has released new versions of its financial planning tools that are built on new architecture and workflows. The software also has a new look and feel.
Moneytree was originally launched in 1981 and had several different owners before being acquired by Accutech in 2019. Accutech has been around since 1987, with a focus on selling trust accounting wealth management software to banks and trust companies.
“What our owner thought was, financial planning is in and around trust,” said Patrick Spencer, managing director at Moneytree. “And I felt it would be a great vehicle to not only integrate into the platform, but to really take this company that he saw as a diamond and try to elevate it and rebuild its presence in market.”
“When we bought it, it had a big computing engine,” Spencer said. “But it didn't have the workflow and it didn't have the ability to really work with the advisor's clients. So that's what we wanted to anonymize.”
Accutech brought Spencer to 2020 to do just that. He started by rebuilding the vehicle's architecture.
They moved from the older architecture to a Microsoft .NET platform, “modernizing the guts of the product,” Spencer said. They also moved the product out of local data centers and put it on Amazon Web Services, a cloud-based computing service. The product also has secondary disaster recovery and third-party backup sites.
From there, Spencer and his team created new workflows.
“What we wanted to do is really build on being a financial planning tool for the advisor,” Spencer said. “We know our competition does a lot of integration; we wanted to focus on the collection. We wanted to focus on how that advisor actually engages with their client. But we also wanted to rely on how quickly they can execute a plan.”
They created a system of drawers and flights that allow advisors to bring in client data from their custodian, such as Schwab or Pershing, and CRMs, including Wealthbox, Redtail and Salesforce.
When Accutech bought it, Moneytree had only a few integrations; the new version has about a dozen, with plans to add more. The new version has improved API capabilities so that users can pull and push data to and from Moneytree more efficiently. “It allowed us to get into integrations much faster than we would have otherwise,” Spencer said.
Moneytree also now has a deep partnership with MX Technologies, an account aggregation tool. MX's technology allows secure tokenized data movement and had more OAuth connections than other account aggregation providers, such as Plaid and ByAllAccounts, he said. (OAuth is a technology standard that allows you to authorize one application or service to log into another without giving away private information.)
“Therein lies their ability to have less disconnection,” Spencer said.
The company also built 'planning pages', which make the process more interactive with the adviser. Instead of looking at a financial plan in tabular format, these pages present a series of graphs that show how the plan changes in real time as data is entered.
The new software is currently available in the “Elite” package, which replaces Moneytree Plan, its goal-based and cash-flow tool. It costs $1,981 by the end of the year (in honor of Moneytree's 1981 roots), and goes up to $2,195 early next year. The Essentials package replaces Moneytree Advise, its goal-only tool, and will launch in the first quarter of 2025. Pricing for that package has not been finalised. There is no sunset on Plan or Advice.
Moneytree currently works with less than 3,000 advisors.