While financial anxiety is at an all-time high, only 33% of Americans have a written financial plan, according to a recent Schwab study.1 When asked why, many say it's because they don't have time to develop a plan (21%).2
The data reveals a significant opportunity for advisors to serve two key groups: smaller or underserved clients, and prospects who have yet to engage in planning.
While many financial advisors intend to sit down and create holistic financial plans for every client, time constraints and administrative burdens make it difficult to scale planning – especially for smaller clients or new prospects. According to Envestnet’s Market Intelligence Advisor Survey, nearly 40% of advisors are spending their time on investment management and administrative activities, and 30% say they’re not able to spend enough of their time with clients.3
The result? Only 55% of advisors deliver comprehensive plans to even half of their clients, leaving much of their book with no planning services.3
Turning underserved clients into planning opportunities
For many advisors, that planning gap is most visible among underserved and smaller client segments. These clients often fall outside traditional planning workflows, even though 93% of clients are more likely to stay with firms offering tools that provide a complete view of their finances.4 The challenge is not demand, but driven by friction and capacity.
Two of the biggest barriers to financial planning today boil down to advisor time and client hesitation to get started. On the surface, traditional planning requires extensive upfront data gathering, making it difficult to scale across underserved segments.
Financial planning builds momentum for prospecting
When used earlier in the advisor-client relationship, financial planning becomes more than a service, it becomes an advisor growth strategy. A well-structured plan does more than enhance the effectiveness of your wealth management strategies – it ensures that every recommendation is closely aligned with your client's personal goals and financial objectives.
The discovery process itself can surface areas where clients need help, and enable advisors to demonstrate how they can make a difference at the start of the relationship. That early value exchange builds trust and accelerates conversion from interest to long-term engagement.
Advisors recognize the power of financial planning, but scalable solutions are needed to efficiently serve both current underserved clients and new prospects.
“We are giving advisors the opportunity to turn their websites into their own prospecting engines, allowing site visitors to create basic financial plans in minutes and showing them how advisors can help them reach their goals.”
This is why Envestnet created Dash.
This guided prospecting tool is deeply integrated with our popular MoneyGuide financial planning software, and addresses the two biggest barriers to financial planning: limited advisor time and consumer hesitation to get started.
More financial plans, more possibilities
Dash jumpstarts planning discussions between advisors and prospects, without the friction that typically slows them down. Prospects only need to enter essential details such as name, state, age, gender, and employment income for a seamless setup. Clients already using MoneyGuide enjoy automatic pre-filled profiles.
By minimizing upfront effort and data entry and maximizing early insight, Dash allows advisors to engage prospects sooner and scale planning across a broader segment of their book.
“Dash is the latest innovative solution we developed to simplify the financial planning process through intuitive data entry, creating a minimal but meaningful approach for advisors to begin planning discussions with prospects – and quickly convert their interest into planning relationships.”
Dash allows advisors to efficiently offer planning services to underserved or smaller clients, making it easier for these clients to connect and access guidance previously unavailable to them.
From client discovery to deeper relationships
Dash’s intuitive, easy-to-navigate user interface is designed to keep prospects engaged while naturally guiding them toward advisor-led conversations, featuring:
- Smart Defaults: Dash automatically sets up key goals, such as retirement living expenses, healthcare, discretionary spending, travel, and basic risk preferences with intelligent defaults. Prospects can easily adjust amounts, add goals, and see real-time impact.
- Interactive Guidance: Visual cues, on-screen guidance, and real-time feedback keep prospects engaged and moving toward becoming a client. An Insights Panel nudges prospects toward education, relevant services, or advisor engagement related to topics such as long-term care, Social Security timing, and digital account opening.
- Dynamic Progress Indicators: As prospects enter data, their visual progress meters update in real time to reinforce completion.
- Seamless Integration with MoneyGuide and CRMs: With one click, Dash data flows directly into a full MoneyGuide plan, eliminating duplicate entry and enabling advisors to transition prospects from self-directed exploration to advisor-led planning. Dash also supports CRM integrations and unique identifiers for linking households, prospects, and advisors.
- Seamless Workflow Transition: Dash supports the transition between self-directed dashboards and advisor-led planning.
Dash can be used with prospects or with existing clients not yet engaged in planning to help them explore their goals and encourage them to reach out to you about gaps or goals where they could use more support.
By lowering the barrier to entry, Dash transforms planning from a high-effort commitment into an approachable first step.
As a result, advisors can turn the 33% of Americans without a financial plan from a sobering statistic into an opportunity for growth.
See how Dash helps advisors turn financial planning into a powerful prospecting tool and engagement strategy and get a free trial.
