Financial Tool Review-Voyant

There has been a real buzz about Voyant in the US and more recently in our own market.

For a company with a small UK presence(only 2 UK employees), Voyant created a bigger splash than might have been expected when they launched into the UK market last month.

You can find lots of press about them, chatter on social network sites like twitter and commentary at industry conferences.  Therefore, I have to admit to being quite excited when it came to reviewing the product.

Perhaps part of the reason for such an early impact is that you can download a free 30-day trial of the software from www.planwithvoyant.co.uk and get to experience what it is like to use the application. I duly did what allegedly tens of thousands of people have done and downloaded the application, which enabled me to gain some user experience before meeting the Voyant team.

The first impressions were really good. Indeed, of all the tools I have seen as part of this exercise, Voyant is the most graphically appealing, with a very modern look and feel.  I love the way key life events can be simply dragged from a menu onto the life-cycle chart, making the data collection exercise far more interesting and interactive. 

One complaint is it is a little American in appearance (a bit brash and loud) and the Union Jack embedded in the logo only serves to reinforce that its origins are not from these shores.

It is probably worth taking a little time to look at its origins as I think they do define the character of the product.  It was launched in the US last year after a two year development project and so unsurprisingly benefits from a modern technology architecture and is very up to date in its look and feel. 

Despite having been ‘Anglicised, the odd Americanism does still appear within the product (for example saving for ‘sweet sixteen’ parties– not that common an event in the UK).  That having been said,  the team has spent the last 9 months working to ensure the product is fit for purpose in the UK, including UK Tax requirements.  To do this, they commissioned specialist UK tax experts  and from my initial look they seem to have done a pretty good job.  The product has been written in the US and is supported from there too.  Whilst this may present some issues, if properly managed, they should not be insurmountable.

The tool has a reasonable coverage of needs, but it is still relatively new and has room for further developments.  For example, there are no Attitude to Risk questionnaires, although we understand that a preferred risk questionnaire can be configured into the tool if required.

The investment planning area lacks coverage of Estate Planning, although we have been told that this will be added in the next few months. It does have an asset allocation capability, with a stochastic model  based on the Markovitz Portfolio Theory, but  the market assumptions that the tool relies are being tested and so remain unproven at this stage. It also lacks integrations to the other current systems in the market, which, like a number of other products, means rekeying data which is not the best use of time.  Voyant are keen to address this and has published integration APIs to enable connectivity to other applications so I expect things will improve in this area soon.

The needs areas that it covers are done quite well, with easy data capture and logical analysis tools.  Included in this is an interactive  ’what if?’ capability which shows the effect of changes dynamically in real time and allows a clear side-by-side graphical comparison and analysis of different scenarios.

As mentioned earlier, this is a good-looking tool and one you could feel comfortable  using in front of clients. Voyant  are going one stage further and using this in a web 2.0 type world where consumers are invited to use this tool on the web for themselves and when they have had an initial play with the tool, investigating their own financial position, they can then permit an adviser to share the data.  As a result, the adviser can pick up a part completed   case and complete the advice process for the client - online or face-to-face.  As a consumer, this would really appeal to me and potentially many others of my generation.

It is a new product and I think Voyant have not yet fully developed their go to market strategy and pricing. However, from what I have seen, it is a product with great promise if it can get good early traction in the market.