FEATURES
FINTECH
VISION SYSTEMS Location: Toronto Founded: 1997 Leadership: Michael Curtis, CEO Products: VisionWorks (personal planning software), CorpWorks (private corporation planning software), TrustWorks (personal trust software) Client base: Financial planners across Canada
VISION FOR THE FUTURE Accuracy is essential for advisors and the products they use – and that’s been a top priority for Vision Systems since day one IN CREATING the software that would establish Vision Systems as an innovator in the financial planning space, the company was careful to take its time. Years of painstaking R&D was required to bring VisionWorks to market in 2002, but it was more than worth the wait, says CEO Michael Curtis. “It took four and a half years to build,” he says. “One of many reasons for that was that we included the ability to integrate the terms of wills into a financial forecast. That is very complex and had never been done before.” Since then, Vision Systems has added CorpWorks and TrustWorks to its suite, but its commitment to innovation remains as strong as ever. “Virtually all the other software in the marketplace is static – what we have is dynamic software,” Curtis says. “Taking retirement as an example, our software assumes that life is not constant and things change over time. It is a technical innovation that we introduced for our products.” In driving the company forward, Curtis has identified five key factors that separate
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the brand from its competitors. The first – scalability – refers to meeting clients’ expectations by producing software that can tailor a financial plan to fit any business model. The second factor is plan relevance – Vision Systems puts a lot of emphasis on creating plans that can answer clients’ needs both today and in the future. “Ultimately, the holy grail of planning is life planning,” Curtis says. This entails creating models that allow people to see the long-term implications of their current lifestyle choices, thus allowing them to make more informed decisions. Clients can make mistakes on the “practice field” of the software, Curtis explains, rather than making costly and irreversible mistakes in real life. The third factor is plan accuracy – in other words, the ability to accurately model a client’s current lifestyle and financial circumstances. Without accuracy, a client has little reason to trust an advisor with their financial well-being. Likewise, an advisor needs to be able to trust the programs they use. “Our ability to model clients’ circumstances correctly is key,” Curtis says. “In
other software, the client has to fit the mould – inevitably, there are things the software cannot model correctly about that client’s unique circumstances. As soon as you can’t portray those circumstances correctly, they will project that inaccuracy on the rest of the plan, and belief in output is severely undermined.” One area where accuracy is key is in tax planning. Vision Systems stands apart in that its software doesn’t just assess what a client’s liabilities are now, but looks at what they will likely be five or 10 years down the line. “Our three programs can do accurate taxes on a pro-forma basis looking into the future,” Curtis says. “If you put in someone’s employment income or RSP amounts, the software will give you an accurate tax return by province. That allows for very effective tax planning and tactics by the advisor.” Another key issue for the company is estate planning – a vital part of a financial advisor’s job. Making a distinction between retirement and estate planning is crucial, particularly when dealing with mass affluent
www.wealthprofessional.ca
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