The University of Utah has joined nearly 30 schools across the nation in giving students access to the second-largest wealth management platform in the United States, eMoney, as part of its university program. As a wealth management platform, eMoney mostly targets independent advisors or firms. Now finance students can become familiar with one of the software programs they may use in the field.
eMoney offers a single location for financial advisors and their companies to manage clients and evaluate data. With a client portal, those being advised have easy access to their finances, and through the screen sharing feature, financial advisors can walk clients through each graph without having to meet in person. There is also a capacity for unlimited document storage and multiple analytical tools.
About four years ago, eMoney started receiving requests to give students access to its program. Since then, the learning management platform has been sweeping the nation. “Through classroom learning and online training, students gain hands-on experience with technology that the industry’s top advisors use every day to transform the financial planning experience and run their businesses,” eMoney said in an article regarding the new program.
In an effort to double the number of partner universities, eMoney has launched a marketing campaign and has added numerous new universities to the list. It is up to professors and directors to decide if students should use it and how they will implement the program into the curriculum.
At the U, students are commonly encouraged to use eMoney for their two-semester long independent research and capstone presentations. When students enroll in a class and the professor decides to use eMoney, they are sent a link. Students use the link to create a learning management system account and must spend 90 minutes training. Once they have been trained, students are given credentials to access the platform and they are ready to go. Students then have the option to work toward an eMoney certificate. The certification program takes 12 hours and provides students with a marketable skill.
“It is certainly becoming sort of absolutely necessary to understand technology at a financial advising firm. Clients have an expectation of a certain level of sophistication, and as an advisor, you are not providing that if you’re still using Excel … that is not going to meet client expectations,” said eMoney financial planning advisor Chris Hershey.
With this need for technological understanding, more firms are searching for young talent that understands platforms like eMoney so that the current employees can focus on customers, according to Hershey.
“Students can learn a lot about financial planning concepts, but when it comes to get out into the real world, in a firm or working on their own, they’re going to be using software and technology to work with clients. What we offer is a really, really important and integral part of financial planning and executing the process,” Hershey said.
Hoping to fill the need of future financial advisors, eMoney is creating its own job board. Coming in 2019, future and current advisors can reach out to each other using the platform.
“We have over 50,000 advisors who are looking for talent. They’re looking for the next generation of planners to sort of take over for them… it just makes sense for us to start developing some of the talent that they can filter into these different openings that are going to be coming up in the next couple years,” Hershey said.