Key Takeaways

• Collaborative financial planning actively involves clients in understanding, evaluating, and shaping their financial plans.

• eMoney research identifies five key collaborative activities: comparing plan options, analyzing the current course, demonstrating scenarios, reviewing assumptions, and refining recommendations.

• Collaborative planning drives client understanding, peace of mind, satisfaction, trust, and referrals.

• Collaborative planning can turn recommendations into meaningful conversations about tradeoffs, priorities, and potential outcomes.

• Technology and client portals can facilitate collaboration, but technology alone doesn’t make financial planning collaborative.

Collaborative financial planning turns planning into an active process between advisors and clients. Rather than simply presenting a completed plan, advisors and clients work together to understand goals, evaluate alternatives, test scenarios, and refine recommendations.

Research from eMoney shows that clients want to be involved in the planning process. Creating more opportunities for participation can help clients better understand their choices while strengthening engagement and the advisor-client relationship.

What Is Collaborative Financial Planning?

Collaborative financial planning is an approach in which advisors and clients actively work together throughout the planning process. Instead of clients simply receiving recommendations after the analysis is complete, they have opportunities to explore their financial situation, understand assumptions, compare alternatives, and participate in decisions.

eMoney’s Planning Better Together research, which surveyed 654 financial professionals and more than 1,200 consumers, found that 78 percent of consumers want to be actively involved in the financial planning process.

Yet there’s an opportunity for advisors to make planning even more collaborative. Just 19 percent of advisors surveyed were highly collaborative across five key planning activities.

Why Is Collaboration Important in Financial Planning?

A financial plan may contain sophisticated analysis, but clients still need to understand the choices they’re making and feel confident moving forward.

Collaboration can help bridge that gap by making clients active participants rather than passive recipients of advice. Advisors can use planning conversations to demonstrate potential outcomes, explore competing priorities, and help clients understand the reasoning behind recommendations.

This approach can help clients better understand how individual decisions connect to their broader financial goals. It can also give advisors greater insight into what matters most to their clients as they evaluate different possibilities together.

This can be particularly valuable when clients face decisions without one obvious answer. Seeing how different choices could affect their goals can make abstract financial concepts more tangible and help clients evaluate tradeoffs in the context of their own lives.

Collaboration can also give advisors opportunities to learn more about their clients. As clients react to different scenarios and possibilities, advisors may uncover priorities, concerns, or preferences that wouldn’t necessarily emerge from financial data alone.

How Can Advisors Make Financial Planning More Collaborative?

eMoney research identifies five activities that can create opportunities for advisors and clients to engage more actively in the planning process.

1. Compare Plan Options and Stress-Test Scenarios

Rather than presenting one recommended path, advisors can show clients how different decisions or circumstances could affect their financial plans.

Comparing alternatives can help clients understand the potential consequences of their choices and see how their plans might respond to changing circumstances. Clients may ask insightful questions about their preferences while viewing comparisons.

2. Analyze the Client’s Current Course

Before discussing potential changes, advisors can help clients understand where their current financial behaviors and decisions may be taking them.

Reviewing the client’s current course together establishes a baseline and gives both the advisor and client a shared understanding of the opportunities or challenges the plan may need to address, and a joint understanding that changes need to be made.

3. Review Assumptions and Estimates

Every financial plan relies on assumptions—from future spending and retirement timing to investment returns, inflation, and longevity.

Reviewing those assumptions with clients can help them better understand how a plan works and give them an opportunity to provide context that may affect the analysis.

4. Review and Refine Recommendations Together

Recommendations don’t have to be the end of the planning conversation.

Advisors can review recommendations with clients, discuss questions or concerns, and refine the plan based on what they learn. This helps turn recommendations into decisions clients understand and have participated in shaping.

What Are the Benefits of Collaborative Financial Planning?

Collaboration can affect more than how a financial plan is created. It can influence how clients experience the planning relationship, and how likely they are to adopt and implement recommendations.

When clients participate in planning conversations, they have more opportunities to understand how recommendations connect to their goals, ask questions, and explore alternatives before making decisions.

That involvement can help advisors create a planning experience that feels more personalized because clients can see how their individual priorities and preferences influence the plan.

Collaborative planning may also help clients feel greater ownership over financial decisions. Instead of simply being told what to do, they’re participating in the process that leads to a recommendation.

What Outcomes Do Highly Collaborative Advisors Report?

eMoney’s Planning Better Together research found meaningful differences in client satisfaction, confidence, and business outcomes between highly collaborative advisors and their peers.

Highly collaborative advisors reported stronger client relationships and greater success in areas such as satisfaction and referrals.

These findings don’t mean collaboration alone causes better business or client outcomes. But they do suggest that giving clients a more active role in financial planning is associated with characteristics of strong advisor-client relationships.

For advisors, the opportunity is to look for places throughout the planning process where clients can participate more meaningfully rather than waiting until the end to present a finished recommendation.

How Can Client Portals Support Collaborative Financial Planning?

Collaboration doesn’t have to stop when a client meeting ends.

A client portal can give clients ongoing access to financial information, planning materials, documents, tasks, and other resources. That can make it easier for clients to revisit information, prepare for conversations, and remain connected to their financial plans between meetings.

Portals can also support a more continuous planning experience. As clients’ circumstances change or questions arise, they have a centralized place to engage with their financial lives and, depending on the capabilities available, communicate and collaborate with their advisors.

Technology itself, however, doesn’t make financial planning collaborative. Its value comes from how advisors use it to invite participation, increase understanding, and create meaningful conversations.

Make Financial Planning Something You Do Together

Collaborative financial planning isn’t simply about giving clients more information. It’s about giving them meaningful opportunities to participate in understanding their financial lives and shaping the decisions that affect their futures.

Advisors can create those opportunities by analyzing the client’s current path together, comparing alternatives, demonstrating scenarios, reviewing assumptions, refining recommendations based on what they learn, and enabling clients with access to the plan after the meeting.

Technology can help facilitate that process, but the advisor remains central. By combining interactive tools with human judgment, context, and conversation, advisors can create a planning experience that clients don’t simply receive—they help shape.

See how eMoney’s financial planning solutions can help you create a more interactive, collaborative planning experience for your clients.

Source: eMoney Advisor, Planning Better Together: The Future of Planning Is Collaborative. View the research