Rising to the top

“NaviPlan has quietly risen to become the most widely used financial planning software product in North America ”, says CFP David Drucker in the October issue of NAPFA Advisor.

Called “Q&A with Dr. Mark Evans, President and CEO of Emerging Information Systems Inc.”; the article diarizes the milestones that have led NaviPlan to the top. (EISI is the company that develops, sells, and supports NaviPlan financial planning software).

The original NaviPlan modelling tool, a project commissioned by a small financial planning firm in 1990, was built to simulate different components of financial planning to make projections into the future.

“We worked on this in a research-and-development capacity for five years,” says Evans. Once a commercial product was released in Canada and a user base had been established, the company continued developing versions of NaviPlan for the U.S. market. “We introduced NaviPlan to the U.S. market in 1997-98, and it became adopted on a large scale in 2000-01.”

Today, NaviPlan is used by independent advisors and RIAs, small to mid-sized financial planning firms, and large-scale financial institutions such as broker-dealers, banks, insurance companies, and wire houses throughout Canada and the United States.

As for future plans, Evans says that EISI will continue developing its flagship products on the browser-based platform (NaviPlan Standard Offline and NaviPlan Extended Offline), release an ASP (application service provider) platform called NaviPlan Central that will debut with NaviPlan Standard in 2005, and pursue more integration projects with other platforms and online services like Albridge Solutions (formerly StatementOne), Pershing, and others.