HD Vest Announces Additional New Enhancements to 1040 Analyst® Tool to Align with Tax Season

IRVING, Texas, Feb. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- HD Vest Investment Services^SM – the leading independent broker-dealer empowering holistic wealth management-based financial advice – today announced that it has introduced a new round of functionality enhancements to its proprietary 1040 Analyst tool. The enhancements, based on advisor feedback, bring added ways to improve both the client experience and the advisors' ability to gain new efficiencies from the tool's utilization, and reflect the tool's ability to outline potential "blind spots" in the client's financial picture. Since its launch in June 2014, 1040 Analyst has met with enthusiastic acceptance by HD Vest Advisors and has now been adopted by over 1,000 advisors and applied to over 120,000 client tax returns to identify a wide range of tax-sensitive wealth management opportunities and vulnerabilities.

The 1040 Analyst technology draws upon each client's directly uploaded, or manually input, tax data, and incorporates relevant information about his or her personal financial situation, goals and needs, to deliver tax-sensitive insight, along with an automatically generated individually customized report, that enables an advisor providing tax and financial services to introduce a detailed discussion of specific, immediately actionable tax-related and wealth management opportunities. Since its rollout, HD Vest Advisors using 1040 Analyst have succeeded in initiating client discussions and offering new wealth management solutions that have brought in a total of more than $130 million in new investment assets.

Scott Rawlins, Managing Director, Sales, at HD Vest, said, "We are extremely pleased to introduce this new round of enhancements to our breakthrough 1040 Analyst tool, just in time for the beginning of tax season. We are thrilled with the remarkable acceptance and rate of adoption that 1040 Analyst has already experienced among our advisors even before it has gone through its first tax season, and we are certain it will yield an abundance of client insight and open up many exciting new wealth planning opportunities as it is utilized by our advisors on this year's crop of tax returns. Combine that with the fact that we have created an automated upload with the top four tax packages and advisors can realize efficiency in managing this powerful tool. "  

The latest enhancements include approximately a dozen new planning concepts for use in connection with information gleaned from the Form 1040.  Most notable include:

• A sorting and filtering mechanism – to enable advisors to take any data point across their clients' tax returns, such as income level, age, amount of interest and dividends, business or farm income, or any other input, to create a data set that can be used for targeted communications to specific client groups.
• Enhanced quick  input – to allow advisors using the "SNAP" input data entry option (instead of the tool's automated data entry and report generation feature) to complete an individual 1040 Analyst report in as little as 2.5 minutes using tax return data.
• Embedded educational components – to allow advisors to digitally insert HD Vest-approved educational pieces on a wide range of client-relevant financial management issues  – such as Roth IRAs, trusts and annuities, 529 plans or strategies for coping with the death of a family member – as well as compliance-approved advisor talking points that enable the advisor to skillfully guide the investment conversation. 

Mr. Rawlins continued, "With this latest round of enhancements – following the first round we announced back in November – we are introducing new concepts and capabilities, inspired by advisor feedback, that we had never even envisioned when we first rolled out the tool last June. This is a tremendous testament to the richness of the tool's usefulness and its easy upgradability. We will continue to incorporate new capabilities on a regular basis as more and more advisors and their clients utilize 1040 Analyst and discover ways to enhance it even further. This tool now identifies over 60 different actionable opportunities and vulnerabilities – from such basic considerations as ways to optimize retirement assets, reallocate interest and dividend-generating assets, or implement tax-advantaged college tuition planning, to far more complex tax-related situations like optimizing passive activity losses or adopting buy-sell life insurance agreements for business owners.

"We are especially pleased with the functionality of these latest enhancements. The new sorting and filtering mechanism will enable advisors to plan out carefully targeted communications campaigns to specific groups of clients based on meaningful data profiles, enhancing the efficacy of their outreach efforts. The improved manual entry option will help those advisors who choose this method to generate an immediate, customized 1040 Analyst report from newly completed client tax returns. And the new educational component allows us to provide easy-to-understand supporting documents into the 1040 Analyst report to guide and elucidate the advisor-client tax and investment planning conversation," he said.

Jerry Style, Principal of Freedom Financial Services, LLC, of Holbrook, NY, has already had success stories using 1040 Analyst even though it hasn't yet been available through a full tax season. He stated, "This year, we are going to use it with virtually every client. Even a young person with only one or two W-2s has financial issues that they need to pay attention to.

"I look forward to using 1040 Analyst because it gives me talking points and enables me to bring up the investment planning conversation when clients come in to do their tax return. The client's mindset is on getting the tax return done, and it's usually difficult to switch gears and turn the conversation to something else. But the 1040 Analyst report reinforces the notion that these concerns are just as important as your tax return and indicates which things we need to talk about. I can say, 'Let's take care of them now and not wait until April 16th.'

"About half our clients are tax-only clients, and half are also investment planning clients. I believe that 1040 Analyst is going to be a great tool to show our tax-only clients that I can be their go-to advisor not only for their taxes but for their financial planning issues as well," he concluded. 

About HD Vest Financial Services
Since its inception in 1983, HD Vest Financial Services^® has supported an independent network of tax and non-tax professionals who provide comprehensive financial planning solutions including securities, insurance, money management services, and banking solutions. Ranked as one of the top 20 independent broker-dealer firms,¹ we know what it takes to make your practice really flourish. Approximately 4,500 independent contractors manage over $37 billion in assets for individuals, families and small businesses in all 50 states.²  

¹Investment Advisor 2014 Broker-Dealer Reference Guide, which measured/ranked the top 25 independent broker-dealers by annual revenue.

²As of January 1, 2015

HD Vest Financial Services^® is the holding company for the group of companies providing financial services under the HD Vest name.

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SOURCE HD Vest Investment Services