Your IndustryMar 22 2019

Cashflow planning software sees surge in user numbers

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Cashflow planning software sees surge in user numbers

CashCalc has seen user numbers more than double in the past two years as advisers increasingly opted for the cashflow planning tool.

At the end of November the firm had just more than 10,000 registered users using its software, up from 9,000 in August 2018 and 5,000 in the 18 months prior. By March this had risen to 11,000 users.

The software solution has seen its funds under calculation rise by £11bn since the start of the year to £80bn today. 

The FUC figure is the sum of the total liquid assets of every client entered into CashCalc with at least one cashflow plan. This could include a personal pension or a Cash Isa which is entered into a CashCalc cashflow plan.

The provider, which this month announced it would allow third party access to its product, said a further 750,000 forecasts have been created, a figure that it said spiked in recent months as cashflow prominence increased.

Rhys Hicks, marketing officer at CashCalc, said: "This growth has largely been driven by demand for a solution to cashflow planning which does everything the adviser needs it to do as well as it being easy for the client to understand. And the feedback we receive overwhelmingly suggests CashCalc does just that.

"We are grateful to everyone who uses CashCalc to help transform their financial planning process and be more productive. We are constantly looking at ways to improve; your ideas and feedback are invaluable to what we have and will develop."

Mr Hicks added: "This latest milestone is down to our cashflow planning tool being used more and more combined with CashCalc becoming the go to place for advisers."

There are two types of cashflow modelling commonly used by advisers, stochastic and deterministic modelling.

Research from FTAdviser last year found stochastic cashflow modeling was the more popular choice for advisers to determine whether a client will run out of money in retirement, but it was not the most commonly used one.

Stochastic tools use lots of historical data to illustrate the likelihood that something will happen, such as the client running out of money. This means the tools will not produce a specific number but a range of possible outcomes. 

Deterministic tools on the other hand arrive at a specific conclusion based on the values put in by the adviser. 

The latter method is used in some of the most popular adviser tools such as Truth, CashCalc and Voyant and is considerably less complicated, although these three also use stochastic modelling in some of their features.

Scott Gallacher, chartered financial planner at Rowley Turton, said: "Whilst many advisers started out primarily with a product based financial advice model, CashCalc’s figures show that in depth ‘bigger picture’ financial planning, like I provide to my clients, is increasingly the way that advisers do things."

CashCalc last year integrated with Intelliflo's back-office software Intelligent Office to allow financial advisers to pull client data from iO into CashCalc.

In August the provider announced a new pension transfer value comparator tool would be offered as a standalone product as part of a shift to implementing a 'modularised' approach to its products, allowing financial advisers to only pay for the tools they use.