The mere fact that securities and financial services legislation permits, and in fact promotes, the bundling of (i) product sales, (ii) advisory services, (iii) personal client records and orders management, and (iv) principal trading against us, all in a single client session, illustrates just how corruptly powerful is the sell-side.

Changes must, and will, be made. Otherwise, society will abandon the rule of law. Until these fundamental conflicts are eliminated, the sell-side is my enemy, and it ought to be yours.

But that is an argument that I will make on another day. Today I will focus on the buy-side need for proper personal financial management and planning tools, as these will help us get out of the grasp of the sell-side.

For years, the services offering of large financial "service" companies has been product sales-driven and not client needs-driven. These companies have been much more focused on marketing their products, and trading their proprietary capital, than in providing independent and objective comprehensive financial planning service for their clients.

The result has been a spin-off of smallish boutique investment and financial planning firms that, in my view, have done a much better job for the client.

One strategic decision that some financial companies made recently has been highly successful, and I salute them although I have been told that sell-side firms did it to protect themselves against client lawsuits. I am referring to the adoption of comprehensive financial planning software used by knowledgeable registered representatives.

There are today a variety of functional financial planning programs from which to choose, but one company, EISI (http://www.naviplan.com/), is likely to become the 800-pound gorilla.

With the assistance of my brother, who is a 25-year veteran financial planner with Canada's largest financial planning company, I had a chance to recently review this Canadian-based software company's product and was impressed. This is world-class software and it is soon going to be found in the hands of financial planners and enterprises around the world.

So impressed was I, in fact, that in future I would never allow a financial planner to prepare a comprehensive financial plan for me without the use of EISI's advanced version of NaviPlan.

You might want to look into it whether you are located in North America or wherever.

Mark Evans, who has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, founded Emerging Information Systems Inc. (EISI) in 1990, but the company's growth only started to accelerate in the past four years. From a staff of 40 in 1999, EISI has grown to a firm of 240 employees, and has over 71,000 licensed NaviPlan users (i.e., registered reps), which makes them the largest provider of comprehensive financial planning software in the world.

The key to EISI's growth has been the change from Windows-based desktop applications to Web-based applications. This new approach means EISI can meet the needs of financial planner firms from one employee to 100,000 or more employees. Each financial planner, of course, has a clientele numbering in the hundreds, so there are already many people who are actually benefiting from the use of NaviPlan.

With NaviPlan, EISI positioned itself to control its niche market in much the same way Microsoft dominates the larger software solutions market.

For years, financial advisors have not had a common platform to allow all the different programs they use to talk to each other. By creating a core application program interface with more links than its competitors, EISI has resolved that issue.

In doing so, EISI positioned itself to act as a gatekeeper to advisors' desktops, which like Microsoft is a great position to hold.

For the desktop, EISI offers two distinct products: NaviPlan Standard, a goal-based product for lighter planning needs; and NaviPlan Extended, a more detailed, comprehensive, cash-flow-driven program. Both are available as NaviPlan Online and NaviPlan Offline.

For large organizations, like Canada's Investor's Group with something like 4,000 financial planners on board, EISI offers NaviPlan Enterprise Solution, which is their scalable, customizable, integrated Web-based software.

I was briefly shown both versions but saw enough in each to decide that this software is a winner.

The NaviPlan Enterprise Solution is constructed in four layers. The foundation is the database, where client files are stored. On top of that is the application layer, which is comprised of two sub-layers: the calculation engine and the engine that draws dynamic pages. The third layer is the page server, which delivers the page to the user's computer. The fourth layer is a Web browser, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which displays the view to the end user.

The system architecture enables the application programs to interface and interact with others.

The latest versions of NaviPlan allow users to define the scope of the financial planning engagement; the program then presents only those data entry screens that relate to the engagement.

Another advantage is control, a feature that is likely to appeal to major financial institutions like Citigroup. Web versions of the software allow management to grant permissions and review and monitor what every planner in the company is doing with the software. For instance, a company would enable the insurance-related modules of the program only for use by employees who hold insurance licenses.

NaviPlan can be programmed so that junior planners can create drafts of financial plans, but they will contain a "draft" or "for internal use only" notation until a superior approves the plan. Management, therefore, can monitor production, which is an essential feature in today's litigation happy society.

As you know, the best technology review is by a professional user. I took the liberty of capturing a user comment off a bulletin board.

Lee Laney (who I don't know) wrote (Feb 20, 2004) that, "The parts of Naviplan I use the most are the cash-flow analysis page, the Monte Carlo, the asset allocation, and the Net Worth and Income Tax pages. What is great about the cash-flow page is that you can get a report of a detailed cash-flow an choose to display up to 10 years (I believe) on one sheet. So, if you have a client who is paying off some debt in 2 years, purchasing a home in year 4, coming into some new assets in year 3, etc., it is easy to show to the client."

I'm sold.

As you know, I am a trader. So, in the near future, I will be seamlessly integrating NaviPlan's comprehensive financial planning software with a wide range of investment management programs, such as analytics, automated decision-support, and portfolio management.

Whether or not EISI stays the 800-pound gorilla in financial planning software, as I expect, this company bears watching. It has earned a solid record of success in the past four years at a time the whole Enterprise Solution software industry has floundered.

BCara@BillCara.com