HD Vest Investment Services(SM), the independent broker/dealer, has launched VestVision™, a goals-based financial planning software system .

Irving, TX-headquartered HD Vest Investment Services, the independent broker-dealer, has launched VestVision, a goals-based financial planning software system .

VestVision enables advisors and their clients to define and prioritize their financial goals, while tracking and visualizing the progress of their investments - whether held at HD Vest or elsewhere.

The “Priority Ladder” tool allows advisors to demonstrate how well their client is achieving their goals, stress-tested against the simulation of 1,000 potential market environments.

“Today, the overwhelming concern of most financial advisory clients is not how well their investments are performing against any particular index or market-related benchmark, but rather, on a personal level, whether they will have the money they need in order to meet their life goals and how they can best achieve that objective,” said Scott Rawlins, managing sales director at HD Vest.

The firm said that, having run pilot tests, it found that this approach helped advisors garner a higher share of their clients' assets and increased their productivity by 20–30 per cent over a 12-month period.

The concept of goals-based financial planning is a fairly new approach in the sector that reinforces investing with the objective of attaining specific life goals, rather than focusing on generating a high portfolio return or beating a benchmark.

Goals-based investing is supposed to enable individuals to address their financial needs and desires in a way which encourages them to look beyond intermittent market volatility. Backers of this approach to investing believe it also promotes positive investor behavior and can thus increase the likelihood that investors will achieve their goals.