Plan-Professional

While discussing the challenges in the fintech industry, we realized a major gap in the 401(k) consultation sector. We noticed that the consultants were enduring a plaguing concern, which had to be fixed at any cost. The flawed system in place currently requires consultants to visit companies in person, look at their 401(k) plans, aggregate data manually and then pitch the right financial services.

But that’s not the case any longer as Plan-Professional is built to fix the gap and bring in additional advantages to its consultant users. The platform offers insights to the consultants on companies and their 401(k) plans. With this information, they can seamlessly pitch fixes to the aspects where companies lack in their 401(k) plans.

Though we had identified the problem at hand and the solution, there were a few challenges and strategies we had to revisit. For a platform to offer comprehensive insights about the 401(k) plans of companies, a lot of background data collection and processing had to be done.

Another aspect of this challenge was to present the data in a visualization that will allow 401(k) consultants to easily draw inferences from the information presented. Besides, the platform should also be flexible enough to give them liberty in terms of usability and operations.

The platform should allow consultants to perform extensive searches about companies and their 401(k) plans, check additional details about companies like their investments, diversifications and other details, do a fees analysis and more.

One of the other challenges poised was in search results. One search spewed thousands of results, which became increasingly difficult for consultants to decipher and proceed. That’s why we also had to come up with a solution to simplify search results.

Because we were dealing with numbers and finance, we wanted to ensure optimum accuracy and credibility as possible. We were sure that there shouldn’t be any space for human errors whatsoever. That’s why we developed solid backend algorithms to ensure airtight search results to consultants and advisors.

For the search results, we also implemented the elastic search functionality to our algorithms to help consultants and financial advisors seamlessly search massive amounts of data sets quickly.

While doing our preliminary market research, we also noticed that experienced professionals were the major takers for the platform. There were several aspects we felt there could possibly be. There would be users who have adequate exposure to technology and there would also be professionals who are used to conventional offline methods of operations.

To ensure their onboarding was simple, we worked on an elegant user interface. We strategically placed buttons and came up with a layout that would lead users to one piece of information from the other. If you use it, you’ll feel you’ve worked on this platform before or several times. The color schemes and fonts were also incorporated strategically.

After tried and tested approaches and strategies and implementing search algorithms, the platform is now a full-fledged disclosure analysis tool, which is free. We set up an operational ecosystem that made it easier for consultants to follow an easy workflow. The platform can now generate and save leads list, write notes, create tasks, upload plans, manage retirement plan prospecting and accomplish other crucial tasks all from one single place.