Fintech roundup: Advisor introduces new software to manage charitable giving

Toronto-based PhilanthPro Solutions launched new financial planning software designed to help donors plan their giving.

Founded by Nicholas Palahnuk, an investment advisor in Toronto, PhilanthPro helps financial advisors create and manage goals-based financial plans for charitable accounts.

“It’s crazy that we don’t have tools to help people give their money away,” said Palahnuk, who is also CEO of PhilanthPro. “Our whole industry is set up to help people to accumulate wealth.”

Palahnuk has been an advisor for over 12 years and has primarily helped clients accumulate wealth, but he discovered the pain of not having financial planning software for giving money away when he founded his own charitable foundation.

“We can kind of force these things into traditional planning software, but it’s not ideal. The taxes are wrong, it doesn’t account for grant planning . . . and it’s not easy to use,” he said.

PhilanthPro’s features include a grant planning tool to help donors keep track of grant commitments, a governance and records portal, and a charitable relationship management system. Advisors can create hypothetical scenarios, for example, to show how a large one-off deposit or donation would affect future giving.

PhilanthPro collaborated with accounting firm Grant Thornton LLP to ensure that the CRA-required minimum distribution of funds is accurately modeled for grant planning. In addition to showing minimal distribution over a time horizon, PhilanthPro can also calculate optimal distribution and perpetuity scenarios. The software will automatically update when CRA rules change, Palahnuk said.

After spending a year performing user testing with advisors and philanthropists, he said there is “a whole army of people that are very interested in the software.” PhilanthPro has been opening accounts in the first week of its launch and Palahnuk said he’s in discussions with wealth management firms about adopting the software.

PhilanthPro is suitable for clients who have charitable accounts like foundations, trusts or donor-advised funds, Palahnuk said. Pricing ranges from $3,000 to $5,000 a year depending on client needs.

It is also available in the U.S. and designed to work with the American tax system.

Wealthica opens API to other firms

Financial management platform Wealthica is opening up its application programming interface (API) to other financial institutions, with Wealthsimple using the tool to facilitate account transfers.

Wealthica, which aims to give financial advisors a complete view of their clients’ assets, can show an individual’s accounts from over 150 Canadian financial institutions and brokerages in one place. The platform updates information from financial accounts daily to aid in financial planning and portfolio management.

Wealthica’s API has powered National Bank-owned financial data aggregator Flinks since 2020, and it became available to other fintech platforms after the exclusivity deal ended in May 2023 .

Jeff Matte, Wealthica’s managing director, said Wealthsimple is using Wealthica to help investors transfer registered savings accounts, such as TFSAs and RESPs, from other financial institutions.

Firms often block transfers if there’s “a slight mistake” in the documentation, he said. “For the user, it’s really a painful experience.”

Wealthica’s feature in Wealthsimple allows users to complete the transfer on their smartphone with the system automatically filling in the regulatory forms. “In the future, we’d like to implement that in every brokerage in Canada,” he said.

Wealthica is also rebuilding its budgeting tool with an update planned by the end of the first quarter of this year, Matte said. “We’re really good at connecting accounts and fetching the transaction [data]. The key for budgeting is really the transactions.”

The Montreal-based company, founded in 2015 by Martin Leclair and Eric Lemieux, has over 50,000 users in Canada and $33 billion in aggregated assets, according to a release.

Minerva creates new channel program for anti-money laundering detection

Toronto-based anti-money laundering compliance technology firm Minerva launched a new channel program with Equifax to help financial organizations detect risk from crime.

“What Minerva is hoping to achieve is to show traditional financial services that there’s a far more efficient and effective way to meet their obligations as well as proactively address financial crime in their business,” Jennifer Arnold, co-founder and chief executive officer of Minerva, told Advisor.ca.

Traditionally, compliance professionals used a piecemeal approach to collect client information from multiple software programs and Google search, which isn’t an efficient way to determine risk and decide whether to conduct business with someone, Arnold said.

Minerva uses deep learning models and neural networks to analyze “billions” of data points to help financial organizations detect crime risk. It creates risk analysis of individual customer profiles for elements such as political exposure, sanctions and ongoing investigations. It can also perform fraud analysis in real time to predict and prevent financial crime, she said.

“Instead of waiting to get information back from somebody else . . . you can call it up in a matter of seconds and be really comfortable with the decisions that you’re making,” Arnold said.

Minerva and Equifax started working together about a year ago. Integration with financial services companies is available as a direct API from Minerva and through Equifax’s existing API arrangement with Minerva.

There are at least four other companies that have integrated Minerva into their operation, Arnold said.

“The responsibility is real for everyone in financial services to really understand who they’re doing business with [and] to make sure that they’re not facilitating money movement for criminals,” she said. “The quicker you can discover that the better off you will be.”