News

Client Reports: How Less Can Be More

Written by Bill Winterberg, MorningstarAdvisor Tuesday, 15 May 2012

To deliver thorough financial plans to clients, financial advisors may be compelled to deliver lengthy reports illustrating how a variety of circumstances, assumptions, and projections can affect the outcome of client goals. While these reports serve as the primary deliverable in the planning process, clients may become paralyzed by the enormity of large plan documents and their endless recommendations.

In addition, most advisors create plans independently after gathering client goal information in discovery meetings, as opposed to engaging clients in an iterative process with immediate feedback. Advisor Software Inc. (ASI) is tackling the issue of mind-numbing plan documents and lack of client collaboration with a new tool that creates simplified client deliverables and helps set expectations of attainable financial goals. Read More..

TD Ameritrade's promise of creating an RIA version of Apple's app store may have found its prototype signing

Written by Brooke Southall, RIABiz Tuesday, 15 May 2012

TD Ameritrade Institutional has been billing its approach to technology as a sort of Apple App Store for RIAs. It sounds good, but the app-for-that side of things has been missing to an extent. There hasn’t been much of the worlds of whizbang technologies that make app stores candy stores for geeks.

But a deal the Jersey City, N.J.-based RIA custodian did with across-the-Hudson River HiddenLevers shows it is now getting around to creating some fun, for a modest price. HiddenLevers is charging an annual $3,000 fee for a single user and $6,000 for a group license (up to five users).

The technology allows advisors to pump in information about portfolios and apply a stress test that discerns how risky it is. See:Advisor Tested: HiddenLevers roots out hidden connections between world events and client portfolios. StatPro Inc. and MacroRisk Analytics are two other firms inhabiting this world. Read More..

Davis Janowski: Sometimes one is better than two

Written by Davis D. Janowski, InvestmentNews Friday, 27 April 2012

Developers of computer technology strive to simplify tasks or increase efficiency, but all too often, they make things more complicated.

Not so for the creators of Orion Connect, a Salesforce App Ex-change application, which improves work flow in a way that is resonating with big registered investment advisers.

Essentially, what Orion Advisor Services LLC has done is meld Salesforce's customer relationship management application and Orion's popular portfolio management/reporting application, using Salesforce's programming interface. Read More..

Never mind Tamarac, Envestnet is getting RIAs on board with its own stand-alone software

Written by Brooke Southall, RIABiz Friday, 27 April 2012

Spire Investment Partners LLC uses Fidelity, Schwab and Pershing for custody of its RIAs assets and Pershing and National Financial to clear its broker-dealer assets. Yet even with the backing of those heavy hitters and, previously, one of the industry’s big software providers, the McLean, Va.-based company needed to overcome a technical challenge.

“Unlike most firms our size, each of our businesses is a stand-alone unit, according to Paul Murphy, executive vice president of Spire. “We don’t have firm-wide strategies.”

Spire moved to solve that problem recently when it signed on with Envestnet Inc., using the Chicago outsourcer’s Vantage software. Read More..