Andrew Gluck: Good afternoon,
everybody. Hi, this is Andrew Gluck. I am the CEO for www.advisorproducts.com. Today is
September 9, 2009 and if you wrote out today’s date like I did, you’ll find
that it was 09-09-09 and at 9 minutes after 9, my wife called me to tell me
that.
Thank you all for joining us. We’re going to get right
into it in a minute. I just want to remind everybody to please check out www.advisorsforadvisors.com,
a new practice management website that we actually just began. www.advisorsforadvisors.com
provides you with content that you won’t be able to find anywhere else,
and I mean that.
Over here at the front end of www.advisorsforadvisors.com,
since we’re going to be talking about practice management today, this is
relevant. At the beginning, on the homepage of www.advisorsforadvisors.com, what
you can see here is that we have the market economy news and the industry
news. Those are being aggregated by us.
Mary Rowland, a former New York Times columnist on
personal finance every Sunday for about a decade, she’s finding us the market
economy news and her husband, Bob Casey, is getting us the industry news, so
we’re really going out every day and by 8:30, we’re getting you the news that
you need to read.
One really cool section of the site is where we do
reviews, and we’ve gotten – even though we’re still in a beta – we’re still in
soft launch – we’ve had tremendous support from the applications that are in
the industry. So you can see here, for instance, this is just showing you all
the different financial planning applications that have participated and are
submitting their data. So if you want to take a look at NaviPlan Standard and
see its capabilities, you just click on NaviPlan Standard. You can write a
review of it right here. You can rate it based on these factors. But what’s
really cool is you can see all about NaviPlan Standard, a ton of data. This is
how I’ve been doing reviews of financial planning software over the years.
You can see who it’s integrated with, how much it costs,
how it does Monto Carlo, how it handles taxation, how it handled asset
location, LTC and other types of insurance.
You can also compare all the applications to each other.
So if we want to NaviPlan Standard to Wealth Station from Sungard. You just
click on it and you can do it right there and you can add in Cheshire Wealth
Manager and just expand all of that, then you can see all of these features,
feature by feature, side by side. We’ve been at this now, working on creating
this thing for many months and we are finally live and we’re about to take it
wide shortly, but we’re still in beta and making sure that everything works
great.
There are tons of other features in here that you’ve not
seen. Please, check out www.advisorsforadvisors.com.
The content is really what’s driving this whole thing. I just posted yesterday
on an application called Client Audit that allows you to do client satisfaction
surveys. I did a post the other day about how to boost traffic to your blog
and how to use www.advisorsforadvisors.com
to boost traffic to your blog.
I reviewed Money Tree’s Distribution Solutions. Mary
recently wrote about the gimmicky new fund of the day. Bob wrote about fifteen
(15) great books. We have a bunch of bloggers and they’re really contributing
all of the time and I really think that if you check out all of our blogs, Bill
Winterberg, Glenn Daily, Greg Israelson, Bill Losey, Rick Randall on Estate
Planning, Cyrus Afzali on PR, Charlie Epstein on 401k’s. So please check out
all of that.
Also, I want to remind you that every Friday at 4:00 p.m.
EST, we continue to have the Financial Advisor Webinar Series, www.advisorsforadvisors.com.
This week we have a presentation on ETFs on just a plethora of ETFs from Rick
Ferri, who is really one of the nation’s foremost experts on ETFs, very popular
with Bogle heads.
Next MarketingSmart session, http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx,
is October 7. We do these every month. The session you’re attending now, we
do them every month. I want to differentiate between these sessions, which are
really about www.advisorproducts.com,
and the Financial Advisor Webinar Series, www.advisorsforadvisors.com,
which is really not about www.advisorproducts.com,
my company.
Please check out my column in Financial Advisor
Magazine. I did something on turning 54 positively; and also follow me on
Twitter. So with that, I want to get right into it and just get into the meat
of the topic here.
In the beginning, there were three separate systems: CRM,
Portfolio Reporting, and Financial Planning. When I see beginning, I mean like
10–15 years ago. But what we’ve seen in the past is how that’ changed and that’s
what we’re going to focus on today.
We had three separate systems: Customer Relationship
Management, Portfolio Reporting (PMS), and Financial Planning Systems. You had
to manage each one separately and when I say “had to” this is how most people
are still operating. But what we’re seeing now – and I can tell you, I’m
seeing it first hand at www.advisorproducts.com
– is more and more people are moving toward integrating and getting
applications that do more.
What happened was that advisors were looking for, of
course, the famous silver bullet – the infamous silver bullet. I coined that
term 10 years ago to describe the mythical powers of an application that could
do it all. So it would be, enter your data into one application and it would
feed all of your CRM, Portfolio Reporting, and Financial Planning data. It was
an all in one application. That was the vision.
We’ve seen one or two silver bullets over the years, but
they never really caught on and that was because invariably, advisors would
find one piece of the application wasn’t up to snuff, wasn’t doing what they
want, whether it’s financial planning section was week in some cases, or maybe
other advisors didn’t like the way the CRM worked, but that’s the way advisors
are. They’re entrepreneurs. They want things done their way and they want to
pick best of breed.
What happened was, we continued to work with these sort of
silos of separate applications. That’s what has continued over the years and
they still dominate. But then we added the ability to import data. So you
started to see some progress toward creating a silver bullet by import. So,
you could manually export data from your Financial Planning application, pump
it into another application. You could manually export data from your
Portfolio Reporting software, maybe put it into Morningstar to do analytics on
portfolios. The trouble is, it’s manually intensive and also, you have to
synchronize it all the time to make sure that all the data is the latest data.
Now there’s been a revolution in Practice Management and
the revolution has already begun. It’s out there. The only thing is, the
advisors are not widely using it just yet, but what we now have is, through the
use of the web and web services – web services are little programs that make
applications talk to each other – you can now take from your CRM system, you
can pump data into your Financial Planning application. You can pump data from
your Portfolio Reporting System into your CRM or vice versa. So all these
applications now started to talk to each other over the past couple of years
and it’s created a new kind of silver bullet. It’s a silver bullet, but it’s
not the way that anybody envisioned it 10 or 15 years ago.
Now add to that the fact that now you’ve got other
applications that have joined the fray – new applications that have joined the
fray over the years. So it’s not just CRM, Portfolio Reporting, and Financial
Planning now. Advisors now have Rebalancing software like iRebal.
They have Account Aggregation Software, these
applications, like www.ByAllAccounts.com,
www.CashEdge.com, www.advisor-exchange.com, and these
are being adopted and so firms now have additional applications and they’re all
beginning now to integrate and talk to one another. When you buy software now,
it’s really important to go to the website and see who the integration partners
are. If you’re considering systems, look before you leap. Know who the
integration partners are.
What’s interesting is that in this picture, there’s
something missing. Do you know what’s missing? Clients; people. In other
words, all these systems here, they’re great for you. They improve your
efficiency, yeah. But none of them are really addressing the client directly.
That’s what’s missing.
When I say there’s been a revolution in the way you
practice, what I mean is the new application called the Client Portal that my
company is really focused on now for about three (3) years, dedicated enormous
resources to, that’s able to – just as there wasn’t Account Aggregation and now
people are using that, now there’s a new application called the Client Portal
System and it talks to and gets information from all your other systems, the
key systems being CRM, Account Aggregation, Portfolio Reporting, and Financial
Planning. Those are the ones that the Client Portal needs to be fed from. It
then gives you a view for your clients to use and a way for you to communicate
with your clients in a much more meaningful way. That’s the revolution in
Practice Management.
Now you have all of these different functions that go on
in your business, these workflows, but at the end of these workflows, there’s
information that goes to the client and that’s the big change, is creation of
this new category of software.
By the way, all of these other systems, Portfolio
Reporting, Financial Planning, they generally, most of them now are creating
their own client views, but what I’m saying is that this is a separate category
of software. Yeah, you could get one piece of the information from your
Portfolio Management software. You could get another piece from your Financial
Planning software, but in order to do it right, to get all of the data that you
want and present it in a way that clients understand and can consume, you need
a dedicated application that does nothing but that and that is focused on
client communications. That’s been the mission of www.advisorproducts.com now since
1996.
Let’s just talk about what specifics in terms of this
revolution that’s occurring. The old system, the old way that most people are
still using, an advisor’s going to track items that you need to do for
clients. Hopefully you’re going to track them in your CRM system. The client
is totally unaware of this. The client doesn’t know what you do for him – not
exactly. He has an idea, maybe, but under the new system, the advisor is going
to display everything that’s achieved and things that are pending to his
client.
Another thing might be that you need to get something from
a client. You need to get him to send you a tax return, for instance –
something as simple as that – or fill in an IRA form. It used to be that you’d
wait. You’d ask the client for it, call him up, send him an email, write him a
letter, and just wait and maybe you tracked it, but changes are, you might not
have.
What the Client
Portal System does is create a systematic way of tracking those things that
you assign to clients so that the client is accountable to you and you’re more
accountable. This is transparency. It’s the way of the world now.
It used to be that when you wanted to collaborate with
other professionals, what would you do? Hold a conference call or maybe you’d
get together in person. Now you can do this over the web using the Client
Portal System as a basis for the collaboration.
It used to be under the old regime that you would document
your prophecies, maybe you would, and you really should. Now more and more
CRMs understand that in order to deliver their value proposition, they have to
embed workflows and processes for advisors in the CRM system and I expect to
see a lot more activity around that because it’s so key to advisor firm success,
and especially after what we’ve been through in the past year –it’s been a year
now – this has become critical to productivity, is creating processes and
helping advisors get more organized. The way to do it is to embed workflow
into CRM.
I’ve lived this, by the way. I’m living this in our
company. We’ve installed systems to do this as well. So you can just see
there are many ways that things have changed. It’s kind of like Web 1.0 versus
Web 2.0.
The Client
Portal System, the way it accomplishes all of these things, the way it
helps you pull off all of these tasks, is by using Web Services, like I said –
integrations with other applications.
Over here on this table, you see all the applications that
the Client
Portal System is integrated with. It can feed data from and can take data
from. It goes both ways, generally, and so – actually, there’s fifteen (15) of
them. I am missing LaserApp, www.laserapp.com,
I just realized.
You can see among the four main categories, Account
Aggregation, Portfolio Reporting, Financial Planning, and CRM systems, were
integrated with almost all of the top players and we’re adding new integrations
all the time, quite frankly.
So let’s just look at some of the details on that. I’m
pulling some screenshots from the Client
Portal System to show you this, so please bear with me. I’ll show you some
screenshots first of the Portfolio Reports. These are portfolio reports that
we have produced in PortfolioCenter and Advent Axys and they’re all leveraging features
that we’ve created in AdvisorVault, a vault system that we’ve built.
Just to give you some details, all of our reporting
systems are going to be moving to look like this as much as possible. We’ve
done integrations now with, as you saw, a number of portfolio systems. Our
reports, these are HTML reports that you can get out of PortfolioCenter and Advent
Axys so you actually have to do an upload. What we’re working towards right
now with www.albridge.com, in fact, is
making this so that it will be seamless and done with www.albridge.com, you actually won’t need to
do any upload. But these reports, more and more, all of the systems that we are
integrated with in the Portfolio Reporting area, all of them will start to look
more and more like this.
So this is a holding report done out of PortfolioCenter
where you take extract – there’s a standard extract that comes with
PortfolioCenter – and you upload that data (and we can do this with Axys as
well). You upload that data to a web server that goes to our secure web server
which processes it so you’re uploading one file and we just set it up so you
can actually walk away from it and not have to watch it. You can upload that and
it generates it, renders these HTML reports. The beauty of it is that these
reports are clickable and linkable.
You can sort any column listed on this page here. I can
sort the Values column, for instance. Just moving on, this is a real-live Gain/Loss
Report and it expands. This is not a detailed view. A detailed view looks
like this. You just click on Expand All, which is over here and that’s
what gives you a detailed view so you can see the actual tax lots and generate
that report.
This is the Transaction Report. What’s really nice is you
can take all these reports – the client can – and export them to an Excel
spreadsheet. To do that, you just click on this button over here, Export to
Excel, and you get that. These reports also have a Print to Friendly
format so the idea is to make it so that advisors can very easily get HTML
reports to their clients; just have that done in minutes.
The HTML is meant to be used daily or weekly, while you
can also do reports in PDF. That brings us to discussing Secure Document
Sharing.
The Vault comes with folders that you can see here: Debt
Consolidation, Estate Planning, Family Finances. So you can create these
template folders – these folders that all clients see. You create them all at
once when you create your client vault. This way you set it up once and you
have it so all clients get those folders. You can organize your practice
around these folders, and your client communication around these folders.
Particularly, if you’ve done the workflow thing and really
thought through which documents you produce for your clients regularly, this is
helpful.
Some of the other features in the Vault is that we just
added a Communication Console so you can actually send branded template emails
to clients. For instance, let’s say that you want to notify clients after
you’ve uploaded your PDF Quarterly Report. Well, you can very easily just
create a bulk notification that all the clients will get. It says the same
thing to all the clients, includes your branding. You write it once and you
can reuse it. You could also use it, by the way, when you send one report just
to one client. So creating those branded template emails, again, productivity
enhancement. You don’t have to do that. You do it once, set it up, forget
it. You can send it out in bulk or one at a time.
Another nice feature in the Vault system is that clients
can actually upload documents themselves. The workflow on it is very simple.
You create temporary passwords then the client creates a permanent password.
So the system generated a temporary password that’s good for a few hours and
then the client has to change that. So the client gets an email saying “This
is your temporary password, please go and change it now.” The client goes and
changes that to something that he remembers. It’s much easier to remember a
password when you created it yourself.
The system is fully redundant. That’s really important.
So when you save something to the client vault, it gets on two web servers
located in a secure SAS-70 facility. The vault system is using a Microsoft
SharePont backbone. We’re leveraging a lot of features that Microsoft builds
into the system in order to produce that. It relies on 256 bit encryption and
you can also add professionals.
If you want to add outside professionals, a lawyer or
accountant, you can do that in minutes.
To me, perhaps the most exciting part of creating the Client
Portal System is integrating with CRM systems. CRM systems, to some degree
I think, they’re poorly named because Customer Relationship Management programs
are really used more by advisors to manage their own businesses, rather than
actually managing their clients, but we’re changing that and making the Client
Portal System the client-facing part of your CRM system. I’ll give you
some very examples of that.
What you’re seeing here is one screen on the Portal
System. This is actually what the Portal System looks like. I’m just paging
down, so this is what you’re seeing, this view. I’m going to show you
screenshots as we go on now, of these different things. It’s much faster to do
it this way than screenshots. It keeps me more organized, quite honestly.
What we’ve got then, is this line over here showing you
completed to-dos. Those are the to-dos that you’ve already completed. The
reason that we’re showing that is because client’s don’t know what you’ve done
for them unless you show it to them or tell them somehow.
Over here, we’re making it so that an advisor
automatically, from the CRM system, sees all the things that he’s done for the
client over the past twelve (12) months. It’s real easy to make that happen.
You just click on a button in the CRM System. It’s Share with Advisor
Products and then that completed To-Do or Achieved Tasks will get sent over
automatically into the client’s portal. So whenever you do something for a
client, you just click on Share with Advisor Products and the Client
Portal System gets updated. The next time the client logs in, he’ll see that
information.
What happened to me was that I went to GEICO about a year
ago and they had on there all of my activity – all of the claims that I made
and things like that over the past year – and that’s what made me think of
doing that was when I saw all of my claims that I made over the past year.
That’s the Completed To-Do view.
The way the integration works with CRM systems – and the
integration that we were looking at a minute ago is with www.redtailtechnology.com. We do
the same thing with other systems as well: EZ-Data, SmartOffice, Excelerate –
which is a version of Sales Force. My guess is that we are going to working on
one with E*Assist. These are integrations work all basically the same way.
I’m going to show it to you now and how you do some basic tasks with RedTail.
This is how you set up a client’s portal and map it to a www.redtailtechnology.com client.
So on the left, you have the www.redtailtechnology.com
client. On the right, you have the portal clients. You just click on Map/Create
Clients and that’s how you map each client in the portal system to your
clients in RedTail. So you just choose your client from your list.
I’m just giving you a close-up shot of how the John Smith
portal gets mapped to the John Smith client in Redtail, and then you just
confirm what you’ve done, make sure it’s correct, and then click Confirm
Connections. Then you’re set up.
So set up is easy and, quite honestly, we’re even making
it easier. We’re working on a way to make it so that you’ll be able to create
portals from your other applications.
This is a view of Redtail where the client’s name is John
Q. Smith, and what you do is you just click on Activities over there and
that takes you to a screen where you can set up an activity for an individual
client and you add a new activity. You set a deadline for the activity and
fill in a couple of other fields and then you have the button down at the
bottom here that I’ve highlighted in red that says Share with Advisor
Products.
When you click that button, then that activity can get
shared with the Client Portal. That creates the to-do in Redtail, of course,
and that to-do, when you complete it in Redtail, you can just mark it as
complete and it will show up as achieved in your client’s portal. That’s how
we’re showing clients exactly what it is that you’re doing for them.
One thing I want to point out is that clients can also
comment on to-dos and you can assign clients to-dos. So it’s not just about
showing clients what you’re doing for them as you do it, but you can also
solicit information from them by assigning them to-dos. I’m just showing you
how easy that it is.
You just pull down the menu that says Portal Client
Todo and that becomes a client to-do in the system, so you might have
something like “update your beneficiaries on your insurance policy,” and when
you click on Share with Advisor Products, that to-do shows up over here
in your client’s portal.
The clients can also, on the right over here you’ll see,
they can comment on different to-dos and that can be very helpful for just
tracking a conversation. When the client adds a comment, that will go back
into your CRM system and be retained over there. So, all of the information –
you kind of have an audit trail for all the to-dos and for tracking all of
those.
In Financial Planning, we’re integrated with MoneyGuidePro
( www.moneyguidepro.com). We’re
also integrated with the application I’m showing you now, which is Finance
Logix, (www.financelogix.com) and I’m
hoping to do this with other Financial Planning applications. We’ll be working
on that over the next year. That’s going to be a major goal, is getting more
Financial Planning applications to look like what you’re seeing here.
Again, just to make sure you understand where you are, let
me just go back to the view of the portal.
When the client comes to his portal page when he signs in,
this pulls the latest financial planning data from www.financelogix.com, in this case.
What the client sees is four different goals. He can see whether or not he has
funded his goals. These are client-defined goals out of Finance Logix.
Finance Logix really has a great-looking interface. I’ll just show you what I
mean. It uses Adobe Flex so that it really creates great-looking graphics.
So in this case, we actually did not render the graphics,
we’re just bringing it right in from them.
This is a really nice feature where the client can come in
here and do what’if’s on his plan. It doesn’t change his plan, but the client
can say, “You know what? Let me see what it looks like if I assume that I’m
going to have $150,000 a year retirement income,” and as you can see, the
client at age 80 or so runs out of money.
Another nice feature in the Financial Planning window is
that the client can see his Net Worth Statement and Cash Flows on a rolling
basis.
Then there is an insurance summary just summarizing all of
the information that the client needs about his LTC policy and his life
insurance policy and disability policy. So it’s all summarized into one neat
view for the client.
Another feature in the portal is the ability to create
personalized newsletters. What I’ll do actually is I’ll show you what I’m
talking about on the live portal system here.
These stories are fed in from our content, so this is all
original content and it’s no longer enough to just send clients all the same
newsletter. What you can do is give each individual client his own newsletter
so when the client logs in, this is geared to his interests so you could see
this story, the numbers behind the global crisis. So the client can come in
here and he can rate the article and he can email you about the article by just
clicking over there.
What nice is you can personalize this. That story was
geared to business owners. That content was set up for business owners, but if
you want, you can just click on Pre-Retiree, or the client can actually
do this and just update his profile himself.
Over here on the right are available keywords and on the
left are selective keywords. The client can come in here and say, “You know
what, I want information about Art,” and now Art is over here on the right.
The client also can come in and just say, “Give me some feed. I have diabetes
and I want to stay up to date on things having to do with diabetes,” or God
forbid, cancer. The client can just add the feeds that he wants to really
create a very personalized home page for himself. That’s really one of the key
things that we’re doing is just creating a very personalized statement for the
client in every way. This is very personalized, all of the content.
As you scroll down, you can see over here you have these
different news feeds. These things all, by the way, can be moved around very
easily on the system. The client can move around his feeds and put them
wherever he wants. So that’s how the content is created.
Really what we’re talking about is straight through
processing of client information, whether it’s from your CRM system, your
Financial Planning system, or your Portfolio Reporting system. The idea is
that you enter data once into your CRM system or your planning system, but that
data gets converted to a client-facing report and it’s put into context in the
Client Portal system.
So much has been made over the last 10–12 years of getting
clients performance reports online. The one thing that’s been left out
consistently is how you put that information in context, especially with what
we’ve been through over the past year. Batch import is showing the client the
whole picture, giving him personal finance content, but also showing him what
you’ve done for him over the past year that is not all about performance, and
the to-do manager will certainly accomplish that for you. So will showing the
client how close he is to achieving his goals. So the client is focused on
goals, not on portfolio performance.
The benefits, I think, are enormous in that it’s going to
create stickier client relationships and also just smooth your workflow in
communicating with clients, and that’s what it’s all about is gaining the
efficiency of communicating more directly with clients.
Another thing I want to mention in terms of the Practice
Management Revolution is that what we’ve seen over the past couple of years
over the internet has been a real explosion in the use of video and what I mean
by that – these are ComScore numbers: December 2008, 150 million internet
users; now 158 million internet users.
But back in 2008, each internet user watched an average of
96 videos a month. Granted a lot of them are on YouTube and they’re probably
your kids. But what we’re seeing is, across the age spectrum, people are using
video more and more. Just look at the numbers since December 2008. Now we
have 158 million internet users.
In July 2009, we had 21.4 billion videos viewed. That’s
up from 15 billion just seven (7) months earlier, so what you’ve seen is a
fifty percent (50%) increase almost between January and July, and people are
watching more videos. The need to create video marketing materials and to
communicate with clients by video just seems to be growing and growing.
I think one of the really useful tools is the one we’re
using right now – GoToMeeting. I think it’s a great application. It’s not
perfect, but it’s pretty good. I recommend checking that out because something
like this, I hit the record button when we got onto this webinar, and I’ve been
recording it and people will come back and take a look at it when they have the
time. So you can do that to market your services.
One thing we’re doing to help advisors cope with the
demand for video and the need for video, we’re about to launch a video dashboard
for all of our marketing websites. The video dashboard basically is going to
be a library of videos that we’ve created. You can see some of the videos that
we’ve already created listed below.
We started creating the videos about six months ago and I put
it on hold because I realized that what we really need is the ability for an
advisor to put a video on his site wherever he wants on his site, and be able
to put multiple videos on, and that’s what we’ve moved to do, is make it so
that you can go into the video dashboard, have up to four (4) videos at a time
on your site, for a set fee, change them out whenever them want. Just click
the button.
All these videos that we’re doing, we’re making it so that
they can be customized with your logo and photos of the key principles. Up to
three (3) principles can be in each video. The idea here is to really make it
customized and also timely. We’re using the financial news content that we
produce. We produce around fifteen (15) or twenty (20) articles a month.
We’re using that to script out the videos and create financial planning
information, so you have something like Planning for a Child With Special
Needs, a video like that, that in three (3) minutes, really can educate people
about the need for creating a special needs trust.
What I’m going to do now is open it up to questions. If
you have a question, just chat that into us and of course, one of the key
questions is when will the slides be available? The slides will be available
in the next couple of hours. We’ll distribute them and have this video
posted. Give us a few hours, please, and we’ll get the slides over to you.
We’ve got some people who actually agree with me and are
saying, I agree with what you said about CRM systems.
Question: What CRM systems
integrate with the portal?
Answer: Our
www.redtailtechnology.com
integration has been live and done for several months. So has XLR8, and we are
about to launch a new one that I was actually going to wait to announce, but
why not mention it here. We’ve been very busy on a SmartOffice integration
with EZ-Data. That’s a very large, very popular – it’s actually the largest
CRM system probably in the financial services industry with about 120,000 users
worldwide, almost all of them in the U.S.
Question: Any plans to
integrate with ACT?
Answer: No, sorry. No plans
to integrate with ACT.
Question: Can you not show
certain dos, to-dos, and activities?
Answer: Absolutely. The
only thing that you show – and I hope that I made that really clear – the only
way that you show your activities and to-dos is by deliberately sharing them,
so that’s the only way. You have to click on Share with Advisor Products
in order to get those to-dos out.
Question: In Redtail, what
separates clients by spouse and children? Can you combine a family group in
the Client Portal so that the client, the husband or wife can log in as just
one family/client portal?
Answer: Yes, absolutely. I
don’t think it’s any more complicated than “yes.” I believe that that’s how
this can be managed. If you want to have separate client portals for husband
and wife, then of course, you can do that as well.
Question: Is this being
recorded for viewing in the future?
Answer: Yes, this is.
Question: Will you integrate
with eMoney?
Answer: I would. I’d be
happy to integrate with eMoney. We are very agnostic when it comes to
integration. I’ll be very perfectly candid with you. Not all companies are
acting that way, and it’s a shame. We want to integrate with all of the
applications that you need to have us integrate with. We’ll get to them.
We’ve done fifteen (15) integrations already and we’re going to get to more.
We’re trying to knock off the most popular ones first. So yes, we’ll integrate
with anyone. We’re just looking to integrate with the firms that serve
advisors best. So let us know and let the other applications that you work
with – tell them that you would like to see an integration with the www.advisorproducts.com Client Portal
system because quite honestly, there is nothing quite like what we’re doing and
the cost is also lower than any other similar product. There is no dedicated
Client Portal system currently. No other company that is really creating a
dedicated client portal that’s in the client communications business. Other
applications do create pieces of it. They do show you your financial plan, or
do they show you your performance reports. We are the only company that I know
of that is trying to put the whole thing together, and that is all that we do.
Question: How many [sounds like: refs] does this support?
Answer: My gosh, as many as
you can send over. Scalability is not really a problem for us.
Question: Can I add my own
content to the client portal?
Answer: Oh, yes you can.
Absolutely. The client portal – and I didn’t show it – there is a blog here.
It is so easy to create a blog and it literally takes me three to four minutes
to add your blog here. Now what’s nice is that this blog – there’s a check off
box in The BackOffice for the Client Portal system that allows you to choose to
share that blog with your public site. So if you choose that, it sends an RSS
feed of your blog to your public marketing website. So yes, you can make that
happen.
Question: Is there interface
with Juncture?
Answer: No, there is not an
interface with Juncture, unfortunately. I would love to have interface with
Juncture. Please ask Juncture to integrate with us. We would love to do that.
Like I said, we just want to integrate with all the best of breed applications.
There are several questions about desktop CRMs.
Question: Have you tried using
any of these applications with retired folks? If so, how are they doing?
Answer: Our experience is
that it is the seniors are often the most active on the internet these days and
all of the applications that we’re building – the user interface, there’s
nothing but point and click. I wish I had scientific data. Give me some
months because we do track all activity in all of the client portals and
advisors can generate reports on all their client portals and see that usage
activity. So give me some time and we will get you that data.
Question: Pricing for this
service?
Answer: The pricing is pretty
– it’s not what I do, quite honestly, so it’s not top of mind and I should have
been prepared for that. But the pricing is basically for the first 100 client
portals with a marketing website, it is $3,600. For each additional 100 client
portals, it’s another $1,000 a year. So for 200 clients, it’s $4,600, and you
can buy it without the marketing website and save a little money that way.
Question: Can the client portal
be accessed through our firm’s website? For example, can we add a link or
application to our website for them to visit rather than having to go to a new
site?
Answer: Absolutely. The
login page can reside on your marketing website and it takes them right to the
login page for the Client Portal system.
Question: How would we utilize
your Client Portal if we already have a website?
Answer: Like I said, we
unbundle it and we sell it just the Client Portal system just as a standalone.
By the way, we also sell the AdvisorVault as a standalone product, so we’ve
done as good a job as we can to unbundle our products for those advisors that
want to add a vault to their existing website, for instance, they can do that.
We also sell it that way.
Question: When will the video
dashboard be available?
Answer: It went into staging
several weeks ago and it is due to come out of the staging server perhaps this
week. Today was supposed to be the final meeting on that. I’m hoping that
we’ll make that happen.
Question: Is there integration
with Excelerate or SalesForce?
Answer: The answer is yes.
We have an integration with Excelerate, which is based on SalesForce.
Question: Isn’t Redtail a
desktop-based system?
Answer: No, Redtail is a
web-based system.
Question: Will you be
integrating with Advisors Assistant?
Answer: That is the first
request we’ve ever had for that. We will consider it if we get a number of
requests.
Question: To have complete
integration and the Client Portal, what is the approximate cost? Is it
practical for a one-person office?
Answer: Yes, we do have
one-person offices and in fact, there are a number of one-person offices doing
it because I think it just enhanced productivity. In terms of the
integrations, most of the feeds that we offer, for instance, the www.financelogix.com feed, all of the
web-based feeds that we provide, they’re included in that price. The only
additional cost that you would have on the pricing that I gave before, the only
additional cost is for PortfolioCenter Advent reporting because you need a
desktop application that we’ve built to upload that data, so it does requires
some additional programming and work. But all the other feed, the www.redtailtechnology.com feed that
I showed you, the www.financelogix.com
feed, all of the other feeds, www.ByAllAccounts,
www.albridge.com, these are all at no
additional cost because they’re web-based and we can do it that way.
Question: Aren’t you actually a
competitor of eMoney?
Answer: Interesting
question. There are going to be overlaps with all of these applications. Some
of them will offer some client-facing parts. That’s just the nature of the way
entrepreneurs are. They’re all building this so if you look at www.MoneyGuidePro.com or www.FinanceLogix.com, they all have
their own client portals. They all have what they call a Client Portal
System. We are the only system that’s really dedicated to doing that. eMoney
is primarily a financial planning application. That’s really what they’ve
created and they’ve done some really great jobs on creating some client-facing
features as well.
Question: The MoneyGuidePro.
Answer: Yeah, I can show you
the www.MoneyGuidePro.com
interface. It’s not where I’d like it to be and hopefully we’re going to talk
to Bob Curtis about getting that done. Maybe you could mention to Bob Curtis
that you’d like to see an improved interface, but this was our interface. You
get a Net Worth Statement and Asset Allocation. It doesn’t give you the kind
of goal-based information that I showed you before that you have with www.FinanceLogix.com.
Question: What about e*Assist?
Answer: Like I said, we are
hoping to start working with E*Assist in the next few weeks, actually.
Question: Is there an interface
with NaviPlan?
Answer: I think you have to
ask NaviPlan. We are happy to interface with NaviPlan and have had some talks
with them. I think they’re waiting to hear people request it more.
Question: Is there an automated
process to get PortfolioCenter data?
Answer: The www.MoneyGuidePro.com data is
completely automated, yes, and there is no complexity to it really. You just
put in your usernames into the Client Portal System and that’s how you set that
up with www.MoneyGuidePro.com. It’s
really pretty simple. In terms of PortfolioCenter, it’s not automated. I
can’t say it’s automated, but we have streamlined that process more than it’s
been done before. We’ve made it faster, I believe, and better than any place
else that you’ll find it, and at a fraction of the cost. Our PortfolioCenter
and Axys uploads and the ways that you can get reports up there in batch in
HTML and PDF, I’m really proud of that.
Question: Can you go into more
detail about sharing information across legally separated firms?
Answer: Well, the way you do
that is with the client vault. For instance, you can create folders on the
vault for other professionals to see. It’s not more complicated than that.
The client can request adding a professional and then you would have to go in
and add that professional to the system and it’s really not very difficult at
all. It’s only about ten fields to fill in. We haven’t integrated this with
the CRM systems, to be really honest. I wish we could. That will probably
happen in the next year or so. But you can actually allow to-do management
with outside professionals as well, which is really useful, I think.
Question: How do you compare
with one of your competitors?
Answer: To be honest with
you, let’s not go there. I think I would love for you to just, if you’re
interested, do the comparison yourself and look at the price point and
functionality and I think we are ahead of the pack.
Question: We already use a
website from www.advisorproducts.com.
How much would it be for adding 100 portals?
Answer: Okay, assuming that
you are using our Platinum website for $2,100, it’s $1,500 for the first 100
client portals. Each additional 100 client portals is $1,000 a year. So it’s
$2,100 for the platinum website and $1,500 for the first 100 client portals.
That’s $3,600 dollars. If you want to add an additional 100 client portals, it
will be another $1,000; $4,600 total. If you don’t need a marketing website, I
think we sell the client portals without a marketing website, but I forget the
price.
Barry, if you are online – Barry is our Sales VP. Let me see if I can see him
online. I do. Barry, can I turn on your audio. Barry, are you there?
Barry Weinstein: Standalone is $3,000.
Andrew Gluck: Thank you. So what does
that mean, standalone is $3,000? Could you explain that, please?
Barry Weinstein: The portal for up to 100
clients with the vault and all the integration, would be $3,000 a year.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, so you’re saving
$600 by not having the website.
Barry Weinstein: Correct.
Andrew Gluck: Okay.
Question: Is there any plans
for an interface with Tamarac?
Answer: That’s an
interesting question. I think that from what I know of Tamarac being in
analytics, I think that it’s not a client-facing—I don’t think there would be a
reason to integrate with them. I could be wrong, so please, if I am, educate
me. Let me know.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, I really appreciate
the questions. Please fill out our survey as you exit and check out www.advisorsforadvisors.com.
Again, www.advisorsforadvisors.com,
is our new Practice Management Portal for advisors and you can get a 30-day
free trial right now. We round up the news that you need to read every day.
Over here you have Market and Economy News and Industry News, and then we have
Tech News as well coming in. We have commentary from a group of bloggers,
experts in specific areas. You have the review capability that I showed you
where you can side-by-side compare different applications, so if I want compare
Cheshire Wealth Manager – I did this before. I’ll do it real quick this time –
I want to compare Cheshire to NaviPlan Extended and MorningStar Office. I can
do that right here in seconds and you can see side-by-side all of the
information that you need about the applications that you’re thinking of purchasing.
That in and of itself, I think probably is worth the price of admission.
Another thing that you get also, though, is we have social
networking built into the site, and so when you log in, you are put into touch
with people that use the same applications that you use. So I have three
applications – my fictional advisor here has three applications with four other
advisors, and I can now go into a discussion group and exchange ideas with
other advisors. So please, there is so much here on www.advisorsforadvisors.com. The
research section is huge. We’re aggregating blogs from all over the internet,
so if you click on 401k, you can see our own blogger, Charlie Epstein, and you
can also see blogs from others about 401k’s. The same thing with Asset
Allocation and we’re just getting more and more information on here every day -
literally every day.
So I want to thank all of you for attending the
MarketingSmart Webinar Series, http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx.
Please join us every month.
Join us this Friday when Rick Ferri will be talking at the
Financial Advisor Webinar Series, http://www.advisorproducts.com/webinars.aspx,
and thank you all for tuning in.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]