Advisor Blog

Advisors Sound Off On Financial Advisor Webinar Series


It's been just over a year since we started the Financial Advisor Webinar Series in the throes of the global financial crisis, and I have to say it's been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my career.



The Series started out as a way to support advisors at a time when it looked like the global economic system was about to collapse, and it was originally known as The Financial Crisis Webinar Series. Over the past year, as we backed away from the edge of the abyss, we've continued the webinars every Friday at 4 p.m.



We've been privileged to produce sessions that inform advisors about how to run their businesses better and cope with the upheaval of recent months. And advisors have responded.



About 200 advisors attend the live sessions and another 300 listen to replays every week. And more advisors steadily continue to participate.



Last week's session featured compliance specialist Chris Winn, of AdvisorAssist, offering tips on 2010 compliance planning for RIAs. He was great. (See comments from attendees below.)



We ask advisors to fill in a survey after each webinar. The average rating of attendees at this session was 4.4, putting it among the highest rated of the 49 sessions we've produced.



What amazes me is that from last February, when we started systematically tabulating the ratings of each session, through the end of August, only two sessions had better than a 4.4 average rating. However, five of the last eight sessions has a rating of 4.4 or better. (And we're getting these high scores despite my clumsy skills as a moderator!) Your feedback is genuinely appreciated.



Please remember that many of the sessions are eligible for continuing education credit from the CFP Board of Standards. Also, keep in mind that you can receive free CE credit by attending any of the live sessions, and you can get CE credit on replays of many sessions by becoming a member of our new advisor practice management portal, Advisors4Advisors.com.



Below is feedback from attendees of last Friday's session about RIA compliance. Please join us at an upcoming session or log in to A4A to discuss any webinar with other advisors.



Comments and feedback from advisors who attended 2010 RIA Compliance Planning with Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist:




  • Thank you - just keep doing it.

  • Very informative. My first look at Advisors for Advisors.

  • Excellent

  • Great timing for a compliance webinar. Thank you for the presentation.

  • Good topic coverage

  • It is refreshing to have someone who can speak compliance language in easily understandable terms. Chris obviously knows his stuff.

  • Great session. One of your best yet.

  • Terrific content! Wish we had time for more questions.

  • Very informative, good supporting visuals, well presented.

  • Really great info...too much for one hour!

  • Great webinar. The best one that I've seen from Advisor Products

  • This one was fantastic

  • No complaints

  • Excellent, Chris made the subject matter very understandable. Thank you

  • Very informative

  • Great webinar! Gets you started thinking about the different issues to address.

  • This was truly a great webinar and I thank you so much for providing this to us. Great job!

  • Excellent presentation. Very helpful.

  • Excellent content

  • Considering the amount of potential info and the time available it was very well done.

  • I thought it was great, would love to get copies of the slides.

  • Well done and useful

  • Fantastic + extremely useful - one of the BEST you have ever hosted. full of very useful + actionable items.

  • Great Webinar. Can't think of anything you could have done to improve it.

  • Excellent - very good topic choice - obviously, a topic like this will have many basic components to it as well as some issue some just venturing into the fray may think are overwhelming, but the presenter did a nice job of balancing so there was something for everybody (more than likely) to take away

  • It was helpful. thank you.

  • Outstanding informative and very comforting.

  • I learned a few new things such as the potential for the SEC to raise the minimum assets under management to $100,000,000 to be registered with them

  • Important issues most advisors don't work with on a daily basis

  • Nice outline of issues.

  • Covered a lot of material I already knew but was good to be reminded anyway.

  • Good overview for office manager, though went fast and I'll need to review the replay

  • Good coverage of some of the basics of compliance. The idea of a Compliance Calendar is useful.

  • Good information. Condense and do more frequently.

  • I thought it was very well done. Chris is knowledgeable and shared that information well. I appreciated his willingness to spend extra time answering questions afterward.

  • It is a dry subject, but overall it was packed with important info.





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5379 Hits

Advisors Feeling The Power Of The Internet


JasonV510 says Act! is “flexible for client tracking and management but not great for the true financial professional.”



TaylorF519 says MoneyGuide Pro “really takes its job seriously and wants to put the best and most innovative product out there!”



Of PortfolioCenter, TerryH770 says: “I was originally skeptical of Schwab owning the software, but to this point it has only been beneficial.



These comments aren’t quotes from a reporter’s interviews.



They’re comments from real advisors talking about software applications for advisors.



They’re not made up. They’re not filtered. And they’re as close you come to truth about an advisor’s practice management applications as you can get.



As a reporter who had to become an entrepreneur to do my job the way I wanted to, I’m excited to be living in the middle of the information revolution.



Most reporters aren’t so happy, however. With regular people reporting the news instead of professional reporters, man daily bites dogs and regular people cover it without journalists.



Sure journalists are still going to be needed to give us insight into big news stories. But much of the content once created by newspapers and magazines can be replaced and made better by empowering people to report the news.



JasonV510, TaylorF519, and TerryJ770 are more important than anything I can say as a reporter.



Sure, I’m pretty smart, and I write well. But what you say matters more, and the collective intelligence of a group of users of an advisor practice management application is more important than my assessment.



That’s what’s happening now at advisors4advisors.com. Advisors are logging in every day and rating the applications they use in their practices. That's why we called it advisors4advisors.



Members of advisors4advisors see the average rating of an advisor app from a group of advisors who use that app and they can also see each individual rating by an advisor for financial planning, customer relationship management (CRM) and portfolio management software (PMS) applications.



We cover just about every PMS, CRM and planning application, and we’re adding new categories of apps every week. Last week, we added rebalancing software and this week we’re adding account aggregation systems.



We also have asked all of the major providers of practice management apps to fill in detailed specifications checklists about their products in the advisors4advisors review section.



This allows advisors to compare different practice management apps feature-by-feature, side-by-side.



The independent advisory industry’s vendors have filled in their specifications on advisors4advisors so far, including EISI, E-Z Data, MoneyGuide Pro, Schwab Performance Technologies, SunGard, Morningstar, Orion and Redtail.



Just about every major vendor in the industry is participating or planning to do so in the next few weeks.



Please contribute to the discussion. Join us at
advisors4advsors.com. Come feel the power of the Internet.











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5406 Hits

See Three CRM Workflow Engines Today At 4 ET


At this afternoon’s webinar at 4 p.m. ET, Blane Warrene, an operations consultant, is going to talk about how advisory firms can embed their processes in their CRM.



This is the single most important way to improve your efficiency, scalability, and client service.



To help Blane illustrate how you do this, I asked three of the leading CRM vendors specializing in the independent advisor market (Junxure, Redtail, and XLR8) to provide two-minute videos showing how you use theirn software to embed your workflows.



We’re going to show each of the two-minute videos at Blane’s presentation today and post them for members of advisors4advisors.



Register for today’s webinar here.


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5104 Hits

Advisors Can Now Post Articles On Advisors4Advisors

Empowering independent advisors to share ideas, Advisors4Advisors (A4A) today started allowing advisors to post links to articles, videos, and other online content.



The three news sections on the A4A home page
Market & Economy News, Industry News and Technology News—now accept advisor submissions.



To post news items, an advisor clicks on “Post An Article” and submits a headline, description, and link. The item must be approved by an editor before it is posted.



This is the latest integration on A4A of advisor-generated content. A4A recently enabled advisors to rate the industry’s practice management applications.



Advisors every day are adding new ratings and reviews of software applications for portfolio reporting, financial planning, and customer relationship management.



A4A also networks independent advisors who practice the same way. Advisors using the same three portfolio management, financial planning, and CRM applications they use in their practice are placed in groups.



In addition, A4A provides detailed reviews of dozens of advisor applications. All major vendors providing software to independent advisors have access to a site where they fill in matrixes detailing their specifications. The matrixes are displayed in the Review section of A4A and enable advisors to compare apps feature-by-feature, side-by-side. A4A is the first and only website to make this information easily accessible.



A4A has about 1,000 members and is in beta. Additional information and a 30-day trial membership are available at www.advisors4advisors.com. If you’re interested in becoming an A4A sponsor, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..










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5578 Hits

Attendees Comment On Roth IRA Conversion Webinar


While we normally average a 4.2 rating from attendees, last week’s session of the Financial Advisor Webinar Series received a 4.4.



The session offered ideas about how to advise clients on Roth IRA opportunities. While entitled, Seizing The Roth IRA Opportunity,” it was not so much about jumping on the marketing bandwagon for Roth IRA conversion as it was about the complexity of the conversion decision.



Featured presenter Ben Norquist of
Convergent Retirement Plan Solutions illustrated the dynamics of the conversion decision using a tool he recently launched, the Roth IRA Conversion Optimizer.



Here are the unabridged comments attendees provided us in the exit survey:





· It was one of the best Roth seminars I have attended.

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5595 Hits

4Q09 Quarterly Market Summary Available To RIAs


Advisor Products’ Quarterly Market Summary becomes available Monday for the fourth quarter of 2009.



QMS is a comprehensive analysis of activity in stock and bond markets and examines a range of asset classes.



It is utilized as a companion piece with quarterly performance reports provided by RIAs.



Written by a veteran financial reporter and edited by one of the nation’s leading financial editors, QMS is delivered to subscribers as an eight-page Microsoft Word document 10 days after the end of every quarter. You can cut, paste, and edit QMS to fit your needs.



Each quarterly release of QMS typically covers performance of:





  • S&P 500 large cap stocks




  • Russell 2000 small cap stocks




  • Growth versus value stocks




  • Corporate earnings




  • Foreign stocks




  • Emerging markets




  • U.S. Dollar versus Euro




  • Fixed income markets




  • Two versus 10-year Treasurys




  • Corporate bonds




  • Economic growth




  • Fed interest rate policy




  • U.S. Retail sales




  • Consumer confidence




  • Unemployment




  • Consumer Price Index







Because of the time sensitive nature of the content, QMS is submitted for review by FINRA only after it is distributed to RIAs. Registered reps, therefore, should consult with their broker/dealer about its use.

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5427 Hits

Power Of Social Media Seen In Haiti Earthquake


The tragic events in Haiti are being recorded and reacted to live on Twitter. To see the live feed, click here.



Text YELE to 501501 to give $5 for earthquake relief in haiti. Your cell phone will be charged $5.


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5052 Hits

Feds Want All FAs To Be Fiduciaries


Way back on page 72 of the regulatory reform white paper released yesterday by the U.S. Treasury is some pretty big news for financial advisors.



“We propose the following initiatives to empower the SEC to increase fairness for investors,” says the Treasury white paper. “
Establish a fiduciary duty for broker-dealers offering investment advice and harmonize the regulation of investment advisers and broker-dealers.”



Entitled, Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation, the white paper makes official the Obama Administration’s intention to put registered reps and advisors at RIAs under the same set of regulatory rules. That’s not a surprise to anyone.



“Retail investors are often confused about the differences between investment advisers and broker-dealers,” according to the white paper. “Meanwhile, the distinction is no longer meaningful between a disinterested investment advisor and a broker who acts as an agent for an investor; the current laws and regulations are based on antiquated distinctions between the two types of financial professionals that date back to the early 20th century. “



What is a surprise is that the Administration is asking to impose a fiduciary obligation on brokers. Of course, only advisors at RIAs are now fiduciaries, and thus obliged always to do what is in a client’s best interest. That is a much higher standard of care for clients than is imposed on registered reps, who must only ensure they are giving advice suitable for their clients.



The Treasury says in the 89-page paper that RIAs and Registered Reps are the same to retail investors. “In the retail context, the legal distinction between the two is no longer meaningful,” says the Treasury white paper. “Retail customers repose the same degree of trust in their brokers as they do in investment advisers, but the legal responsibilities of the intermediaries may not be the same. The SEC should be permitted to align duties for intermediaries across financial products. “



“Standards of care for all broker-dealers when providing investment advice about securities to retail investors should be raised to the fiduciary standard to align the legal framework with investment advisers,” according to the Treasury Department. “In addition, the SEC should be empowered to examine and ban forms of compensation that encourage intermediaries to put investors into products that are profitable to the intermediary, but are not in the investors’ best interest.”



The Administration is calling for new legislation:




requiring that broker-dealers who provide investment advice about securities to investors have the same fiduciary obligations as registered investment advisers

providing simple and clear disclosure to investors regarding the scope of the terms of their relationships with investment professionals

prohibiting certain conflict of interests and sales practices that are contrary to the interests of investors.

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5258 Hits

CE Credit On Webinar Replays


When the U.S. economy seemed like it might collapse last October, Advisor Products hosted a webinar for advisors in an effort to help to help them cope.



Attendees were so grateful, we did it the following week.



Pretty soon, it became clear that advisors wanted us to bring them this information regularly. Thus was born the Financial Crisis Webinar Series, which brings advisors leading thinkers from the financial advisory profession every Friday at 4 p.m. EDT



We’ve now hosted 32 webinars , replays are always available, and since January we have offered continuing edcuation credit for Certified Financial Planner
® licensees.



Last week, we upgraded our registration platform. As a result, you are now be able to receive continuing education credit when viewing webinar replays.



With the new registration system, you register just once. We’ll drop a “cookie” into your browser—
a short line of texton your computer's hard drive—and you’ll be recognized without registering the next time you return. If you use a different computer, you’ll need to log in again, however. Before this upgrade, you had register your information each time you wanted to view a webinar replay.



The new registration system also allows you to access videos and request more information about our services from the Advisor Products website. Videos explain our client portal system, newsletters, AdvisorVault, and Online Reporting for Advent Axys or PortfolioCenter.



Advisor Products clients will continue to use their existing log-in credentials for accessing the BackOffice for managing your website, email newsletter, and newsletter. That is unaffected by these changes.



It is our privilege to be able to bring you The Financial Crisis Webinar Series. Join us this week to hear Mark Tibergien, CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions, speak about the link between operational efficiency and human capital.







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5168 Hits

Jon Stewart’s Double Play


In a hilarious double-play, comedian Jon Stewart last night hammered Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, a former Mets centerfielder turned financial-advisor-in-bankruptcy, and then tagged TV financial personality Jim Cramer with a jarring comedic blast.



Stewart began a segment on last night’s show by focusing on the irony of the bankruptcy filing by Dykstra, who touted himself in recent years as a successful investment advisor and was profiled in 2008 as a “financial whiz kid” on the HBO program Real Sports. Dykstra, who told a Real Sports reporter that he did not read books because it was bad for his eyes, reportedly was sued by 20 creditors by the time he filed for bankruptcy on July 7.



Stewart revived his public humiliation of Cramer by playing an interview of Cramer on the HBO show in which he hails former Mets hero Dykstra’s as a brilliant financial advisor, “one of the great ones in this business.”



The irony of the baseball legend turned stock-guru’s misfortune provided Stewart with great material. Dykstra, 46, became a New York Mets hero for hitting a walk-off home run in Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, when the Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox in seven games to win one of baseball’s most memorable World Championship Series.



Cramer, the extremely energetic host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and founder of TheStreet.com, is a former hedge fund manager. Prone to hyperbolic rants, Cramer was the subject on March 4 and March 9 of scathingly funny blasts by Stewart. Stewart, the popular host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” assembled a string of video clips in which the self-proclaimed “infotainer” of finance made glaringly wrong investment predictions. Stewart wrecked any credibility Cramer might have had in the financial media by showing Cramer urging stock investors to “be buying things and accept that they’re overvalued, but accept that they’re going to keep going higher” a few months before the global financial crisis caused a stock market collapse. Stewart and Cramer’s public showdown became famous and then faded—until last night.










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Important Content For Advisors


The launch of advisorsforadvisors this month is moving ahead and our growing list of bloggers began providing important content for advisors. Some of the posts:






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5170 Hits

Link Exchanges And Advisor Websites


From what I can piece together, an ongoing thread on the discussion board of the National Association of Personal Finance Advisors has been for months creating excitement about NAPFA members engaging in a link exchange program.



I feel obliged to clarify the benefits of a link exchange program, which may have been overstated by some NAPFA members on the discussion boards. (Please keep in mind that I don’t have direct access to the NAPFA discussions and have to piece together snippets of information relayed to me.)



A link exchange program among groups of advisors allows one advisory firm to display on its website links to other advisory firm websites.



You may ask: Why would an advisor want to link to another advisory firm? The answer: To increase your website’s “link popularity,” a factor in a site’s search engine ranking.



What advisors must realize is that link popularity is just one of many factors that determine your natural search engine ranking. Many other factors, such as your site’s content and your URL are more influential in the algorithms used by search engines to rank your site. Moreover, search engines discourage gimmicks to enhance search rankings.



“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites,” Google says in addressing link schemes. “This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results.”



Advisors who expect a link exchange program to bring a lot of new traffic to their sites are likely to be disappointed.



Despite all this, Advisor Products is creating a link exchange program for advisor websites. While the potential for abuse exists, we want to respond to requests from advisors asking for this feature and we will try to educate advisors about how to best utilize the tool.



We’re now programming a new feature in our content management system, BackOffice, to enable your firm to add a “Link Exchange” page to its website. This will allow you to quickly add links to other firms that will be displayed on your marketing website. The page on your site will be pre-formatted to look attractive and easy to read.



While enabling link exchanges with other advisory firms is unlikely to greatly enhance your site‘s search engine ranking, we want t be responsive to advisor requests for this feature and do believe a link exchange program that expands beyond advisory firms can be used productively as long as it is not used excessively.


If you have suggestions about how you would like the link exchange page to be created on your website, please let us know.












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4874 Hits

Money Tree Moves Ahead Even As Its Leader Steps Back


Mike Vikauskas, who quit being a financial planning in 1981 to start a financial planning software company, is taking Money Tree Software forward even as he plans his exit from the company.



Vitkausas is stepping down from day to day activities to spend more time on volunteer activities in his church. It’s part of a succession plan that Vitkauskas has envisioned for years.




But even as he leaves, Money Tree is moving forward on the path set by Vitkausas over the past three decades by launching a new advisor application, Distribution Solutions, which helps advisors create retirement plans for baby boomers.


To see a video about Distribution Solutions and read more about what's happening at Money Tree, please register for a free trial of advisorsforadvisors, our new practice management website for advisors.

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5032 Hits

Boost Your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking


On advisorsforadvisors, the new practice management website, advisor blogs are being aggregated, which makes it easy for advisors to see what other advisors are blogging about. This can give you ideas for your own posts or inspire you to start writing your own blog. More importantly, being listed on the blogroll can help boost your blog's search engine rankings.



One of the factors search engine algorithms use for ranking your blog site is “link popularity,” a measure of how many sites link to your bog combined with how much traffic those sites attract. Since
advisorsforadvisors is a portal for advisors, being listed on the blogroll can boost your blog's ranking by search engines.



To further leverage the
blogroll's effcts on yor search ranking, you might ty blogging about posts by other advisors. The web of connections among blog posts can be very influential in boosting traffic to your blog.



For example, let’s say your blog is listed on the
advisorsforadvisors blogroll and you post about using Section 72(t) of the Internal Revenue Code to take IRA distributions. If another advisor listed on the blogroll posts a comment on his blog about what you wrote—clarifying something you said in your post or perhaps disagreeing with you—and links to your blog in his post, that’s going to boost your blog’s search ranking. When a consumer Googles "Section 72(t)," your post is more likely to come up.



Algorithms used by Google and other search engines place more weight on link popularity when links are based on content. (They also can penalize link popularity schemes, as mentioned in my previous post.) Creating a web of links based on other advisors' blog posts
can be effective way gain traffic..



advisorsforadvisors makes it easy to track what other advisors are blogging about. We list advisor blogs and display the most popular posts on all the advisor blogs. The list of advisor blogs is just one art of the "Research" section of the site, which includes blogrolls covering 25 topics advisors want to follow.



If you’ve been a member of advisorsforadvisors for more than 30 days, please email me the name of your blog and its URL and we’ll add it on our advisor blogroll.



The blog section is only one small way
advisorsforadvisors is helping independent FAs. Sign up for a free trial.









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3 Hits

Recovering From The Meltdown

One year ago, America’s financial system teetered on the edge of ruin. Happily, we avoided the worst. However, in the year since the crisis erupted and securities prices collapsed, even the most successful advisory firms suffered decimated fees and are earning a lot less. Worse still, confidence in all things financial—including advisors—has been similarly debased. Are you planning your comeback yet?



With Labor Day behind you and the final quarter of 2009 closing in, it’s time to start planning your firm’s recovery. It’s a good time to think strategically about you’re going to make 2010 a better year.



Part of your 2010 recovery plan is likely to focus on serving existing clients, and that what this post is about. It’s about making sure you know what your clients think about you and aligning your services and marketing with what clients want.



Julie Littlechild, the CEO of Advisor Impact, took me on a tour of Client Audit, a tool to systematize the client feedback process. Click on the image to the right to see a two-minute video about Client Audit or see my full review and a nine-minute demo at A4A.






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5218 Hits

SunGard WealthStation On Advisors4Advisors






SunGard WealthStation, a leading financial planning application with 125,000 users, has posted its specifications on advisorsforadvisors, a practice management website for independent advisors.



Posting of the specifications enables advisors to compare WealthStation to 10 other financial planning apps feature by feature, side-by-side.



With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, 20,000 employees and customers in 70 countries, SunGard is the world’s largest financial services technology firm. Its WealthStation product for financial planning is used by many banks and brokerages as well as about 1,500 RIAs.



According to the specifications SunGard posted, WealthStation:






· Provides an interface that is meant to be shared with clients

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5570 Hits

Account Aggregation For Advisors

An Advisor Products client emailed us yesterday asking about our account aggregation capabilities. Specifically, the question was about CashEdge.



Since we receive a lot of questions from advisors who would like to provide aggregated account information to their clients, I am going to answer some questions here.



The aggregation interface offered by Advisor Products comes with our Client Portal system.



Feeds from two account aggregation companies currently are integrated into Client Portal: ByAllAccounts and Advisor Exchange. CashEdge is not currently integrated with Client Portal.



ByAllAccounts is a Woburn, Mass. company founded by James Carney along with Martin and Ellen Dickau in 1999. Carney is the President and CEO. An entrepreneur who had succeeded in two previous tech start-ups—a systems integration firm sold for $50 million in 1992 and an engineering technology software company that went public in 1996—Carney was not involved day-to-day in the early years of BAA. The company, along with just about all of the aggregation vendors, foundered for a few years after the tech bubble burst in 2002.



About six years ago, Carney became more involved in day-to-day operations at BAA and it was purchased by State Street Bank in August 2004 at a time when State Street was considering opportunities in the wealth management business. But BAA was not a good fit for State Street after it backed away from the wealth management backoffice support business and in 2008 Carney and his partners bought back BAA.



Since then, BAA has grown by focusing on feeding reconciliation-ready data from held-away accounts into portfolio management software (PMS) systems, including Schwab PortfolioCenter and Advent Axys. By focusing on aggregating data clean enough for a PMS system, BAA has gained traction with about 475 advisory firms and is currently bringing in about 15 new advisory firms monthly.



Advisor Exchange of Glenview, Ill. was founded in 2006 by D. Keith Ross, a successful options trader. Ross
began his career as an options analyst in 1976 after graduating from Princeton University. In 1979, he became a member of the American Stock Exchange and a registered options trader on the floor of the exchange. In 1983, Ross formed Ceres Partners, specializing in risk arbitrage and options market making. In 1988, he became a member of the CBOE and was a market maker until 1999.



With a background in electronic trading, Ross was drawn to the account aggregation business by its potential for growth. Ross struck a deal to license aggregation interfaces from Cash Edge, an account aggregation vendor, and has been building a platform for advisors leveraging CashEdge interfaces with about 7,000 banks, brokerages, credit card companies, qualified plans, and other sources.



Ventures like Advisor Exchange always take longer than expected, however. Advisor Exchange has been building its advisor platform for the last three years and is expected to release a new version over the next three months. About 125 firms now use AE’s aggregation system.



CashEdge, meanwhile, is showing renewed interest in the advisor market. In 2006, when it licensed its feeds to Advisor Exchange, CashEdge displayed little interest in the independent advisor market. CashEdge had been almost singularly focused on a successful system it built for cash management at banks. However, about 18 months ago, CashEdge hired Tom Roberts as a senior VP of its wealth management business and Roberts has expressed renewed interest in developing better systems for advisors.



The Client Portal system enables a revolutionary new way to manage clients: straight-through processing of client-associated tasks from your CRM, financial planning, and portfolio management software to your clients’ portals.




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5757 Hits

New PMS System For RIAs!

advisorPMS, a portfolio management software system, is being officially launched today, promising to usher in a a new era for advisors.



advisorPMS costs $1,000 a year for unlimited users, just a fraction of the licensing fees charged by industry leaders Advent Software Corp. and Charles Schwab. The program, which received rave reviews from technology writers at all advisor trade publications, is being offered in a desktop application and also runs on a web server hosted by advisorPMS for $10 a month. In addition, advisorPMS offers a CRM add-on and financial planning module for free.



“We know we will take a loss on the early adopters,” says advisorPMS founder and CEO, Brad Slavemen, who also runs a successful financial planning practice in Angola, Texas. “But we will make it up on volume.”



advisorPMS website

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5338 Hits

Smart Marketing For Tough Times


I received a call from an advisor last Friday that taught me a lesson, one that perhaps many advisors can also learn from.



The call was from a longtime client of Advisor Products. We don’t speak often, but I
always enjoy it when we do.



On Friday, she opened my eyes to the fact that Advisor Products needs to do more to educate advisors about what we offer. So I’m going to host a monthly webinar about how Advisor Products helps advisory firms retain clients and gain prospects.
Please join me for the first session Wednesday, April 15 at 4 p.m.



Back to the lesson I learned and how you might be able to learn from it.



The advisor who called me is responsible for marketing at the firm, but she didn't know about important ways we could help her firm.



She didn’t know we just completed an interface with the CRM software used by her firm (
XLR8) that enables her firm to assign her clients To-Dos in XLR8 and programmatically update them in a client’s personal portal. She didn’t know that Advisor Products 18 months ago more than doubled the number of articles available for newsletters and websites from 20 a quarter to 50. She didn’t know we now provide marketing videos or that we added search engine marketing services.



Advisor Products constantly updates advisors about how to benefit from what we do via:





  • MarketingSmart, an email newsletter with updates on all new services and advisor marketing tips




  • My blog, which I post almost every day




  • The weekly Financial Crisis Webinars Series that helps advisors manage the wrenching downturn




  • A sales team tasked with calling each of our clients every six months




  • A CRM system that records all email correspondence with each client and stores notes by our staff about every phone call




  • A “BackOffice” for each advisory firm to manage their newsletter and website and that prominently displays updates about our products and my blog






The list could go on but there’s no need to beat the point to death.

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5241 Hits

What Advisors Want


In the 2000 romantic comedy, “What Women Want,” after he accidentally sustains an electric shock, advertising executive Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) finds himself suddenly able to read women's minds. Gibson uses his newfound ESP to create better ad campaigns and make his boss, Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt), fall head over heels for him.



Apart from the hilarity that ensues, the movie shows how important it can be to get into the heads of the people we care about. That’s what Advisor Products is doing right now with its clients and what advisors must do with their clients.



Advisor Products this morning sent an email to people we care about—advisors that are our clients—inviting them to a webinar where I will speak about marketing opportunities created by using our website services.



The webinar invitation included a link to a survey asking advisors they want from us, and we made the survey findings available. Like Mel Gibson, we now can see into the minds of our clients.



Advisors, to succeed in this environment, must work toward the same transparency, openness, and cooperative communication. How?



Whenever you rebalance a client’s accounts, complete a client’s review, or perform key services to clients, ask the client how you did. Creating a survey and emailing a link to your clients to fill out will take just a few minutes. Ask your clients how you’re doing. Ask them what they want.

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5125 Hits

The Trust Issue


Do advisors understand the extent of the public’s mistrust? Are they doing enough about it?



I don’t think so.



Advisors have failed to embrace transparency as much as they should. Even NAPFA, traditionally the industry’s strongest advocate in the fight against unethical behavior in the financial services business, has missed the opportunity.



Many consumers who trusted advisors during the bull market are now skeptical, and those who were skeptical are now cynical. Worse still, consumers who were cynical of advisors are now in contempt of them.



If you don’t believe it, read the
comments from readers responding to reporter Ron Lieber’s article in this past Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, “How A Personal Finance Columnist Got Caught Up in Fraud.” Lieber bravely reported that he—The New York Times’ personal finance columnist—had hired an advisor who is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his connection to irregularities alleged to have been discovered in his clients’ accounts.



From the first reader’s comment (“The lesson I have learned is that you can't trust financial planners.”) to the last (“It is worth the time and effort, obviously, to be in complete control of one's assets.”), the public’s outrage boils over. Yet financial advisor discussion boards, trade magazines, and conferences are not addressing “the trust issue.”



There’s no mad scramble to find solutions, no urgency to address the trust issue. Look at the lack of comments on my blog posts in the past few weeks.






  • On March 11, in Closing A Door On Madoff Opens A New Era, I wrote that a new era for investment advisors had begun. “It’s an era in which trust is founded on undisputable proof presented at repeated regular intervals. Advisory firms must proactively adjust their behavior and business processes to succeed in this fearful new world.”




  • On March 12, a post entitled, “Your House Is On Fire,” chastised advisors for a lack of care in performing due diligence on alternative investments.




  • On March 19, a post entitled, The Elephant Wrecking Your Revenues said it plainly: “If you are not moving toward a more transparent relationship with clients, then you are not changing with the times and will be left behind. You will be crushed by the elephant.”




While this blog now has hundreds of readers every day, not a single advisor commented on any of these posts. It’s as if advisors don’t want to deal with the trust issue.



In my view, transparency through technology is the best hope for assuring clients they can continue trust you with their money and for convincing prospective clients that your firm can be trusted with their money.



I was fortunate enough to begin researching Web 2.0 technology three years ago and saw the beginning of the age of transparency unfold right before my eyes back then. That spurred the reinvention of my company, Advisor Products.



Advisor Products recently implemented a system that automatically records phone calls and automatically deposits audio files in each advisory firm’s folder in our CRM system. Every staff person here knows what he says to our clients is easily retrieved, encouraging outstanding service. I’m hoping to add even more transparency by allowing advisors to rate our performance for every service call we handle.



My research into Web 2.0 also caused Advisor Products to develop a
technology platform enabling advisory firms to practice with greater transparency to their clients. The platform extends CRM systems used by advisory firms beyond managing your staff to manage your clients. It integrates a CRM with personal client portals. It also interfaces with performance management software systems, enabling clients to see every transaction posted to their accounts.



We now live in an era of Google Earth, a twittersphere, a place where sophisticated investors will no longer be satisfied with mere promises about your honesty, integrity, and fidelity. They want proof. Either advisory firms reinvent themselves and figure out how to survive in this untrusting, fearful new world or online discount brokers will gain at your expense.



This information is, of course, self-serving. But that does not diminish its value or validity. I’ve aligned my business with my beliefs and values, and my strong desire to be honest. I encourage you to do the same. It also happens to be good for business.

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5275 Hits

Life Planning Will Be A Winner In The Financial Crisis


While the economy has escaped the most frightening doomsday scenario, the financial crisis is far from done with us. Department stores and malls remain practically empty in Long Island most weekdays. Getting into fine restaurants on a Saturday night no longer requires reservations weeks in advance. Workers at my local Home Depot are so fearful of losing their jobs that they're actually friendly and service-oriented now. Meanwhile, in our corner of the economy, many advisors worry that over the next couple of years clients who have been disappointed by their portoflio's performance will fire them.





However, the setback suffered by clients in their retirement portfolios and the rampant distrust of financial advisors unleashed by the Madoff scandal are likely to cause advisors to rethink the way they practice. Advisors will reinvent the financial advice business. As with earlier financial crises, change will follow. Progress will come inevitably. And a winner when this crisis ends is likely to be Life Planning.




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5423 Hits

More On RIA Regulation Changing


Pat Allen's question about my previous post about RIA regulation touches on an important issue. She wrote:




“I've been thinking that the reason Investment Advisors are more communicative on the Web is that they are not regulated by FINRA. Is that right--would you expect that a different advertising standard will be applied? One consequence of which would be that IAs will be discouraged from blogging, tweeting, etc.?”

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5204 Hits

Former NAPFA President Faces SEC Fraud Charges


A former president of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) was charged by the U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission yesterday with accepting $1.24 million in kickbacks, dealing a highly embarrassing public relations blow to NAPFA, a champion of consumer rights, advisor integrity, and applying the fiduciary standard to advisors.



The SEC complaint alleges that James Putman, founder, majority owner, and CEO of
Wealth Management LLC of Appleton, Wisconsin, accepted $1.24 million in undisclosed payments derived from investments made by the unregistered investment pools. Simone Fevola, the firm's former President and Chief Investment Officer, was charged along with Putman for taking undisclosed payments from the unregistered investment pools.



The SEC also alleges that Wealth Management, Putman and Fevola misrepresented the safety and stability of the two largest investment pools and placed clients into these investments even though they were inconsistent with some clients' objectives.



According the SEC litigation release
, the agency filed an emergency civil action in U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Wisconsin to obtain an order to freeze the RIA’s assets.



The SEC alleged Putman and Fevola sold clients the private deals from May 2003 through August 2008. In 2006 and 2007, the SEC says, Putman and Fevola each accepted at least $1.24 million in undisclosed payments derived from certain investments made by the pools.



According to the SEC, Wealth Management claims currently to have approximately $102 million of its clients’ assets invested in the pools. However, the SEC says that the pools have “limited remaining assets and that it appears likely that the reported values of the pools are substantially overstated.” The SEC's complaint alleges that the pools' assets are largely illiquid, and Putman has provided redemptions to investors based on what the agency believes to be overstated valuations.



"As we allege in our complaint, Putman and Fevola put their own financial greed ahead of the safety and stability of their clients' investments," said Merri Jo Gillette, Director of the SEC's Chicago Regional Office. "They abused the trust that their clients placed in them, and emergency enforcement action was necessary to prevent further harm to those clients."



The SEC's complaint charges Putman, Fevola and the RIA with fraud. In addition to seeking emergency relief, the SEC's complaint seeks permanent injunctions barring future violations of the charged provisions of the federal securities laws, disgorgement of the defendants' ill-gotten gains plus pre-judgment interest, and financial penalties.



According to Putman’s biography on his firm’s website, Putman was co-founder and the first President of the Northeast Wisconsin Chapter of the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP), now the Financial Planning Association. He served on NAPFA’s Board of Directors in 1995 and 1996 before being elected as President of NAPFA and serving his term in 1996 and 1997.



Wealth Management’s website features the cover of Financial Advisor, the trade magazine for which I write, which wrote a story quiting him a year ago. (A previous version of this post incorreclty characterized the FA story as "flattering.") It also features a cover story from Bloomberg Wealth Manager Magazine, entitled “Pooled Assets: Why Some RIAs Are Creating Customized Investment Vehicles,” in which Putman is quoted extensively. The site also features a Worth Magazine (my former employer) cover story from July 2002 in which Putman was selected as one of the “Top 250 Financial Advisors In America,” and the cover from Medical Economics’ November 2006 list of the “Top 150 Best Advisor For Doctors.”



The allegations of wrongdoing against a former NAPFA president could not have come at a worse time for the group, which is part of a troika with FPA and the Certified Financial Planner
® Board of Standards lobbying Congress for creation of a new Self Regulatory Organization to oversee financial planners. Last month, another NAPFA member, Matthew Weitzman of AFW Wealth Advisors in New York City, was caught up in scandal and was reportedly the target of an SEC probe,
according to a story by New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber, who was one of Weitzman’s clients.



In a post here just yesterday, I mentioned that the continuing string of scandals involving RIAs make it unlikely that any effort to further regulate RIAs could be thwarted by NAPFA, FPA and the CFP
Board. But revelations about Putman are particularly sad because he held himself out as a leader of NAPFA, an organization that is dominated by members with great integrity, advisors who have always been at the forefront in campaigning for issues in the interest of consumers. To see NAPFA’s reputation stained by a few bad members is heartbreaking.



For years the "fee-only" brand and NAPFA's brand itself were slowly compromised.The fee-only brand starting about 10 years ago was embraced and then abused by advisors who take hidden sales fees and behave unscrupulously. (NAPFA did try saving it by trademarking the term "fee-only," but was met by harsh criticism and gave up the fight.) Now, however, the NAPFA brand itself has been abused, which will inpsire a new skepticism from the press and cause confusion among consumers.



While NAPFA has remained a beacon of light in the sometimes shrouded world of financial advisors by supporting a fiduciary standard, it also increasingly became a marketing machine for advisors who used the referral network and favorable press garnered by NAPFA to grow their businesses and who were little interested in the high ideals of many the group’s members. Perhaps the news about Putman’s troubles will cause an introspective discussion among NAPFA members and help the group reclaim its high moral ground.



One other good thing that may come of this is that maybe—just maybe—a reporter in the consumer press will write about the idiocy of these “top financial advisor” lists, which sell magazines but stink at figuring out which advisors are really the best. There is no substitute for real research, which these magazine stories always fail to do. While the articles in Worth and Medical Economics were great marketing for Putman’s firm, these publications can’t possibly research all of the nation’s advisors and find the best ones without a massive effort, an undertaking they are unlikely to know how to effecutate or finance.



There ought to be rule prohibiting advisors from using the “top advisor” lists as the centerpiece of their marketing effort when the list is old. Worth has done several new lists since 2002, but Putman’s website does not mention this. It just has the cover from Worth’s 2002 issue on the home page. The same true of the Medical Economics list from 2006 on Putman’s site, which makes no mention of the more recent lists by the magazine, which presumably left out Putman.



Putman-SECComplaint.pdf (1.10 mb)


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5974 Hits

Online Reporting For PortfolioCenter Moves Forward


Beta testing of the Advisor Products Inc.'s (API) application for Online Reporting For PortfolioCenter has been a great success and we are now focused on improving web reporting for advisory firms using PortfolioCenter.



Beta testers gave API Online Reporting For PortfolioCenter rave reviews and some great suggestions for improving the application. Seven advisory firms participated in the beta test by uploading their client reports to our server, which successfully parsed client reports and deposited them into secure folders accessible to clients.

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5636 Hits

AdvisorVault 2.0 Is Hot


While the economy and stock market has been tanking, we have been experiencing one of the strongest growth spurts in our 12-year history. Much of the increased demand for our products can be traced to AdvisorVault 2.0, our new secure online vault platform that allows advisors to share documents with clients.



AdvisorVault is pretty much a no-brainer for advisors. AdvisorVault is less expensive than standalone online vault platforms marketed to advisory firms. Such standalone vaults are not integrated with a marketing website, website content, email newsletters system, and other features that we offer to help advisors market and communicate. Some standalone vault systems do offer many features that are valuable to advisors, but they don't provide the same value as AdvisorVault. They cost about the same or more than what we charge for a website packaged with AdvisorVault, and AdvisorVault offers all the same features or more than the standalone vault systems. Point is, even though other companies may specialize and sell nothing but an online vault, AdvisorVault works as well or better.

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5748 Hits

Video Explosion


Everyone knows that TV and the Web are melding. Videos are increasingly being used on the Web. comScore.com yesterday reported that U.S. Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos in November 2008, a 34% increase over the same time a year earlier. On YouTube this past November, 5.1 billion videos were viewed; more than 146 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 87 videos each, and the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video.



What’s really scary is that in my lifetime, we’ll probably be able to click on the couch that Oprah sits on and see its manufacturer and lowest price vendor. (My wife will bankrupt me!)

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5163 Hits

Indiana Financial Advisor Jumps From Airplane To Fake Death, Then Vanishes


A Hamilton County Indiana Superior Court judge froze financial advisor Marcus Schrenker's assets and those of his wife late yesterday, after Schrenker reportedly parachuted out of his company-owned plane over Alabama Sunday while the plane continued flying on autopilot before crashing into Florida swampland two hours later. A manhunt is under way, according to reports.



Click here for the latest news about this strange incident.  

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5478 Hits

An Entirely New Software Category For Advisors


If you’ve been yearning for a way to use the Internet more effectively with clients, check out our new Personal Client Portal platform. It fills a gap between your firm’s existing software applications and your clients. This is a new type of application, and there is nothing else like it.



Your financial planning, performance reporting, and customer relationship management applications are disconnected from your clients right now. Our new portal system bridges the gap between your applications and your clients.

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5911 Hits

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A good content strategy is focused on developing and distributing consistent, valuable content to engage and retain prospective customers and target audience, via your website. Our content library provides financial advisors with fresh, high-quality financial content that is updated regularly, improving SEO along the way. And our automated e-newsletter and social media tools allow advisors to reach out to clients and prospects in an easy-to-use manner, providing frequent touch points for optimal brand building.

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