T3 2011 Conference Live Blog: Fidelity Integration Panel

One of today’s sessions was a panel discussion featuring advisers on Fidelity’s platform follwing the keynote session by Brent Burns of Asset Dedication. Here are our most important takeaways from Fidelity’s panel.

The panelists included Tom Goyne, founder of Shamrock Asset Management in Dallas, TX, Rick Adkins, CEO of the Arkansas Financial Group, and Michael Lee, COO of Lord Capital Management

To start off the discussion, Goyne came right out of the gate stating that if an advisers’s firm manages less than $75 million in AUM, they can’t afford to stay in business with all the impending regulations coming.

On their approach to integration:
Adkins has a saying, “We can’t make that much baklava.” Each December his firm would make client gift baskets that included baklava, but as the number of client grew, they just couldn’t make all the baklava. He used that same analogy with firms running without integrated technology.

Adkins also postured, “We don’t make money clicking keys,” stressing the importance that while technology makes certain things capable, advisers must remember that the success of their business is contingent on maintaining connections with clients and not being buried in technology.

On Custodian Integration:
Lee’s firm is 100% Fidelity, Adkin’s firm is approximately 90% on Fidelity, and Goyne’s firm is all on Fidelity with the exception of bank assets.

On Regulatory Reform:
Adkines: Regulators seem to be more comfortable with advisers using cloud systems, knowing that it improves business continuity and leverages security policies of the hosting providers.

Lee’s firm went through an SEC audit six months ago months ago and easily satisfied the SEC’s data requests with their paperless environment.
Goyne cautioned that if advisers are going to fund the SEC examination budget of ~$1 billion, extrapolated across about 8,000 advisers, each firm’s share will be about $121,000. He predicts it’s going to become very expensive to be an RIA in the future.

That’s it for the Fidelity panel session. Please be sure to check back with us for more updates.