2019 TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC coverage sponsored by Envestnet | Tamarac Sign up for a demo at http://www.fppad.com/tamarac
I connected with technology executives from TD Ameritrade Institutional at the 2019 National LINC conference to get all the updates on how TD Ameritrade Institutional is pushing the envelope on Veo One, technology innovation, and enhancing the client experience.
Innovation and AdvisorClient Updates
First up is Jon Patullo, Managing Director, Technology Product Management for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss Innovation Alley, new TD Ameritrade Institutional skills for Alexa, and updates to the AdvisorClient user experience.
Growth of Veo Open Access
Then I met with Marcel Tsai, Senior Product Manager, Technology Solutions for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss the latest statistics of the Veo Open Access solution provider network and identify the vendors that are integrated with Veo One.
Veo One® Enhancements and Innovation Quest
Finally I met with Chris Valleley, Director of Technology Solutions for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss the functionality present in Veo One for financial advisers and highlight the new Innovation Quest competition being introduced at the 2019 National LINC conference.
Promotional consideration for this demo was provided by LifeYield. See all disclosures at fppad.com/disclaimer
Most financial advisors help clients determine an appropriate asset allocation. With LifeYield, financial professionals can now also optimize their asset location.
LifeYield’s Proposal Advantage measures the efficiency of a client’s asset location by using the Taxficient Score®. The higher the score, the more tax-efficient a portfolio is.
Tax-efficiency is improved by placing assets with high tax rates in tax-advantaged accounts and those with low tax rates in taxable accounts. This minimizes a client’s taxes and maximizes after-tax returns.
4:16 LifeYield Dashboard Features 5:56 LifeYield Sample Scenario 9:06 How to illustrate Social Security “break-even” strategies 10:47 How to estimate “Income Gap” capital requirements 16:26 Proposal Advantage and the LifeYield Taxficient Score® 19:35 How to generate a quick proposal for clients 24:33 Client Portfolio View in LifeYield 26:07 Is it possible to get a Taxficient Score of 100? 27:22 How to configure “equivalent groups” in LifeYield 31:20 Detail of the Taxficient Score Analysis 34:27 How the Taxficient Score can facilitate an advisor’s value proposition 39:02 View the detailed Taxficient Score report 40:59 How to see which activities impact the Taxficient Score, and by how much 46:05 A preview of what’s coming soon in LifeYield
NOTE: Please see my conflicts of interest regarding Envestnet, Orion Advisor Services, and XY Planning Network, all mentioned in today’s briefing: http://fppad.com/disclaimer
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Envestnet | Yodlee Acquires Abe AI
Envestnet | Yodlee is expanding its capabilities in artificial intelligence, as the company announced the acquisition of Abe AI for its conversational banking technology. Founded in 2016, Abe AI is best known for AI-powered chatbots used by financial institutions to engage customers with messaging platforms like SMS, Slack, and Facebook Messenger as well as the voice-first platforms of Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
According to the company press release, Envestnet will add Conversational AI to Yodlee’s financial wellness apps and APIs, other retail banking solutions, and in the future, Envestnet’s wealth management offerings.
PIETech Announces MoneyGuideOne and MoneyGuideElite
In financial planning news, PIETech, the creators of MoneyGuidePro, announced the introduction of two new products that are powered by the company’s flagship software. The first is MoneyGuideOne, a streamlined version of MoneyGuidePro, that targets advisors who have not performed financial planning in the past, to create financial plans in minutes without compromising on quality.
The second product is MoneyGuideElite, an advanced planning product that supports sophisticated illustrations for lifetime insurance analysis, portfolio and social security income modeling, and more.
XYIS Announces Partnership with Orion Advisor Services
And finally, the XY Planning Network just announced a new partnership between its XY Investment Solutions subsidiary and Orion Advisor Services. The new partnership will leverage Orion’s new Enterprise platform to offer integrated portfolio management technology and an advanced investment management experience to advisors that use XY Investment Solutions for investment management.
I caught up with XYIS director Brandon Moss to get more information.
This partnership with Orion Enterprise puts our advisors using XYIS on par with the capabilities of the biggest and baddest RIAs in the country. They’ll no longer have to worry about whether they’re missing out on something by not signing up with a robo, but even the broader aspects a large national RIA might have, all of that is there, and Orion Enterprise is giving us the same robo-sytle capabilities for front-end type activities, but all of the flexibility that advisors are truly looking for from an automated platform.
Brandon Moss, XYIS Director
For more details on this news and more, head over to FPPad.com/flashbriefing to find the links to today’s top stories.
And don’t forget to leave a 5-star review in the Alexa app if you enjoy the FPPad Fintech Update.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
[Disclosure: I provided marketing services to Wealthbox within the last 12 months. See all my disclosures at fppad.com/disclaimer ]
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Plaid Acquires Quovo
Financial account aggregation provider Plaid started off 2019 with one of the first large #fintech acquisitions, announcing earlier this week that it will acquire Quovo, a competing account aggregation company, in a deal that Bloomberg reported could be worth roughly $200 million dollars after performance bonuses are factored in to the price.
Most consumers aren’t aware of Plaid, as the company focuses on helping other financial applications such as Venmo, Betterment, and Robinhood, connect to customer bank and credit card accounts in order to verify account information. According to a company blog post, Plaid will use the Quovo acquisition to expand its data aggregation capabilities to include investment and brokerage accounts.
SEC Fines Wealthfront and Hedgeable
In regulatory news, the Securities and Exchange Commission took its first enforcement actions on two automated investment services, commonly referred to as robo-advisors, as it fined both Wealthfront and Hedgeable for making false statements in marketing materials to potential customers.
The SEC fined Wealthfront $250,000 dollars for claiming the company would avoid all wash-sale transactions in its tax-loss harvesting algorithms, when three years of trading history showed that wash sales were indeed triggered in at least 31 percent of customer accounts. The SEC also issued an $80,000 fine to Hedgeable for allegedly misleading portfolio performance reports that included performance data from less than 4 percent of client accounts.
Wealthbox Releases All-New Mobile App for iOS
And finally, in CRM news for financial advisers this week, Wealthbox announced the release of an all-new mobile app for iOS devices. The mobile companion to Wealthbox CRM supports Touch ID or Face ID for account authentication, single-tap quick actions for frequently used functions, support for native dictation, and more.
Here’s Steve Carroll, Product Manager for Wealthbox, with more information:
The all-new Wealthbox Mobile app is completely rebuilt and and redesigned for today’s modern financial advisor. This companion app is completely in sync with the full-featured functionality the web-based Wealthbox product, and has many convenient mobile features like bio authentication and native dictation for advisors on the go.
For more information on this news and more, head over to FPPad.com/flashbriefing to find the links to today’s top stories.
Disclosure: Wealthbox and its owner Starburst Labs have purchased marketing services from Bill Winterberg in the last 12 months. See all disclosures here: fppad.com/disclaimer
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Robinhood Outage Impacts Options Trading
It was a tough week for Robinhood, the zero-commission stock and cryptocurrency trading app, as the company first suffered a significant outage related to stock option trading on Wednesday December 12th.
According to a Business Insider article, a Robinhood spokesperson said the outage impacted “a smaller percentage of customers” and trading was limited, “as a precautionary measure.”
Nevertheless, a number of Robinhood users voiced their frustration on Twitter, posting a series of tweets showing rejected option trades in their accounts and complaining of losses they felt they realized due to the outage in trading.
Robinhood Rescinds “Checking and Savings” Feature
Then on Thursday, Robinhood announced a new brokerage feature it called “Checking and Savings,” that promised a 3% interest rate on cash, support for bill pay and direct deposit, all of which Robinhood claimed was insured under SIPC protection.
But in response to swift industry backlash, Robinhood removed all of its marketing material for “Checking and Savings” just 36 hours later and replaced it with a reference to potential “cash management” features to be released at a later time. The most concerning feedback surrounding the feature launch came from SIPC president and CEO Stephen Harbeck, who went on the record to say that he doubted cash deposited for the Checking and Savings feature would be covered and insured under the non-government member agency’s rules and requirements.
TD Ameritrade Institutional and Wealthbox CRM Automate Account Openings
And switching gears to fintech news for financial advisers, Wealthbox, the provider of CRM solutions for advisers, announced a new automated account opening feature integrated with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Veo platform.
The integration allows advisers using Wealthbox CRM to pre-fill client information into Veo and Veo One account-opening forms directly from the contact record page in Wealthbox.
Here’s Wealthbox CEO John Rourke with more:
Wealthbox continues to fathom the depths of Veo One integration resulting in fewer steps.
For advisers to help investors the Wealthbox app is a breeze.
From millennials to empty nesters, opening new accounts is now done with ease.
For more information on this news and more, head over to FPPad.com/flashbriefing to find the links to today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Introducing Free Financial Planning from Wealthfront
Today’s update is all about financial planning software, with the first story coming from Wealthfront, the Silicon Valley-based automated investment service with over 220,000 clients. This week the company announced it will now offer free access to its propriety financial planning software called Path with no investment account required.
Originally launched in February 2017, Path allows customers to illustrate the hypothetical growth of stock market investments, estimate home affordability, calculate projected college tuition costs, and more. Prior to the announcement, investors needed $500 to open a Wealthfront investment account in order to use Path, so the minimum fee to access the service was 25 basis points of $500, or just one dollar and twenty five cents.
SEI Strengthens Automated Workflows through Strategic Partnership with Advizr
Next up is news about Advizr, as SEI Investments recently announced an integration with financial planning software from Advizr to expand the company’s BusinessWise Program for financial professionals. SEI works with over 7,500 financial advisers under its SEI Advisor Network, which was recently rebranded to Independent Advisor Solutions by SEI, and the addition of Advizr to the BusinessWise Program is intended to offer financial professionals the choice of implementing a focused, modular financial plan or a completely holistic plan when engaging clients in the planning process.
See the New RightCapital/Advyzon Integration in Action
And finally, in news from from RightCapital, the financial planning software provider announced a new integration with Advyzon, a cloud-based wealth management platform for investment advisors. Soon advisors will be able to leverage data and portfolio account information maintained in Advyzon to quickly and efficiently populate an initial financial plan inside RightCapital without the need to duplicate data entry.
The companies will demonstrate the new integration in an upcoming webinar held on Tuesday, December 11, so be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for a link to the webinar as well as all the links to today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
BlackRock Announces Strategic Relationship with Envestnet
First up is news from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, as the company announced a strategic relationship with Envestnet, a provider of research, analytics, portfolio management, and reporting tools for financial professionals, and also announced that the company purchased a 4.9% equity stake in Envestnet for roughly $123 million dollars.
According to a press release, the new partnership will accelerate work to integrate BlackRock Digital Wealth’s technologies into Envestnet’s platform, which includes solutions such as iRetire, FutureAdvisor, and Aladdin Risk for Wealth Management. The partnership also provides Envestnet with additional growth capital, which some analysts expect Envestnet will use for strategic acquisitions in 2019.
LPL Financial Acquires AdvisoryWorld
And speaking of acquisitions, earlier this week, LPL Financial, the nation’s largest broker-dealer announced the $28 million dollar acquisition of Advisory World, an investment analytics technology provider to financial advisers.
The AdvisoryWorld acquisition will bring over 30 years of analytics and technology expertise to LPL, as the company’s tools like proposal generation, hypothetical illustrations, and digital on-boarding workflow have been widely adopted by over 30,000 financial advisors and institutions in the U.S.
I caught up with AdvisoryWorld COO Mike Wilson for his thoughts on the acquisition announcement:
This is just a great opportunity for us to continue to serve our existing clients in new ways and to deliver our capabilities to more people. Leveraging LPL’s resources will allow us to evolve our offerings, we’re going to be able to try new things and to learn from a broader base of customers which will help us deliver the most sophisticated service we can to all of our clients, both existing and new. Something completely that I must underline is LPL has this broad base of experience and knowledge that we can use to widen our offering to different types of products and to a more diverse audience.
For more information, be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for all the links to today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
From Schwab IMPACT® 2018, I connected with John Connor, Vice President of Digital Advisor Solutions for Schwab Advisor Services to tour the “Tech Alley” section of The Exchange exhibit hall.
From Schwab IMPACT® 2018, I connected with Andrew Salesky, Senior Vice President of Digital Advisor Solutions for Schwab Advisor Services to first get to know more about his background and role within Charles Schwab.
We then covered two of the “blocking and tackling” technology initiatives within Schwab Advisor Services: Digital Account Open and Schwab Advisor Portfolio Connect™.
We wrap up our conversation with what Schwab is doing internally to stay on the leading edge of financial technology and future updates to the Schwab Advisor Services platform.
If you want a financial plan, but don’t have a hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest, there’s a new company that wants to help, as Baltimore-based Facet Wealth recently raised $33 million dollars in funding to offer financial plans by CFP professionals to Americans nationwide. Facet Wealth charges a flat fee for financial planning services that range from $480 a year to $5,000 per year based on the complexity of the plan. Facet Wealth also said it will use some of its funding to transition certain clients from other financial advisers that don’t meet that firm’s ideal client profile.
RightCapital Announces Strategic Partnership with Betterment for Advisors
Continuing with the financial planning theme, earlier this week, RightCapital announced that the financial planning software provider has secured a strategic partnership with Betterment for Advisors. The partnership builds on an integration that was rolled out last year, and means that RightCapital will help advisers streamline the process of managing investment accounts with Betterment for Advisors, and advisers using Betterment for Advisors will be able to launch Right Capital software and access its planning features all under one login.
PIEtech Unveils MoneyGuidePro Version G5
And finally, MoneyGuidePro, one of the industry’s largest providers of financial planning software to advisers, announced the launch of G5, the fifth generation of its planning software. G5 features enhanced planning for anticipated health care expenses, custom rate-of-return estimates for assets outside the adviser’s management, a cash reserve bucket strategy, and sophisticated life insurance needs analysis illustrations.
Here’s executive vice president Kevin Hughes with more details on G5
Our customers view MoneyGuidePro less as a financial planning tool and more as an integral part of their business model. G5 builds on that successful collaborative experience helping advisers position their advice and motivate their clients to implement their recommendations.
For more information, be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for all the links to today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
