Bill Winterberg, Author at FPPad

How screencasts can promote business growth this year

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Bill Winterberg in Software

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Screencasts can educate, inform, and promote your business for a more prosperous New Year.

How many times have you walked clients through filling out one of your account forms, or shown them how to create an account for your client portal?

If the answer is more than once, then screencasts might be your answer to address these situations more efficiently.

What’s a screencast?

It’s essentially a recording of both your voice and your computer screen that you can turn around and publish for others to view. There are a number tools you can use to make screencasts of your own, several of which I covered in my latest Quickview update for Morningstar Advisor.

Click here to read Show off With Screencasts at Morningstar Advisor and see which tool you’ll start using to experiment with screencasts.

FPPad Best of 2012: Posts

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in General, Technology

keyboard I’m recapping the best content found on FPPad in 2012. Previously I featured the top five videos from 2012 and the top five podcasts from 2012.

Today’s update is the last in the Best of 2012 series and highlights the twelve (for 2012!) most popular posts, as ranked by total views.

Before I begin, make sure that you’ve subscribed to my free newsletter so you don’t miss recaps of all the new posts, podcasts, and videos coming in 2013.

Here are the top twelve posts of 2012.

1. How to hide endorsements from your LinkedIn profile

Just like the most viewed video of 2012, readers wondering how to hide LinkedIn Endorsements generated the most visits to this FPPad post in 2012.

The relatively innocuous Endorsements feature LinkedIn added this year created a lot of frustration among registered advisers. While the feature is a convenient way for others to highlight an adviser’s skills and expertise, Endorsements skirt the gray area of testimonials that are prohibited by the SEC and FINRA.

Again, the conservative approach many advisers follow is to hide Endorsements altogether, and this post embedded a video to show how to do that.

2. Tungle, my go-to calendar service, is shutting down. Here are public calendar alternatives financial advisers should consider

I was bummed to learn that Tungle, my favorite online public calendar service, planned to shut down in December. Evidently, many other Tungle users felt the same way.

In this top post of 2012, readers wanted to know what alternatives they could use to replace the extremely useful and simple public calendar service from Tungle (no thanks to Research In Motion!).

3. Why advisers can’t trust their clients anymore

This is probably one of an adviser’s worst nightmare. They think they’re fulfilling a client’s withdrawal request to fund, say, a vacation or new car purchase.

But unbeknownst to the adviser, the client’s email account was hacked, and the request for funds was actually made by a hacker claiming to be the client.

If an adviser isn’t cautious, tens of thousands of dollars can be mistakenly distributed to a hacker, and not to the client.

This post covers ways advisers can spot identity theft, detect client “spoofing,” and implement techniques to identify clients before transferring any funds.

4. Yes, you can create financial plans in eight minutes

I think everyone would agree that having a financial plan is the best way to work towards financial success. But the ways financial plans are created vary widely across the industry.

One method growing among advisers is the creation of a quick financial plan.

In one of this year’s top posts, Neal Ringquist, President of Advisor Software, Inc. talks about the trend of quick financial planning tools and highlights his company’s goalgamiPro product in a video spotlight interview.

5. The Best Financial Adviser Technology of 2012

Advisers clearly want to know what technology will help their business in the years ahead. For a post that’s just three weeks old, it was so popular it vaulted into the top five of all content for the year!

Sure, you can read surveys and industry reports until your eyes glaze over and identify the most popular technology products out there, but what about those products that will help your firm truly stand out from all the others? That’s where my annual Best Tech for Advisers list comes in.

Read this year’s update to find products that will help you share documents with ease, broadcast yourself live over the Internet, and proactively plan for your clients’ needs.

6. How to hide LinkedIn Endorsements on the new LinkedIn profile design

See the top post of 2012? Here is its sister post, updated to reflect the new ways to hide LinkedIn Endorsements using the new profile design.

This post has the two minute screencast demonstrating how advisers can hide LinkedIn Endorsements, either globally or skill by skill.

7. The Financial Planning Flowchart (or why your clients will balk at paying your fees)

Here’s a post that is just FOUR days old, and it cracked the top ten of popular posts of 2012!

Why? Because advisers know that consumers (and clients) have more access to financial planning tools than ever before, including flowcharts like the one published in BloombergBusinessweek.

This post gained some serious traction on social media sites, generating a lot of traffic over the post- and pre-holiday weekend. Read it to find out why.

8. How financial advisers can improve their personal workflow

FPPad readers are always looking for ways to be more efficient and get more done each day.

That’s why a lot of content here focuses on tools and techniques to deliver on that premise.

In this post, I share one very cool app that I continue to use to this day to manage and organize personal workflow.

9. Should Financial Advisers use Google Drive?

In the same category as one of the top all-time posts at FPPad (see: Dropbox for Financial Advisers: Is it Safe?), I cover reasons why financial advisers should think twice about using Google Drive, the search giant’s online file storage service, for storing files with sensitive information inside.

10. Smarsh president Stephen Marsh addresses Pinterest and compliance

This is the first podcast update to break into the list of top posts of 2012, and that’s likely because it includes two topics of recent interest for advisers: Pinterest and compliance.

In this podcast, Smarsh president Stephen Marsh talks about the company’s latest product that can be used to archive content from new social media websites like Pinterest without depending on APIs or other data access methods that may not ordinarily be available from the social media site itself.

If you are one of those advisers who can’t wait to try out the next new social media website, then Smarsh’s new tool may be just the thing you need to manage your compliance requirements.

11. New LinkedIn profiles raise compliance concerns as there appears to be no way to hide endorsements

Notice a theme here? Yes, LinkedIn and their new Endorsements feature has generated a lot of interest and traffic here at FPPad.

This time, as new profile updates were being rolled out to LinkedIn users, it appeared that Endorsements couldn’t be hidden whatsoever.

One adviser who received the new profile design in an early rollout sent a screenshot to me, which was covered in this screencast update.

Fortunately, the final profile design includes an easy way to edit Endorsements and hide them, which you’ve already seen in the number six post of 2012.

12. Cloud computing for financial advisers: How to stay safe

And finally, here’s the post to round out the best of 2012. It’s all about cloud computing and the things advisers can do to stay safe when using cloud services.

This is a reference over to my article for the July edition of the Journal of Financial Planning that includes a list of ten things advisers should ask of their cloud service provider when conducting due diligence.

All of the answers provided should be saved to your compliance file, so when a regulator challenges you on the security of your cloud provider, you have all this information at the ready to satisfy the request.

And that’s it.

The most popular posts of 2012 here at FPPad, all rolled up into one convenient update for your reference.

Allow me to ask one more time for you to subscribe to the free newsletter so you can stay up to date on the best in financial planning technology content. I’d normally say “monthly” newsletter, but I don’t send updates on a monthly schedule. It’s less frequent than that, so 1) your inbox won’t be overloaded, and 2) you’ll receive quick links to some of the premium content posted here.

Have a happy, prosperous, and productive 2013!

FPPad Best of 2012: Podcasts

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Podcast

podcast I’m recapping the best content found on FPPad this year. A few days ago I featured the top five videos from 2012.

Today’s update highlights the five most popular podcasts (ranked by total listens), and my final update in the series will list the top posts of 2012.

And before we begin, make sure that you’ve subscribed via iTunes so you don’t miss the next podcast.

Here are the top five podcasts of 2012.

1. Trumpet Publisher might be your answer to manually uploading hundreds of files to a file sharing site

In this year’s top podcast, Jo Day, co-founder of Trumpet, Inc., walked me through her company’s latest integration with popular online document storage provider ShareFile (ShareFile was one of this year’s Best in Tech winners).

Trumpet’s suite of software can take hundreds (even thousands) or reports generated in a batch, append custom content (say, a newsletter or cover page), and upload all the individual reports to their correct destination within ShareFile.

Imagine if you or your staff attempting something on this scale by hand. You’d likely end up making simple copy-and-paste mistakes, or worse, publish the wrong report to your client’s ShareFile folder.

2. Daily follow-up reminders help financial advisers maintain strong client relationships

The runner-up podcast for 2012 is my interview with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band. Band describes Contactually as “a professional relationship manager application” which I initially discovered early in 2012.

Fast forward to today, as I still find that I use Contactually every day. It’s sometimes spooky at how it picks up on conversations that have gone dormant, but inevitably my proactive follow up rekindles relationships and discussions (and more often than not, new clients!)

To learn more about how financial advisers (and others) are using Contactually, listen to the podcast below.

3. Financial advisers don’t need to tweet or like to get social media benefits

This podcast features a new product from Socialware, the social media compliance and strategy provider to financial services companies, called Social Network Listening.

Even if you don’t tweet or post to social networking sites, you can gain a tremendous amount of insight by paying attention to the posts and updates of others.

But with thousands of first- and second-tier connections scattered across social media sites, how do you efficiently monitor them and identify the important updates?

Tim Walker, Marketing Program Manager for Socialware, tells me that Social Network Listening is designed to do just that, saving you valuable time while delivering the most relevant updates from your social networks.

4. Advisers using Yammer can enhance collaboration without sacrificing compliance

One of the tools I’m starting to see more and more in the enterprise (read: your business) environment is the internal social network. One such product is Yammer, purchased earlier this year by Microsoft for $1.2 billion (yes, billion with a B!).

If internal social networks such as Yammer are to take off inside the financial services setting, advisers need a way to capture and archive the internal network messages, just as they currently for email.

In this podcast, Sam Kolbert-Hyle, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Smarsh, discusses their new product to archive content posted to Yammer and allow regulated organizations to add this new tool to their business without violating compliance requirements.

5. How PreciseFP streamlines routine data gathering and client collaboration

Finally, the podcast rounding out this top five list is a new one featuring PreciseFP. PreciseFP is a web-based data-gathering tool advisers can use to streamline the data collection and data entry process when signing up a new client.

Now I have an aversion to filling out lengthy online forms that ask for a bunch of redundant data my adviser should already know.

So in this podcast, PreciseFP co-founder by Don Whalen sets the record straight about how advisers can use this tool to collaboratively work with clients on data gathering, yet avoid many of the frustrations clients may normally encounter with custom-built online forms.

Also, Wahlen offers a discount promo code for podcast listeners, which likely explains how this podcast, barely two weeks old as the time this review was published, vaulted into the top five podcasts of 2012. Well, advisers love to save money, and this is one way to do so (and in full disclosure, the promo is not an affiliate code, so I receive no referral fees if you sign up).

I hope you enjoyed this recap of the best podcasts of 2012. Return to FPPad one more time to get the list of the most popular posts for the year.

FPPad Best of 2012: Videos

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Video Spotlight

Year-end “best of” lists are flooding my feeds, and I’m reading the majority of them as they offer good insight on what audiences of different media outlets and publications read the most.

This year, I’m going to split the Best of FPPad in 2012 feature into three categories: Videos, Podcasts, and Posts.

fppad video Videos were a new initiative I launched in 2012 to diversify the format of content featured here at FPPad.

This time last year I assembled my two-camera video setup that I could pack into a backpack and transport in an airplane overhead bin. I started with sit-down interviews, then branched out with point-of-view style interviews, iPad app demos, and then live On Air broadcasts.

I must say that the videos have been a big hit, as the FPPad YouTube channel surpassed 10,000 views and 50 subscribers this year. Have you subscribed yet?

So to kick off my list for this year, here are the top five videos (determined by view count) from FPPad in 2012.

1. How to hide endorsements from your LinkedIn profile for financial adviser compliance

Any time social media is mentioned for financial advisers, compliance rears its ugly head. This year’s most watched video addresses a new feature LinkedIn added earlier this year called Endorsements.

Generally, Endorsements are a quick and convenient way to highlight skills and expertise of LinkedIn connections, but the hard line the SEC and FINRA draws on prohibiting testimonials of any kind clouds whether or not Endorsements can be displayed on a regulated adviser’s profile.

The conservative approach is to simply hide Endorsements altogether, leading to the substantial interest in this how-to screencast.

Note that LinkedIn’s profile design changed late this year, so the process of hiding Endorsements has changed, reflected in this updated screencast, How to Hide LinkedIn Endorsements in the New LinkedIn Profile (which has a decent chance of becoming the most watched video for 2013…).

2. Veo® Mobile app for iPad from TD Ameritrade Institutional

All the major custodians now offer iPad apps for affiliated financial advisers. One app with extensive functionality is Veo® Mobile from TD Ameritrade Institutional.

Inside the app, advisers will find account management options, trading functionality, and streaming video from CNBC. It’s the all-in-one app advisers on the go can count on while away from the office.

3. Orion Advisor Services’ Eric Clarke discussing TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo® Open Access

In one of the first series of video spotlight interviews, I spoke with Orion Advisor Services President and CEO Eric Clarke about his company’s integration with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Veo® Open Access platform.

This type of content shaped what was to come for the remainder of 2012, as I added content that highlighted financial planning technology developments that really matter to your business.

And I know, I know, it’s “VAY-oh” Open Access, not “VEE-oh!”

4. FPPad Spotlight: Mike Wilson of AdvisoryWorld at T3 2012

This is a dark horse winner for 2012, as AdvisoryWorld (and their portfolio statistics offered to advisers) doesn’t garner much attention from the other media outlets to which you subscribe.

Nevertheless, this video continues to receive consistent traffic from a variety of locations, including the AdvisoryWorld.com website (see, there’s a lesson in this for you: put video, arguably ANY video, on the home page of your website. People will watch some or all of it!)

5. T3 2012: Competing Against Robo Advisers: Delivering Advice in a New World – Part 1

The final top five video of 2012 was filmed at the 2012 T3 conference in Dallas, TX. It features a panel session with Blueleaf CEO John Prendergast and inStream co-founder Alex Murguia discussing the controversial topic of robo advisers, or online financial advice and financial planning platforms that are competing against traditional financial advisers and wealth managers.

Both Prendergast and Murguia outline strategies advisers can implement to take on challengers like Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Betterment, LearnVest (hey, why doesn’t LearnVest have an https:// certificate?!?), and others.

I hope you enjoyed the video recap, so be sure to return over the next week to view the best podcasts and posts from FPPad in 2012.

The Financial Planning Flowchart (or why your clients will balk at paying your fees)

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Practice Management

The BloombergBusinessweek Financial Planning Flowchart

BloombergBusinessweek has managed to capture 80% of everything clients need for their financial planning in a one-page colorful flowchart.

Or has it?

Visit BloombergBusinessweek to view the Financial Planning Flowchart.

Here, in one fairly-straightforward graphic, clients have a roadmap to follow to address the essentials of their financial plan. When you connect with a new client or prospect, I argue that you largely repeat many of the same evaluations as you gather data, and possibly make similar recommendations, too.

What’s Your Value?

So how are you prepared to differentiate your value proposition and the work that you do over a flowchart? If you’re not prepared, you’re going to have a hard time justifying the fees you charge.

And if the financial planning decision-making process can be outlined in a flowchart, what’s to stop software designers from writing a program that automatically steps through all of these primary conditions?

I concede that the flowchart is a basic guide and good for a starting point, and it falls short of the complicated planning scenarios when trusts, estates, and multi-generational planning factor in to play. But for those advanced strategies, you’re talking about the needs of (and I’m certainly guilty of over generalizing here) “the 1%.”

You Can’t Charge High Fees for the Basics

For the majority of the general population who admit they could benefit from some financial planning, but just haven’t pursued an engagement with a “real” planner, they’re going to have a hard time justifying fees in the thousands of dollars for guidance they can follow from a magazine they can buy for $2.99 from the App Store.

This post isn’t intended to compress your planning services into something as simple as a flowchart, but rather challenge you to step up your offering while acknowledging the need for simplicity.

Complement Simplicity

A lot of people will get a good financial planning foundation established by following this chart.

So encourage it.

Complement the process.

And when clients, prospects, friends, and colleagues get to a decision point with no clear answer, you step in and shine with what you do best, and charge appropriately, too.

Because if you don’t, you run the risk of being replaced by an automated flowchart (aka robo adviser).

FPPad Bits and Bytes for December 21

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

There’s no FPPad On Air broadcast scheduled for today, but be sure to check out the library of content for episodes you may have missed

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Where to go online for year-end money advice from Reuters.com

[While author Beth Pinsker calls services like Personal Capital and Betterment “upstarts,” I feel they’re gaining significant marketing momentum, especially with recent mentions such as this Reuters article, FastCompany, and even The Economist. Are you ready to compete head-to-head as these upstarts become more mainstream in 2013?] Online calculators can readily tell you much house can you afford, when to retire or how long will it take to pay off debt. But comprehensive investment guidance has been a lot harder to come by with the click of a mouse.

Wingate Wealth Advisors Switches From Worldox to NetDocuments and XLR8 from PRWeb

[While not a huge deal among document management providers, I find the reasoning of this press release from NetDocuments interesting. Worldox does offer a hosted version, Worldox/Web Mobile for $25/user in addition to standard license fees. Then, Worldox can be integrated with Salesforce through a product called Virtuoso from Trumpet, Inc. So why did Wingate feel compelled to abandon Worldox rather than explore options to move it to the cloud and integrate into Salesforce using Virtuoso? It likely came down to cost, I suppose.] Wingate Wealth Advisors announced it has selected NetDocuments and XLR8 as their integrated document, email, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. “Wingate decided to switch to NetDocuments because of their cloud-based offering and their seamless integration with our CRM system, XLR8, which is built on the Salesforce.com platform,” Mark Greco, the firm’s Chief Operating Officer, stated.

Contactually’s Email Report Card: Everything you didn’t want to know about your bad email habits

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Software, Technology

Contactually Report Card Frequent readers know I’m an advocate of Contactually, a professional relationship manager application developed by the eponymous startup (see: Podcast: Daily follow-up reminders help financial advisers maintain strong client relationships).

One pretty cool “holiday gift” in terms of new functionality from Contactually is their Email Report Card.

Contactually now delivers an interactive infographic, for lack of a better word, that grades a variety of parameters with respect to your email habits.

Now all of your bad (and good, if there is such a thing) email habits don’t need to remain a mystery anymore. You can see statistics on new contacts made (I got an A+!), subject line length (B+ here), and your average email response time by month (oops, I failed!).

Click to view my custom Email Report Card from Contactually.

To get one of your own, sign up using the link at the top of my report (not an affiliate link, I get no benefit if you sign up).

TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo® open access now offers seven integrations with popular CRM software

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

Pareto Platform, Tamarac Advisor CRM, Junxure CRM and Advisors Assistant are now integrated with the custodian’s Veo® open access platform

In a press release today, TD Ameritrade Institutional announced that it has added four new integrations of CRM software to its Veo® open access platform, bringing the number of CRM integrations supported up to a total of seven.

Click to view the press release (at MarketWatch.com)

Existing CRM software integrations included Salesforce, Ebix and Redtail, where advisers can customize a dashboard to view total client holdings with data provided via TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo® open access connections.

In the press release, Jon Patullo, managing director of technology product management, TD Ameritrade Institutional, said, “Technology that helps an advisor manage a better client experience is becoming increasingly important. By integrating data between Veo and CRM systems, advisors are now armed with a more robust CRM system that can help boost productivity, improve client service, and streamline numerous tasks so advisors can spend their time on what matters most – their clients.” (see: TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Veo® Open Access to enhance trading, fee billing, and client on-boarding processes)

Since its launch in July 2010, Veo® open access now offers integrations with over 60 technology vendors spanning advisers’ critical systems including CRM, portfolio management, financial planning, and document management software. For more information about Veo® open access, visit TD Ameritrade Institutional online at http://www.tdainstitutional.com/

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