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FPPad Bits and Bytes for September 24

Posted on September 24, 2010 by in Bits & Bytes

FPPad goes on vacation today and won’t return until Monday, October 4. So enjoy this week’s Bits and Bytes; it’ll have to tide you over for two weeks!

Ameritas Investment Corp. Selects Smarsh for Email Archiving and Compliance Services from Businesswire.com

Smarsh®, the managed service leader in innovative, secure and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, announced today that Ameritas Investment Corp. (AIC) has migrated to the Smarsh hosted email archiving and compliance platform

Fidelity® to Integrate Black Diamond Performance Reportingtm within Its Open Technology Platform for Independent Advisors from BusinessWeek.com

Fidelity Investments®, a leading provider of custody and clearing services to registered investment advisors (RIAs), today announced that it has expanded advisors’ access to third-party solutions within Fidelity WealthCentral® by establishing a strategic relationship with Black Diamond Performance Reporting(TM) to integrate its BlueSky portfolio management and reporting platform.

Moxy 7.0 trade order management now available from Advent from InvestmentNews.com

Advent Software Inc. yesterday announced availability of Moxy 7.0, the latest version of the trade order management system that’s so popular with registered investment advisory firms. All told, the software is used by 850 financial services firms around the world.

What’s New? The FPPad Refresh

Posted on September 20, 2010 by in General

Notice anything different? Visitors to the FPPad.com website should notice a few changes that were rolled out this weekend. So what’s new?

Updated Design

We added a new WordPress theme from WooThemes to refresh the look of the website. The left-hand sidebar is now on the right, placing the content immediately to the left. Behind the scenes, we have better overall management of the content posted here, including better use of menu navigation, sidebar widgets, and user experience.

New E-Newsletter Service

A new item in the right-hand sidebar is a box to sign up for the new FPPad E-Newsletter. Until now, we used FeedBurner to provide e-mail and RSS subscription options to new FPPad posts. FeedBurner works fine, but it doesn’t allow us to distribute a targeted monthly newsletter or deliver exclusive offers to our subscribers.

So please take 10 seconds to enter your name and e-mail to subscribe to our new E-Newsletter. As a thank you for completing the subscription process, we’re offering a free download of our eBook titled 7 Essential Tips For The Productive Advisor. Get seven of our best tips in eighteen pages with over twenty technology resources.

If you subscribed by e-mail to FeedBurner, you will want to unsubscribe from that feed to avoid receiving duplicate e-mails for new blog content (the unsubscribe link is at the bottom of FeedBurner e-mails).

Better Search

There’s a new menu item to search FPPad archives. The old search would show only the titles of posts matching the search results, but not the body of the post showing what matched. We now added Google Search for FPPad that yields better results when you search for words and phrases used on our site.

Welcome!

So welcome to the new and improved site! We hope you enjoy what FPPad has to offer.

Like what you see? Prefer some changes to improve your experience? Please leave a comment to let us know how we can continue improve FPPad.com.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for September 17

Posted on September 17, 2010 by in Bits & Bytes

This week’s Bits and Bytes provides tips on how you can ditch your antiquated fax machine, become a top performer, and identify the best financial planning software on the market.

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Five Best Fax Services from Lifehacker.com

Despite the overall decrease in the popularity of fax machines, faxing is still a common practice in many industries. Here’s a look at five of the most popular services for sending and receiving faxes from a computer—without the clunky hardware.

Secrets of the top performers: The top firms and technology from InvestmentNews.com

What separates the top firms from the rest of the advisory industry? The way they utilize technology, for one. Watch this 3 minute video with Pershing’s Mark Tibergien and InvestmentNews’ Kelli Cruz who reveal insight from the latest Moss Adams/InvestmentNews Financial Performance Study of Advisory Firms.

Naviplan, Money Guide Pro and Advisor Vision Top List of Best Financial Advisor Software from Financial-Planning.com

Naviplan, Money Guide Pro and Advisor Vision are the best products in an increasingly crowded financial-planning software market, according to a new analysis by Aite Group in Boston.

And one story from the previous week that slipped through my filters: As Black Diamond deal starts to click, small custodian gets another hot partner from RIABiz.com

One of the smallest RIA custodians, Shareholders Service Group, has made its third big-league move in a little over a year by signing a deal with Envestnet Inc.

July 2010 CFP® Certification Examination Results Pouring In

Posted on September 13, 2010 by in General

Results from the July 2010 CFP® certification examination are pouring in. Many recipients are broadcasting their results on twitter.

Click here to see real-time updates from those who passed with this Twitter search: “passed cfp”

Congratulations to all those who passed this rigorous exam. If you did not pass, I highly recommend you evaluate the Ken Zahn Live Review course.

Thomson Reuters Unveils Rich Analytics Application

Posted on September 13, 2010 by in Software

Billing itself as “your portal to everything you need,” Thompson Reuters today launched Eikon, an integrated market data, analytics, and research application.

Here are some of the application features I found of interest:

  • Fully customizable desktop where windows can be dragged and dropped to individualize the platform
  • Global search option that “clusters” search results into groups such as equity, bond, and options news.
  • An integrated social networking and messaging platform to communicate in real-time with colleagues, including a publishing application to share your own market insights.

Do you have access to Eikon? I’d love to hear your feedback about the application. Feel free to comment below or send me a message at bill [at] fppad [dot] com.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for September 10

Posted on September 10, 2010 by in Bits & Bytes

As today wraps up a Labor Day-shortened week, Bits and Bytes is brief, meaning you can get through the material much faster!

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

RedBlack’s Peter Giza gives RIABiz a look under the hood of its Rebalance Express software from RIABiz.com

RedBlack, based in Bedford, N.H., entered the rebalancing technology market in 2006 to challenge two established companies: iRebal and Tamarac.

ByAllAccounts Receives $5 Million to Fuel New Growth from Marketwatch.com

ByAllAccounts, Inc., the financial advisors’ choice for account aggregation, today announced that it has received $5 million in Series B funding, led by Castile Ventures, to expand in the advisory market and increase its presence in the institutional market.

Prominent Financial Planning Program at Texas Tech to Offer Laserfiche Certification Training at Laserfiche.com

Laserfiche today announced that it has partnered with Texas Tech University, one of only 200 schools across the nation with a financial planning program that is registered by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards (CFP), to provide training and certification for students enrolled in the Professional Technology in Personal Financial Planning course.

CashEdge’s AllData Aggregation Enables ‘My Money’: Bundle’s Powerful New Budgeting and Spend-Tracking Toolset at PRWeb.com

CashEdge Inc. (www.cashedge.com), provider of AllData, the only premium account aggregation service, today announced that it will offer its industry-leading aggregation service to power exciting new features in Bundle’s My Money toolset. My Money adds personal financial management tools complementing Bundle’s groundbreaking comparison tool, Everybody’s Money, the most comprehensive collection of free spending and savings data on the web.

And finally, a moment of shameless self-promotion: When Disaster Strikes, my latest column for Morningstar Advisor.

Google Instant Can Save 2 To 5 Seconds Per Search

Posted on September 8, 2010 by in General

If you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8 to access the Internet, head over to the Google homepage and enter a search query. Instead of pressing the Enter key or clicking the “Search” or “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons, Google now displays instant search results beneath your query.

Here’s a short video from Google on how Google Instant works.

I admit, I rarely access the Google homepage to perform search. Instead, I enter search queries directly in Chrome’s Omnibox. Personally I find that Omnibox saves me time versus visiting Google’s homepage since most of my searches are to retrieve pages I visited before (and discoverable in my browser history).

Have you tried Google Instant? What are your first impressions?

Another Choice Among Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customizations

Posted on September 7, 2010 by in Software

Keeping up with all the flavors and variants of CRM is a daunting task. One iteration that I don’t have much experience with just yet is Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Tamarac Advisor is built on Microsoft Dynamics, but other than that, choices are limited for advisers interested in leveraging the software giant’s CRM application.

Lauren Carlson, a CRM Market Analyst for Software Advice, brought one more Dynamics customization to my attention. Look for it in her article titled Microsoft Dynamics CRM Industry Solutions: Our 15 Favorites at SoftwareAdvice.com.

If you know of or are using other Dynamics customizations, leave a comment and let me know.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for September 3

Posted on September 3, 2010 by in Bits & Bytes

With a hat tip to Doug Cornelius and his Compliance Building blog, we want to provide a short summary of interesting stories (mostly) in the financial planning technology arena, but the links don’t necessarily warrant a post on their own.

We hope Bits and Bytes will become a regular fixture on FPPad. If you find the information useful, or you’re tired of this kind of junk in your RSS reader and/or inbox, please leave a comment or contact me.

So here are this week’s stories of interest:

Gmail Priority Inbox Finds & Sorts Important Messages Automatically from Lifehacker.com

Google’s new Priority Inbox feature not only sorts your inbox, but it also figures out what’s important based on what messages you reply to and read.

LIMRA And Smarsh Join Forces to Provide Members Email, Text And IM Archiving from BusinessWire.com

Smarsh®, the managed service leader in innovative, secure and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, and LIMRA, which provides research, consulting, and other services to insurance and financial services companies worldwide, today announced a strategic partnership. The companies will work together to help LIMRA member firms meet their electronic message archiving and compliance needs.

Fidelity wins converts to WealthCentral, but most of its advisors have yet to make the switch from RIABiz.com

After getting off to a slow start in the market, Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services’ technology platform is beginning to catch on with advisory firms.

Introducing the free Fidelity Mobile App for iPad(TM) from Fidelity.com

Fidelity Mobile – our mobile platform to your iPhone®, BlackBerry®, web-enabled phone or other PDA – keeps you in the market and in full control of your trading day. Now available for iPad(TM).

Legent Clearing Selects Black Diamond as Portfolio Management and Performance Reporting Platform from PRNewswire.com

Black Diamond Performance Reporting™ and Legent Clearing announced today a joint program to provide Black Diamond’s industry leading, web-based portfolio management and reporting platform to Legent’s growing list of institutional and retail brokerage firms.

Virgin Mobile’s MiFi Goes Unlimited

Posted on September 1, 2010 by in Technology

Astute followers of my Twitter feed know that a few weeks ago I purchased the MiFi® 2200 mobile hotspot card from Virgin Mobile. (Alas, it’s still in the box waiting to be activated.)

When I bought the MiFi card, Virgin Mobile had four different price points for its data plans. Plans were along the lines of:

  • $10 for 100MB which expired in 10 days
  • $20 for 250MB, 30 day expiration
  • $40 for 600MB, 30 day expiration
  • $60 for 1GB, 30 day expiration

But as of August 26, Virgin Mobile cut two of its plans and now offers two simple options:

  • The same $10, 100MB, 10 day expiration
  • A new, $40 unlimited data plan with a 30 day expiration

The unlimited data plan is a huge deal. But don’t take my word for it. David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times provided his review of the MiFi device and its unlimited data plan.

Also, if you’d like feedback on the MiFi device from a practicing financial advisor, read this blog post from Curtis A. Smith, CFP® on Morningstar Advisor.

And yes, soon I will break the package open and activate my MiFi…