In the event that you have not been contacted by Schwab, 2008 IMPACT Award® nominations can be made through June 13.
Nominations for firms can be submitted by visiting the following link: http://www.impactawards.schwab.com/
IMPACT Awards are available for three categories: Best-in-Business, Best-in-Tech, and Pacesetter Award.
Part of my semi-daily web browsing habit is to check out the podcasts available at the Investment Advisor magazine website. Recently added is a podcast of an interview with Mark Tibergien, the current CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions.
02/23/2012: The content has been removed. Click here to listen to the Tibergien podcast on IA’s website. (opens an embedded audio player)
Here’s another announcement from Financial Advisor magazine: Practice Lifecycle is now offering free access to their website and related content.
In an email to FA newsletter subscribers I received this morning, Practice Lifecycle founders David Drucker and Kristofor Behn have waived the $199 yearly subscription fee, citing a decision to convert to a revenue model based on website advertisements (e.g. Google AdWords and the like).
Drucker was quoted in the email as saying:
Too many advisors need access to the practice building information and other professional resources available through this truly innovative practice management portal. We can’t let price become a barrier.
I invite you to visit the site and register. I will be doing so over the course of the week and will post feedback here (and likely to the PL website, too) as appropriate.
My firm is seeking to hire a new employee, so I have assisted in sending out notices through my various networks to find qualified candidates. One individual recommended that I use the services of the Succession Registry, a relatively new resource first mentioned in the October 2007 edition of Inside Information published by Bob Veres.
Succession Registry is an online career website where Rainmakers, aka employers, can post available positions that can be searched by Wellsprings, aka prospective employees. The service is free for Rainmakers and costs $9.95 per month for Wellsprings. Many have commented that the nominal fee for job seekers increases the quality of the candidates that contact employers regarding open positions, and I agree that it likely succeeds in doing so (Note that Craigslist has done the opposite where employers must pay a $25 fee to post an ad to cut down on the work-from-home advertisements).
Financial advisers create large volumes of data due to the comprehensive nature of the financial planning process. Portions of the material generated include documents that can easily be searched, such as Word documents of financial plans, Excel worksheets with calculations, and email correspondence with clients and allied professionals.
There are also many types of documents that advisers do not generate, such as third party brokerage statements and insurance policies supplied by a client during the data-gathering process. Adviser firms are adopting paperless office practices in increasing numbers to reduce the amount of paper stored for all of these documents. However, paperless versions of these third party documents pose a problem to advisers as they cannot quickly be searched for information critical to the comprehensive financial plan.
I have invested many months in an attempt to make the production of quarterly reports much more of a turn-key process in my firm. I am happy to say that by lunchtime on April 2nd, I finished all the quarterly reports and associated workpapers that will be provided to the planners and, ultimately, to our clients. (Update, April 3: Well, I discovered errors within the reports, but they are due to a custom plugin to our Portfolio Management Software, dbCAMS. So for all intents and purposes, they are done, but I’ve had to go through additional steps to circumvent the plugin errors.)
This all started when I was first interviewing with the firm. Part of the negotiation process included a provision that I was not able to take vacation during the first two weeks of the month that followed the end of a quarter. The quarterly production cycle and associated work with fee calculations generated a lot of work and anxiety. Therefore, the owners requested that the Operations Manager be present in the office while this work was completed.
Surprise, surprise: members of Generation X have little faith in financial firms and financial advisers, according to a study recently released by Charles Schwab. Titled Gen X Money Mindsets, I was not surprised at all by the results. Below is a short comment from this article.
Many Gen Xers do not believe financial firms can help them. More than half (51 percent) think that investment firms don’t care about people like them — those who don’t have a lot of money. And 46 percent feel that by turning to firms and advisers, they might end up spending more money than they make.
Much of the commentary is fairly in-line with what I’ve read before and experienced anecdotally through the lives of those around me. But what financial advisory firms need to consider is the overwhelming lack of faith this generation has in financial service providers. Why do you suppose that is?
