August 22nd, 2008 Bill Winterberg
In the last month or two, I have received a number of new reports that focus on operations and technology in the financial adviser space. These reports do a fair job of identifying some of the trends of technology used in a wide variety of firms and some of the reasons why advisers have been slow to roll out new technology.
The first report is the 2008 FPA Practitioner Technology Report - Leveraging Technology Solutions. This report uses results from an online survey taken by 291 random FPA members in February 2008. Respondents consisted of the following categories:
- Independent RIAs (35 percent)
- Independents affiliated with a broker-dealer and IAR-dually registered (21 percent)
- Independents affiliated with a broker-dealer (20 percent).
The majority of participants (72 percent) reported revenue of $1 million or less.
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June 10th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Part of what I have been working on over the last week is a presentation I’m going to deliver in July to a group of specialty physicians. Since I consider myself technologically savvy and a creative user of presentation software (ok, yes, I still use PowerPoint due to my history with it), I’ve looked for resources on how to design and deliver effective presentations.
Most of us are very familiar with the common characteristics that plague most one hour presentations. There’s a title slide, introduction, an outline overview, all followed by a gratuitous spray of bullet points, hard-to-read graphs, and concluded with yet more bullet points. Thank you, the end!
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June 4th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Increased Internet bandwidth, webcams, and conference technology has definitely impacted an adviser’s ability to engage clients that may be located in another state, country, or even continent. Cisco has taken video conferencing technology even further with its introduction of On-Stage TelePresence.
I watched a seamless presentation of this technology here.
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May 30th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
A few days ago I encountered an article on TechRepublic by Jason Hiner. He mused as to whether or not Twitter is the most important web development of 2008.
Jason’s article incited a flurry of comments as to the relevance of such a simple application, but there doesn’t appear to be an overwhelming consensus arguing a particular side. On the one hand, Twitter provides a super-quick way to post updates on current user activities. On the other, Twitter provides an outlet for updates on any topic, from business activities to what’s cooking for dinner. Personally, I’m not captivated by knowing what’s on my friends’ culinary menu.
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May 29th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Davis Janowski from Investment News posted a thought-provoking question on LinkedIn.com this week. He asked:
Looking into your crystal ball what do you see as the technology needs, trends, challenges, and milestones that lay ahead for financial advisers and the industry at large over the coming decade?
Click here to see the variety of answers given so far, including mine regarding the advent of mass collaboration and wikis.
What technology-related issues do you think advisers face in the future? Share your comments below or over at LinkedIn.
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May 16th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Lifehacker.com recently announced Mint.com has added investment tracking to its list of features. A highly requested and attractive feature, investment tracking should dramatically increase this service provider’s already rapid adoption in the market.
Mint.com is a free online personal finance management application that users can configure to track expenses by aggregating transactions from checking, savings, and credit card accounts. Now that investment accounts have been added, Mint.com is getting closer to a complete personal finance product to compete with the likes of computer-based (as opposed to web-based) Quicken and Microsoft Money. Note that Quicken does have an ASP-based product of Quicken Online, free for 30 days, then $2.99/month thereafter.
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May 12th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
At the end of April, Charles Schwab and Texas Tech University announced the creation of a Schwab Technology Complex on the University’s campus, and also named Danielle Winchester as the first Schwab Research Scholar.
Click the link to view the Charles Schwab and Texas Tech University press release.
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April 25th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
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.
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Posted in Practice Management, Technology | 1 Comment »
April 17th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
As a busy financial planning professional, I send out many requests for meetings, conference calls, and other events throughout each week. Some are fairly easy to schedule, such as one-on-one time with a co-worker, but every so often there are times where I need to send a request to numerous individuals and make a futile attempt to work around their own busy schedules.
Fortunately, I have been able to avoid sending out a flurry of emails to attempt to schedule an event as I have come across two unique web utilities. I have been using Doodle for a while and recently discovered When Is Good through a recent Lifehacker post.
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April 3rd, 2008 Bill Winterberg
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.
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