Tag Archives: AdvisoryWorld

LPL Financial Acquires AdvisoryWorld: Flash briefing for December 4, 2018

Click here to see my conflicts of interest regarding Envestnet, mentioned in today’s update.

Here are the links to today’s top stories:

Envestnet and BlackRock Enter Strategic Relationship to Enhance the Financial Advisor Experience from Envestnet.com

LPL Financial Announces the Acquisition of AdvisoryWorld from LPL Financial

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.

Brokerage websites go offline during market volatility: Flash briefing for February 7, 2018

Here are the links to today’s top stories:

Fidelity Reports Web Issues After Robo-Adviser Sites Crash

Personal Capital Adds Socially Responsible Investing to Serve Rapidly Growing Client Base

What’s new from AdvisoryWorld, 2018 Fintech Update from YouTube

Welcome to the FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.

Brokerage Websites Offline During Market Volatility

With huge increases in market volatility this week, brokerage customers have experienced unresponsive websites from some of the largest providers like Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Vanguard as well as smaller automated investment services Betterment and Wealthfront. According to Bloomberg, brokerage companies acknowledged that customers did lose access for short periods of time on Monday, but as trading activity subsided, account access was restored to all customers by Tuesday morning.

Personal Capital Adds Socially Responsible Personal Strategy®

In socially responsible investing news, Personal Capital is hopping on the responsible investing bandwagon with the addition of its new Socially Responsible Personal Strategy®. The strategy screens US equities based on environmental, social, and governance factors powered by Sustainalytics data to generate investment strategies that align with customers’ socially responsible preferences. Personal Capital joins Betterment, Wealthfront, Motif Investing, OpenInvest, and many others to help investors align their portfolios with their socially conscious preferences.

AdvisoryWorld Update on ACQUIRE Solution

And how do you stay up to date on what’s new this year in fintech? Well if you visit the FPPad YouTube channel, you’ll see the first batch of dozens of interviews filmed with fintech solution providers at last week’s National LINC conference, including a conversation about an updated from Advisory World called ACQUIRE. Here’s AdvisoryWorld COO Mike Wilson with the details.

We continue to work on what we refer to as ACQUIRE, which is our digital onboarding component. With that, advisors are able to embed links on their websites and social media accounts that helps get new business through the doors. It’s a questionnaire that points, again, to a model.

More interviews are being uploaded to the FPPad YouTube channel every day, so visit fppad.com/flashbriefing to get all the links to today’s top stories.

I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com, be sure to check back in with me later for more fintech news.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for August 2

It’s here! Bits and Bytes has gone video.

I’m now delivering the week’s best technology bits for financial advisers in a video broadcast you can bite into anytime you like (oh yes, I just did that).

This week’s edition of Bits and Bytes is brought to you by Redtail Technology, providers of cloud-based CRM for financial professionals since 2003.

Redtail Technology

Check out their popular advisor solutions and sign up for a 30-day free trial. Visit fppad.com/redtail for more information.

(Watch on YouTube). But still, those with short attention spans or aficionados of the written word can get this week’s stories of interest in their full-text glory below.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know!

Like the new format? Hate it? Don’t care for it? Be honest, and let me know by contacting me.

Tech reporter Davis Janowski leaving InvestmentNews to become editor for WealthFront, via Davis’ Twitter feed

[In this week’s lead story, venerable technology reporter Davis Janowski announced this week that he will be leaving his position as tech reporter at InvestmentNews to assume the editor role over at WealthFront. Most of you should recognize WealthFront from a number of past articles about online financial advice platforms and so called “robo-adviser” platforms. For as long as I can remember, Davis has been a solid journalist covering technology for financial advisers and inspired me to launch FPPad back in the day. So Davis, thanks for all your work and passion, and I look forward to what you have in store for advisers with your new role at WealthFront.]

 

USB flash drives masquerading as keyboards mean more BYOD security headaches from ZDNet.com

[In my Defending Against Phishing, Hacking, and Spoofing Attacks presentation, this is one of the attacks I talk about under social engineering. See, hackers drop these little USB flash drives in business parking lots, labeled with enticing messages like “personal and confidential” or “2012 tax returns.” They hope than an unsuspecting employee will pick it up and plug it in to their corporate computer, which unbeknownst to the employee unleashes all kinds of malware and spyware inside the corporate firewall. The best defense against this tactic: train everyone in your organization not to use USB drives from unknown sources. The risk of stumbling on a rogue device is just too great.] You should be already aware of the data theft risks that USB flash drives pose to your company – even a seemingly lowly 2GB drive can hold a lot of precious data – but a new threat has emerged which makes them even more dangerous.

inStream Hires Professor Dr. Wade Pfau to lead Financial Planning Research from inStreamWealth.com

[inStream, the provider of free web-based financial planning, strike that, practice management software, just beefed up its chops in the retirement planning area by hiring Dr. Wade Pfau to lead its Financial Planning Research division. Pfau is the Professor of Retirement Income for the American College and has authored a number of influential papers on retirement research. Clearly, advisers looking to serve the needs of their retiring clients want access to the leading research on retirement planning, and Pfau’s connection with inStream will likely raise the company’s profile on most advisers’ radar. A final note: inStream is an advertiser on FPPad and helps support content production just like this.] inStream Solutions (“inStream”) announced today that American College Professor of Retirement Income Dr. Wade Pfau has joined the firm to lead Financial Planning Research.

Orion Advisor Services Enhances Integrated Performance Reporting Capabilities from MarketWatch.com

[Orion Advisor Services is well-known for its hosted portfolio management software and reconciliation service bureau. One issue with many of these services is that the reports themselves might not be exactly what advisers are looking for and want to present to their clients. Some advisers turn to third-party providers like MorningStar or AdvisoryWorld for more attractive reports that better convey information advisers want to put in front of clients. Well this week, Orion announced that its Report Builder solution now integrates with AdvisoryWorld, so advisers can pull in components like risk analytics, Modern Portfolio Theory statistics, and diversification and overlap analysis directly from AdvisoryWorld, but be able to match the font size and look and feel of standard Orion reports. If you’re one of the hundreds of Orion users, check out the updated Report Builder and see how you can enhance your reports with the latest AdvisoryWorld integration.] Orion Advisor Services, LLC, a premier portfolio accounting service provider, is delivering more robust performance reporting capabilities to its advisor clients through expanded integrations with AdvisoryWorld, a leading provider of customizable portfolio analytics and investment planning applications to the financial services market and PIEtech’s MoneyGuidePro, the leading goal-based financial planning software for financial advisors.

BlazePortfolio Completes Integration with Black Diamond from BlazePortfolio.com

[For rebalancing software, advisers are pretty familiar with Envestnet|Tamarac, TD Ameritrade Institutional’s iRebal, and Total Rebalance Expert. One of the programs not on most advisers’ radar is Atom Align from Blaze Portfolio. This week, the folks at Blaze Portfolio announced that their solution, Atom Align, is now integrated with Advent’s Black Diamond portfolio management software. So if you’re a Black Diamond user and don’t have rebalancing software, you have one more option to consider to increase your efficiency when rebalancing client accounts.] BlazePortfolio is excited to complete its integration with Black Diamond.  The BlazePortfolio and Black Diamond integrated solution offers Investment Advisors the opportunity to utilize both platforms for their back office systems.

LinkedIn Company Pages Add Analytics from Mashable.com

[If you’re like me, you work hard to build your brand and build your profile through a number of social media websites. So a big part of measuring your success for the time you spend on social media is the ability to get metrics and real data behind your social media activity. Mashable reported on Wednesday that LinkedIn is now offering analytics for Company Pages set up on the site, so if your firm has a Company Page, go sign in and look for the new analytics tab in your menu.] LinkedIn added analytic support to Company Pages Wednesday, giving businesses the opportunity to track how content shared on LinkedIn performs.

And if you want to read the best material in financial planning knowledge and information over the weekend, click or tap the button below to head over to Michael Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog and see the latest in Weekend Reading.

Click to view Weekend Reading at Kitces.com

Video Spotlight: AdvisoryWorld COO Michael Wilson on performance reports and platform integrations

AdvisoryWorld has a number of portfolio tools available capable of creating reports for advisors and clients alike.

In this video spotlight, Mike Wilson, COO of AdvisoryWorld, talks about how advisors use their platform for actual and hypothetical performance reports and the different integrations AdvisoryWorld currently supports.

(click to view on YouTube)

 

Orion integrates reporting options from AdvisoryWorld

Yet another integration announced by Orion Advisor Services this week is one with AdvisoryWorld, enabling access to the reporting company’s extensive library of fact sheets, analytics, and comparison tools.

AdvisoryWorld provides a large universe of reports, all supported by data sourced from Lipper, Morningstar, Standard and Poor’s and Zacks Investment Research. For a comprehensive view of AdvisoryWorld’s report options, see their PDF by clicking the following link: http://www.advisoryworld.com/ice/AdvisoryWorld_Sample_Reports_Full.pdf

Sample Report from AdvisoryWorld

Sample Report from AdvisoryWorld

Michael Wilson, Chief Operating Officer of AdvisoryWorld, said that the company is finalizing a reseller agreement with Orion over the next week, so the integration should be available to Orion users shortly. Pricing starts at $45 per month per advisor for AdvisoryWorld’s basic reporting module and $95 per month per advisor for an extended version.

With the integration active, advisors using Orion’s platform will be able to automatically pass position and holding information from Orion into AdvisoryWorld. There won’t be any need to re-key position information in order to generate reports with up-to-date holding information.