ByAllAccounts Archives

Robinhood to launch cryptocurrency trading: Flash briefing for January 29, 2018

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Bill Winterberg in Flash Briefing, Technology

Here are the links to today’s stories:

Robinhood announces plans to trade cryptocurrencies

ByAllAccounts says Fidelity Stock Plan pages are off limits for account aggregation

Subscribe to the FPPad YouTube channel for updates from TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC

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

Robinhood to Trade Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrency trading is coming to Robinhood, as the provider of the popular mobile app for commission-free stock trading announced a waiting list to sign up for access to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Screenshots shared on social media last week show in-app price quotes for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin, but no definitive announcement has been made just yet as to which cryptocurrencies will actually be available for trading when the app is expected to go live in February.

ByAllAccounts Cannot Aggregate Fidelity Stock Plan Pages

In account aggregation news, ByAllAccounts just emailed its customers saying that the company can no longer access account information from Fidelity Stock Plan pages, according to an email screenshot shared online by Michael Kitces. The company said it is working with Fidelity on a long-term solution, but did not have any ETA on when account aggregation would be restored. Back in November, Fidelity announced plans to block screen scraping of customer account in favor of its new API-based Fidelity Access℠ service to be rolled out throughout the year.

TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC in the Spotlight

And thousands of advisors will be in Orlando this week for the TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC conference. In addition to getting updates on Veo Open Access and Veo One from TD Ameritrade Institutional, my producer Steve Biermann and I hope to film interviews with ALL of the tech vendors in the Veo Village this year, so be sure to subscribe to the FPPad YouTube channel so you don’t miss our updates on the latest in advisor technology for 2018.

To get links to all the details on today’s stories, visit fppad.com/flashbriefing

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.

What is Fidelity Access℠?

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

Fidelity Access℠ is an API-based account aggregation offering for Fidelity customers to grant permission to third-party financial websites and aggregation services and obtain account balances, holdings, and transaction information.

What is Fidelity Access℠ it and why it matters:

Fidelity Access℠ is a new API-based connection that enables third-party financial websites and account aggregation services to obtain information from Fidelity customer accounts, with the customer’s approval, without using customer login and password information in an attempt to “screen scrape” account information
Who’s onboard? Fidelity Access℠ is available now (November 2017), but no large account aggregation services (other than the obvious eMoney Advisor, a Fidelity company) as of yet have disclosed or announced their adoption of the Fidelity Access℠ API
Improved account security: Moving to API-based account aggregation reduces the number of times customers share their login credentials with third-party financial websites and aggregation services
Expect short-term frustration: Customers who leverage third-party financial websites will need to be patient as their providers transition away from using Fidelity login credentials to the new API. All providers must first meet Fidelity’s security and access requirements before connecting via the API. It’s quite possible that multiple aggregation providers and personal financial applications will not be approved by Fidelity to leverage Fidelity Access℠
What customers must do: All Fidelity customers will eventually have to manually enable account access to third-party financial websites using the Fidelity Access℠ dashboard when logged in to their Fidelity account
What financial advisers must do: Financial advisers who use data aggregated from clients’ Fidelity accounts will need to instruct clients to manually enable permissions through Fidelity Access℠ to the third-party aggregation services used by the financial adviser

Fidelity Investments announced the introduction of Fidelity Access℠, a new service that allows Fidelity customers to grant account access to third-party websites and aggregation services to obtain account balances, holdings, and transaction information using an API.

With Fidelity Access℠, Fidelity joins other financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo (Gateway Channel) and others that have already introduced an API for third-party account aggregation as an alternative to “screen scraping” by logging in using a customer’s online account credentials.

Ending Online Credential Sharing

Historically, investors provided their financial account login credentials to popular aggregation and personal financial management apps like Intuit’s Mint.com, Personal Capital, Betterment, Wealthfront, Learnvest, Clarity Money, Quicken and more.

These services leveraged account aggregation functionality from providers such as Yodlee, Fiserv AllData, Finicity, Aqumulate, Plaid, Quovo, Wealth Access, and Morningstar ByAllAccounts to log in to financial accounts and obtain account balances and transaction data. (See How Intuit’s account aggregation shutdown may impact the fintech solutions you use)

One problem with sharing login credentials with third-party websites is the protection of the account login information and specifically the account password. Given the rapid increase in attacks on financial institutions, including the large security breach of Equifax affecting over 140 million customers in the U.S., hackers are obtaining passwords in record numbers for a variety of online logins that they then use in brute-force attacks to compromise online financial accounts. Many customers are at risk when they do not follow good online password hygiene by using the same password for multiple online accounts.

Cleaner Data

A few positives emerge from an API-driven connection like Fidelity Access℠. First, account authentication and data exchange is performed using well-defined protocols. Overall, security is enhanced as Fidelity Access℠ authentication is performed using the OAuth open standard.

Second, the quality of data obtained via API is much higher than “screen scraping” since the data is transmitted using conventional API functions. Such functions clearly identify datatypes being relayed over the API, so there’s no ambiguity over what pieces of data represent a security name, security symbol, transaction date, transaction amount, or total value of a holding.

Finally, institutions like Fidelity are able to reduce the bandwidth demands for websites customers use to log in to view account information, which were never intended to be accessed in high volumes by third-party aggregators.

Instead, institutions will now be able to shift the bandwidth required for account aggregation to separate services that support access over the API and reduce the demand on public website login page access.

Expect a Rough Transition

Sometime in 2018, Fidelity will no longer allow third-party account aggregation services to log in to customer accounts using shared online credentials and ultimately “break” the aggregation functionality.

At that time, Fidelity customers will need to manually enable account access via their own Fidelity Access℠ dashboard for each of the aggregation services they wish to continue to use.

The challenge here for customer satisfaction will be the rate of adoption among the dozens, if not hundreds, of third-party personal financial management apps into the Fidelity Access℠ program. It is possible that the transition will actually limit choice among customers as to which personal financial management apps can access Fidelity account information. Today, customers can enter their login credentials into any financial management app they wish to enable aggregation of Fidelity accounts without first obtaining Fidelity’s approval.

Also, many customers maintain relationships with multiple financial institutions for a variety of reasons, so as this trend of migrating to API-based aggregation plays out, customers will be required to manage account aggregation access not only for accounts they hold with Fidelity, but also with accounts at a variety of other financial institutions where the conduct business.

The common denominator for client satisfaction here is the aggregation provider that is able to quickly adopt as many of the institution-specific APIs as possible.

After all, what good is it to permission Fidelity Access℠ to the Personal Capital dashboard when Personal Capital is not approved to connect with other financial institution aggregation APIs? The incomplete aggregation decreases the value of the consolidated dashboard in services such as Personal Capital when it is not able to aggregate all of a user’s accounts.

Tepid Adoption

One other interesting take on the Fidelity Access℠ announcement is that none of the major aggregation providers were identified as adopting the new API (eMoney Advisor is, of course, onboard, which is expected as it is a Fidelity company). Other API introductions launched with at least one major aggregator on board, such as JP Morgan Chase and Intuit’s announcement in January 2017.

Eventually, adoption of Fidelity Access℠ will be very likely among the major aggregators, but I wonder what the thought process was behind the announcement of Fidelity Access℠ without also announcing which of the larger aggregation providers have already begun to leverage the API.

We’ll have to stay tuned for more updates here as the success of Fidelity Access℠ (and satisfaction of Fidelity customers) depends heavily on how widely adopted Fidelity Access℠ is among the major aggregation providers.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for September 30, 2016

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, get updates on hackathons hosted by Orion and eMoney, Motif Investing introduces subscription pricing, Betterment automates asset location preferences, and more.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(WatchFPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by Envestnet | Tamarac, providers of Advisor Xi, an industry-leading fully integrated web-based suite for RIAs. Tamarac’s Advisor Xi unifies portfolio management, modeling, rebalancing, trading, billing, and reporting with a fully customizable client portal and enterprise-grade CRM.

On October 20th, two innovative and rapidly growing firms will share how they leveraged the Advisor Xi Suite in their business during an interactive webinar. Space is limited, so secure your spot today by visiting http://fppad.com/tamarac

Here are the links to this week’s top stories:

Fuse 2016: Day One and eMoney Advisor Summit 2016: Hack-a-thon Day One

Now you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a few weeks since my last Bits and Bytes broadcast, and that’s because I’ve attended not one, but two hackathon events hosted by financial technology companies. The first was the Fuse event in Park City, Utah, where Orion Advisor Services assembled developers from dozens of companies to present innovative ways they leverage the Orion Notifications platform. My producer Steve and I vlogged each day of the event, which I highly recommend you watch to find out who claimed the coveted Best in Show award.
And then two weeks later, eMoney hosted their own hackathon event, which had a bit of a different structure from Fuse, as four groups of advisors teamed up with eMoney product, design, and engineering employees to build new planning experiences onto the existing eMoney platform. We made vlogs of this event, too, which I also think is worth your time to watch.
Now, I get that hackathons generate good PR and marketing buzz for the host companies, but quite honestly it’s exciting to see activities like these that promote innovation and experimentation with technology that’s all about helping you serve your clients AND be a better business owner.

Motif Enters Subscription Economy, Introduces Motif BLUE from BusinessWire

Now, moving on to top stories, let’s start with Motif Investing, as the company just introduced a new subscription-based service called Motif BLUE. If you remember back in December 2014, I awarded the Best Back-Office Technology to the Motif Advisor Platform, but that was before the company switched from a flat monthly fee per customer to an AUM-based fee schedule.
But with Motif BLUE, the monthly fee makes a comeback, as customers can pay up to $19.95 a month to invest in three motifs, get auto-rebalancing of professional motifs, and trade motifs three times per month commission free.
So my theory is, customers can use the Motif BLUE Starter plan at $5 a month to mimic one of the asset allocations of the popular automated investment services out there, but instead of paying an AUM-based fee of, oh, 25 to 35 basis points, customers pay Motif roughly $60 a year.
Do the math, and Motif is cheaper when assets go above about $20,000 versus an annual fee of 35 basis points. Now I admit, there are still other differences between Motif Investing and automated investment services, but I think you can sense I believe that fees for investing software should not be based on the size of the assets being managed, and I expect that trend to grow as customers gravitate towards subscription-based pricing models.

Tax-Coordinated Portfolio™: The Latest Breakthrough in Tax-Smart Investing from Betterment

But to up the ante, Betterment announced its own new offering called the Tax-Coordinated Portfolio service, where Betterment automatically implements asset location preferences across taxable and tax-deferred or tax-exempt investment accounts.
Now the concept of asset location preferences is nothing new, but what IS new is the ability to use software to automatically manage location preferences on the fly, such as when clients make one-time deposits or withdrawals across their various accounts. Betterment confirmed that this service will be available to Betterment for Advisors customers, so when I go back to that whole discussion around fees a moment ago with Motif Investing, one could argue that higher fees could be justified because of nuanced differences like automated asset location management.

Quovo Unveils Advisor Dashboard, Arming Financial Advisors With Enriched Client Data Insights in an Intuitive User Interface from Marketwired

And look, if you want to effectively mange asset location preferences, you really need to see all of your clients’ assets and accounts, which leads me to my final story that comes from Quovo, as the company announced the release of the Quovo Advisor Dashboard. The dashboard allows advisors to quickly view information on both assets under management as well as held-away assets, easily synchronize new client accounts, and generate simple reports based on the data obtained by Quovo.
Now I know aggregating held-away assets has always come with its share of challenges (like expired account credentials), but with the Department of Labor fiduciary requirements coming in April next year, how will you be able to defend the advice you provide to clients if you don’t have a clear picture of their assets and liabilities?
You can certainly get those details without using account aggregation, but it just won’t be very efficient, and with direct-to-consumer providers like Personal Capital and Betterment including account aggregation in their solutions, well, these are the new table stakes for technology in your business. So if you’re not using solutions like Quovo or alternatives like Morningstar ByAllAccounts, Aqumulate, eMoney, Wealth Access, Yodlee and others, there’s still time to add one of these to the tools you use today.

Here are several stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Riskalyze Rolls Out Coverage for Individual Bonds from Riskalyze

It’s a request we’ve heard from a lot of advisors: make it simple to include individual bonds in a portfolio on Riskalyze. We’re excited to announce that coverage for over 30,000 individual corporate, government and municipal bonds will arrive on October 1.

Qumram launches fully-compliant WhatsApp social media record keeping from Qumram

Despite end-to-end encryption, Qumram enables financial services firms to meet client demand for social media interaction, via WhatsApp, without compromising compliance.

Save time with smart scheduling in Google Calendar from Google

If you’re using G Suite, “Find a time” already lets you set up meetings much faster in Calendar on Android. Today it’s coming to iOS and by the end of the year, the web.

Guide Financial to shut down operations on October 11

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

guide header

Guide Financial, the financial planning startup acquired by John Hancock in June 2015, told its users via email this week that the company plans to discontinue operations on October 11.

Intuit Aggregation Wake

Guide Financial is the first financial adviser technology provider that I know of that has decided to close its operations in the wake of Intuit’s announcement that it is discontinuing its Financial Data APIs for account aggregation. Those APIs will be maintained only for current production developers until November 15, 2016, Intuit said in an email to developers.

In a phone call with Guide Financial, I learned that the company first attempted to contact as many advisers as possible by phone to communicate the news, and those who were not able to be reached received an email with the details of the shutdown on Thursday.

In the email, the company noted that Intuit had recently announced the discontinuation of the account aggregation services that powered the Guide Financial Service. But in my post from March 2015, How Intuit’s account aggregation shutdown may impact the fintech solutions you use, Intuit told developers that Finicity would be providing façade APIs to facilitate the transition from Intuit to Finicity for aggregation services. Guide Financial did not comment on the option to transition to aggregation provided by Finicity.

No Data Exports

In the weeks prior to the shutdown, Guide Financial users will not have the ability to request an export of their data contained in the system. Generally, data on clients is limited to basic demographic information and is likely to be found in other systems used by advisers, such as CRM and portfolio management software, so an export of that data would not be useful in most circumstances. Guide Financial said that transaction data aggregated from financial institutions will not be made available.

Guide Financial has offered a brief FAQ on its website regarding the transition, and additional questions can be directed to support@guidefinancial.com

Alternatives

For alternatives to Guide Financial, I can think of a few financial planning and financial dashboard solutions that perform account aggregation to update financial plans. The list of the solutions are below:

eMoney Advisor, $1,944 to $3,888/year depending on features, including aggregation and an online client dashboard
Right Capital, under $1,000/year including aggregation
MoneyGuidePro, $1,295/year (I think aggregation is an additional $365/year, but I’m not 100% sure, and clients do not see an online dashboard for their outside accounts)

Note: I originally listed Balance Financial in the list of alternatives above, but I have not been able to connect with them for any updates. Also, their website’s terms and conditions have not been updated for two-and-a-half years (last updated January 28, 2014). Until I connect with someone at Balance, I’ll keep them listed in this note and not as a viable alternative to Guide Financial.

There are other solutions that perform aggregation (ByAllAccounts, Aqumulate, Quovo, Blueleaf, Wealth Access, etc.), but they generally don’t also have financial planning capabilities built directly in to the program.

If you can think of other solutions that should be on this list, contact me (or tweet me @billwinterberg) and I will update this list.

Last updated: August 30, 2016 at 11:54 AM ET

How Intuit’s account aggregation shutdown may impact the fintech solutions you use

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

Intuit’s Financial Data API looming shut down will have a ripple effect across popular account aggregation providers

Intuit’s looming Financial Data API shut down will have a ripple effect across popular account aggregation providers

Quick Take:

Intuit is discontinuing its Financial Data APIs widely used for financial institution account aggregation
Account aggregation providers using Intuit feeds (e.g. Blueleaf, Quovo, Wealth Access, Plaid and more) may need to transition to an alternate account aggregation provider
Intuit identified Finicity as a suitable account aggregation provider, but Finicity has issues around its business that raise concern for me
For advisors, your clients will have to reauthorize any accounts aggregated using the Intuit APIs as various companies phase out their use of the Intuit data feed

On March 15, 2016, Intuit announced they have decided to discontinue the Financial Data APIs (formerly CAD). No new direct Financial Data API (CAD) developers will be allowed to move into production.

The API will be maintained only for current production developers until November 15, 2016 to enable time for migration.

In the wake of Intuit’s decision, Guide Financial became the first adviser fintech provider to announce they are shutting down their service later this year. See Guide Financial to shut down operations on October 11.

Intuit identified Finicity as a solution that will provide a “façade” API interface that translates Intuit-structured API calls into Finicity-structured API calls.

Financial Data API Backstory

The Financial Data APIs from Intuit allow developers to link to end-users’ banking accounts from within their application.

In September of 2012, Intuit announced that it was opening up the technology that powered Intuit products like Mint.com, Quicken, and QuickBooks to the developer community via a library of APIs that it called Customer Account Data (CAD).

Customer Account Data, which was rebranded Financial Data APIs, is composed of two separate products: the Transactions API and the Identification API Beta.

The Transactions API offered connections to roughly 20,000 US and Canadian financial institutions, enabling third-party developers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy aggregation functionality to a wide array of financial sources.

The Identification API Beta facilitated customer’s identity and banking account verification using banking credentials. Developers were able to configure ACH connections via the API instead of relying on microdeposits (a series of deposits under $1 that the customer verifies) and a process called “fatfingering.”

FinTech Floodgates

The general availability of the Intuit Financial Data APIs opened the floodgates of all sorts of new B2C fintech startups that featured the aggregation of users’ financial accounts. These startups included popular names such as LearnVest, SaveUp, Hello Digit, BillGuard, and more.

A similar increase has taken place among B2B account aggregation providers, with companies like Blueleaf, Wealth Access, Quovo, Plaid, and Right Capital all appearing with some type of advisor aggregation fintech solution over the last four years.

Prior to the new wave of account aggregation providers, advisor solutions were dominated by four key players:

Yodlee, acquired by Envestnet, completed in November 2015 for $538 million
Cash Edge, acquired by Fiserv in June 2011 for $465 million and available to advisors through partnerships such as Aqumulate
ByAllAccounts, acquired by Morningstar in April 2014 for $28 million
eMoney Advisor, acquired by Fidelity in February 2015 for a reported $250 million

Intuit Gave, Intuit Hath Taken Away

So now that Intuit is going to shut down access to its APIs, several fintech aggregators should find themselves scrambling for a suitable replacement before November.

Based on my research, many companies I mentioned earlier are going to have to fill the gap left by Intuit’s hole in the marketplace. They include:

Guide Financial (which will shut down later this year, see Guide Financial to shut down operations on October 11)
Blueleaf
Wealth Access
Quovo
Plaid
Betterment (retail and Institutional, based on their use of both Plaid and Quovo)

Note: Prior to August 30, 2016, I had Right Capital in the list above. After connecting the Right Capital co-founder Shuang Chen, I learned the company had considered Intuit’s API for aggregation at one time, but ultimately decided to engage Yodlee for account aggregation. Therefore, Right Capital will not be affected by the Intuit API shutdown.

In its press release, Intuit identified Finicity as an alternate provider of aggregation services.

We have identified a new aggregation partner, Finicity, for whom this service is a core part of their business. Finicity can offer long-term benefits and service for our aggregation customers. To minimize developers’ engineering work to switch APIs, Finicity will provide a façade API interface that translates Intuit-structured API calls into Finicity-structured API calls.

The “façade API interface” means that developers with existing code that calls on Intuit APIs will not need to change their codebase. Instead, Finicity will publish an API interface that is 100% compatible with existing calls to the legacy Intuit APIs and return data to the developer’s application as if Intuit’s APIs never went away.

Who is Finicity?

For me, Finicity is a newer name in aggregation that came to my attention last year while monitoring Quora for details on Yodlee despite founding the business in September 2000.

While the Finicity compatibility endorsed by Intuit sounds good for existing developers, there are certainly other issues to consider before building a business on top of Finicity services, and that absolutely should factor into the due diligence process of advisors.

Finicity has a relatively unremarkable profile in CrunchBase, but a few more details about adoption and marketshare come from Finicity co-founder Nicholas Thomas from this Quora question:

2015 has been a good year for Finicity. We’ve signed hundreds of Fintech and Financial Institutions to build their solutions on our API, have quietly launched over a dozen partners, and are launching dozens more in 2016. Our partners tell us that our broad native data source coverage and our fanatical agg support teams are the primary reasons why they love us.

-Nicholas Thomas

So with relatively little marketing (e.g. as I published this, their most recent tweet was on October 27, 2015), Finicity managed to sign up “hundreds” of customers, launched “over a dozen” partners, with more on tap in 2016.

Is account aggregation Finicity’s only play in the industry? No.

To see what other lines of business Finicity offers in addition to their aggregation services, their website lists two other divisions: Mvelopes and Money 4 Life Coaching

Mvelopes from Finicity

Mvelopes is a software application for personal budgeting and has extremely high ratings for its apps in the app stores. Surprisingly high, actually (more on this later).

Mvelopes allows users to create virtual envelopes for different spending categories and allocate money to them accordingly. The idea is that throughout the month, users refer to the amount of money left over in each envelope after paying bills in order to preventing overspending. Transactions are aggregated from connected accounts, and transactions are automatically deducted from applicable virtual envelopes of available cash.

The service is free to use with a limit of four aggregated cash flow and credit accounts (here’s the Finicity aggregation connection). To access unlimited accounts, users subscribe to the Mvelopes Premier plan for $95/year.

Money 4 Life™ Coaching

Where things get more controversial for me is Finicity’s division called Money 4 Life™ Coaching. The Mvelopes pricing page makes the first mention of coaching services and describes how customers can benefit from one-on-one coaching customized for individual needs.

Finicity coaching snapshot

So I looked into this coaching services with a quick Google search and came across quite a few consumer complaints (36 to be exact) about the services on the Better Business Bureau website.

Most of the complaints seem to be centered around the Money4Life coaching including allegations of no contact by coaches for months at a time and allegations of cancellation difficulties.

Most complaints listed on the BBB site appear to reach a satisfactory conclusion once customers initiate the dispute process (which results in an overall BBB rating for Finicity of A+) , but it is surprising that many customers feel that they need to involve BBB in the first place in order to reach a resolution.

Also, the Mvelopes mobile app ratings are overwhelmingly positive, but many of the five-star reviews have no details in the description or come from users with no other app reviews other than Mvelopes. It’s eyebrow raising.

Critical Mvelopes app reviews such as the one below from iTunes are enlightening:

mvelopes app review

I contacted Finicity for comments and have not yet heard back from the company, so I will update this post accordingly.

What’s Next?

So what’s next? Given Finicity’s connection to awkward customer experiences under the Money4Life coaching program, how likely are the younger aggregation providers to migrate their API calls to the Finicity API? Or will there be a trend to simply abandon the aggregation of financial institutions currently covered by Intuit?

No matter what, as the aggregation vendors make their decisions behind the scenes, advisors’ clients will need to reauthenticate their usernames and passwords once a migration to a new aggregation service is implemented.

For some firms that have a handful of aggregation accounts, this may be a non event, but for larger firms with thousands of aggregated accounts, the issue could take weeks or months to resolve as all clients work through their accounts to reauthenticate their login credentials.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 11

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, heads is for Salesforce, tails is for Betterment.

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by RightCapital, innovative financial planning software that creates real plans for real people. RightCapital offers both cash flow and goals-based planning along with easy to use tools for retirement planning, budgeting, stress testing, Social Security optimization, Roth conversion strategies, and even pro forma tax forms, all built right in.

Subscriptions start at just $50 a month, so sign up for a free trial of RightCapital today by visiting fppad.com/RightCapital.

Salesforce Announces General Availability of Financial Services Cloud — The World’s #1 CRM, Reinvented for Financial Advisors from Salesforce.com, and

Orion Advisor Services Rolls Out Salesforce Financial Service Cloud Integration; Introduces New Billing and Payment Capabilities from Marketwired.com

Advisor Software Extends Capabilities of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud with New Suite of Customizable Apps from PRNewswire.com

LiquidHub Extends Reach of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud with Pre-built Wealth Management Conversion Packages from BusinessWire.com

Smarsh Extends Capabilities of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud with The Archiving Platform™ from BusinessWire.com

[Alright, my coin flip came up heads, so this week’s top story comes from Salesforce, as the world’s largest provider of CRM software officially released Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. Earlier this week, the company hosted a live broadcast with United Capital CEO Joe Duran to demo the new platform.

I used Periscope to broadcast myself watching the Salesforce broadcast and gave my real-time reactions to what I saw, so if you’re a subscriber, look for the link to that video in my email newsletter. If you’re not a subscriber, well?

So let me cut to the chase. The CRM is built on the all new Lightning product, which for you means the Lightning Experience delivers the same look and feel of a fresh, modern interface across any device you use. Lightning also simplifies the creation of new apps, because third party developers build those apps around the Lightning Design System that enforces consistency across the platform. That’s good.

But, did I see any new features in the demo that Salesforce doesn’t already have today? No. What I saw is more data, in really tiny font size, consolidated into customizable dashboards.

Look, Financial Services Cloud is the framework, the foundation, for new features, but there’s nothing that I saw out of the box that screams “oh my gosh I must have this right now!”

And on top of that, Duran said that United Capital will be releasing a their own version of Salesforce that advisors can white label. What?

So if I understand that correctly, you subscribe to Financial Services Cloud for $150 per user per month, but then you’ll need to get a white labeled version to take advantage of features United Capital built for RIAs? How much will that cost?

And then you have a number of other third party providers announcing their own extended capabilities for Financial Services Cloud, which includes Orion Advisor Services, Advisor Software, LiquidHub, Smarsh, and many more.

I have got to be missing something here because it’s just not adding up for me. Will any of this news be enough to attract conversions from advisor-focused providers like Redtail, Junxure, Wealthbox CRM?

I don’t know, you can read all about Financial Services Cloud and the third party extensions over on the website at fppad.com/182, then send me a tweet, I’m @billwinterberg, and tell me what you think.] Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, announced today the general availability of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.

Help Your Clients See All of Their Wealth in One Place from BettermentInstitutional.com

[Moving on, my next story comes from Betterment, as the automated investment service announced this week that it is rolling out account aggregation capabilities to users of both the retail and institutional platforms.

This means that Betterment customers can now connect their held-away investment accounts like 401(k)s and 403(b)s as well as their bank, credit card, mortgage, and personal loan accounts to the automated service and see everything in one place, all for no additional fee.

The aggregation is powered by Plaid and Quovo, which, if you follow me on Twitter, the latter is a partnership I tipped my hand about back in November. Is this the part where I brag about my predictions? That’s right, that’s not my style.

Anyway, this doesn’t outright replace other PFM services like Mint.com, YNAB, Personal Capital, or LearnVest because those services aggregate individual transactions, where Betterment aggregates only balance and holding information. Well, at least for now.

But it does mean that more and more investors are going to expect to see all their assets and liabilities in one place. If you’re not using solutions like Morningstar ByAllAccounts, eMoney, Wealth Access, Aqumulate, Quovo, or Yodlee inside of MoneyGuide Pro, well, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

And Betterment isn’t adding aggregation out of the kindness of their heart. It’s totally an asset gathering strategy because they’re telling customers they have too much idle cash sitting in a bank account or the mutual funds held in a brokerage account have high fees.

Oh, I can only imagine what those pop ups might look like. That reminds me, click to pop up to sign up for the FPPad newsletter!

Alright, alright, that’s enough snark for one episode, so let me wrap up by saying this. You are in a technology arms race, and I want you to keep reinvesting in your business and adding the right technology, which is why I make FPPad Bits and Bytes to keep you up to speed.] Now when your clients sync their outside accounts with Betterment Institutional, you can see details about all of their investments, including fund allocations, holdings, fees, and cash.

Here are stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Envestnet | Tamarac Implements Integration with Pershing’s NetX360® Platform from PRNewswire.com

Envestnet | Tamarac has integrated its web-based, custodian-agnostic Advisor® Xi suite with Pershing LLC’s open-architecture platform, NetX360®.

Inaugural Personal Capital Spending Report Reveals Financial Habits Nationwide from PRNewswire.com

To help people identify new ways to save for retirement and change problematic spending behaviors before it’s too late, Personal Capital, the leading online financial advisory firm, has issued its inaugural Spend Report.

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 11, 2016

Envestnet acquires Yodlee

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

envestnet acquires yodlee

Fast Facts:

Yodlee, known by financial advisers mainly for its data aggregation services, agreed to be acquired by Envestnet, the wealth management services and technology provider to financial advisers.
The deal is valued around $660 million.
Yodlee raised $75 million in an October 2014 IPO after approximately 15 years as a private company, valuing the company around $340 million.
Financial advisers do not directly use Yodlee products or services, but many of the technology services they do use employ Yodlee account aggregation services (see below).
Current competitors to Yodlee include Aqumulate, ByAllAccounts (acquired by Morningstar for $28 million in April 2014), Intuit’s Customer Account Data (CAD) API, Plaid, Quovo, and OpenFinance.
Fiserv’s CashEdge also performs account aggregation and the company sells an advisor-facing aggregation product called AllData Advisor®.
MoneyGuidePro has offered discounted pricing for Yodlee, but now is presented with a conflict given that Yodlee’s new owner also recently acquired Finance Logix, a competing financial planning software solution.

Who Uses Yodlee?

Noteworthy adviser technology vendors who use Yodlee include Blueleaf, CircleBlack, MoneyGuidePro (see MoneyGuidePro to integrate Yodlee for account aggregation), Orion Advisor Services, Wealthminder, Wealth Access, and Wells Fagro.

The MoneyGuidePro relationship presents an interesting conflict, as the financial planning software provider competes with financial planning solutions from Finance Logix, a company that Envestnet also acquired earlier this year (see Envestnet Acquires FinanceLogix As The Integrated Financial Planning And PFM Buying Frenzy Continues from Kitces.com).

The Yodlee acquisition by Envestnet, now owner of Finance Logix, can’t be sitting well with PIETech, Inc. executives (the creators of MoneyGuidePro).

Outside of adviser-specific tools, Personal Capital is also a Yodlee subscriber, and so is Blooom, Future Advisor, LearnVest, and Openfolio.

Who Doesn’t Use Yodlee?

Interestingly enough, eMoney (see Fidelity Investments acquires eMoney Advisor) uses its own proprietary connections for roughly 90% of all data feeds and rounds out the rest using Fiserv’s CashEdge. NaviPlan had once used Yodlee more than ten years ago, but I cannot confirm today whether or not aggregation by Yodlee is in use today. I suspect it is not, given Advicent’s recent acquisition of Figlo.

Good or Bad?

So is this good or bad for financial advisers?

If you’re Envestnet, or if you use Envestnet products and services in your business, this acquisition is good. Very good. Envestnet now has a very broad portfolio of services that helps financial advisers run efficient businesses.

What services, you ask? They offer CRM, portfolio management and reporting, client portals, business intelligence, and mobile apps from Envestnet|Tamarac, financial planning software from Finance Logix, and now account aggregation from Yodlee.

If you’re a vendor who competes with Envestnet AND offers account aggregation to your financial adviser users, it could be bad. One of your product’s competitive differentiators, account aggregation, just got acquired by a leading vendor of financial technology and portfolio management solutions to advisers. Now what do you do?

And if you’re an adviser who doesn’t use Envestnet, your choices for an independent account aggregation solution are now smaller. Who’s left? Aqumulate, Intuit, Quovo, and Openfinance.

ByAllAccounts is owned by Morningstar (but an important note is that Morningstar doesn’t sell investment products or portfolio services, but rather adviser technology and investment research).

And Intuit is a special case, too, as once again, advisers can’t directly purchase or subscribe to Intuit aggregation. Aggregation from Intuit must be integrated by a third-party technology provider.

Openfinance is one to watch, as I was told recently that First Rate, SunGard’s main performance reporting partner, teamed up with OpenFinance to provide aggregation solutions for First Rate integration partners (e.g. Grendel CRM from Big Brain Works).

Plaid is out there too, but as far as I can tell, their bread-and-butter customers are consumer-oriented financial apps like Acorns and robinhood.

So overall, are the limited choices among aggregation solutions good or bad? I’m not entirely sure.

Some advisers choose not to offer account aggregation at all. Some do. It largely depends on how the business is structured and whether or not account aggregation boosts the overall value proposition of the firm.

A Yodlee Backstory

One of the Achilles’ heel of financial services is the forced fragmentation of where all of us keep our money.

Your monthly income and spending flows through a bank checking account.
Want a savings account that actually has an annual interest rate that isn’t zero? You’ll probably open an online savings account.
Want to invest in low-cost mutual funds? You’ll likely open an account directly with the fund company.
Want to own a few stocks? You’ll need a brokerage account for that.
Want to save for retirement? Your employer requires you to use certain retirement plan providers. Time to open another account.
Want to save for college? Again, your state might have a specific plan sponsor if you want to take advantage of state tax deductions. Boom, another account!

Seriously, why must the industry be so fragmented that consumers have no choice but to open so many discrete accounts across so many financial institutions?!?

So if you’re like most people who live on planet Earth and use money, it’s nearly impossible to see what you have one place AND keep that report up to date as your spending fluctuates and your investments rise and fall.

Enter Yodlee.

Yodlee seized the opportunity among this fragmentation to facilitate all-in-one reporting. As online financial account access became mainstream, Yodlee allows consumers to grant permission to read data from each financial account and aggregate all that disparate data into one dashboard, the Yodlee MoneyCenter. To build a buisness, Yodlee charges third-party companies (e.g. banks, insurance companies, trust companies, broker-dealers, financial apps like Personal Capital and LearnVest) to be on the receiving end of the aggregated data.

Fast forward to today and Yodlee’s market value for its business is in the neighborhood of $660 million.

And now you know the Yodlee backstory (well, as I tell it. There’s a lot more to the story, but this is what matters for you, the financial adviser).

Note: An earlier version of this post suggested that rumors indicated the Fiserv adviser-facing product AllData Advisor® was being phased out. A company spokeswoman for Fiserv wrote, “At this time, Fiserv has no plans to phase out the referenced advisor-facing product.”

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 6

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, Wealthfront wants you to know they crossed another round number in AUM, ByAllAccounts is now aggregating over $1 trillion dollars in investor assets, and Morningstar is out with a new iPad app for advisors.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by IMPLEMENT NOW, the independent advisor’s Practice Management Virtual Summit hosted by Kristin Harad broadcasting online March 16th to the 20th. When you register, you’ll get access to interviews and bonus material from 22 industry thought leaders as they reveal their practice management secrets for success.

And if you register by March 15th, you’ll receive a copy of Carl Richard’s new book The One Page Financial Plan. Find all the details for this high-impact event by visiting fppad.com/implementnow

Two Billion Reasons to Believe from Wealthfront, and

Vanguard may expand fast-growing virtual investing service to advisers from InvestmentNews

[First up is news from online investment service Wealthfront, as the company announced this week that it has surpassed the $2 billion dollar mark in assets under management, an increase of 20 times in just over two years. This places the automated investment service just barely in the Top 100 RIA firms measured by assets according to the InvestmentNews RIA database. However, another online provider has also entered this rarefied territory, but with very little fanfare.

That provider is mutual-fund giant Vanguard, as the Vanguard Personal Advisor Services™ reached $10.1 billion dollars in assets as of the end of 2014, and it’s still in a limited pilot program. If you do the math, the company added nearly $8.8 billion to its platform in just nine months, and the company is also considering offering some form of the service to advisers.

So while the startups continue to make headlines and receive face time on cable business TV, the incumbents that the startups say they’re disrupting are putting up some very impressive growth metrics of their own.] Wealthfront managed less than $100 million in client assets when I joined, and had many skeptics. No one outside of the company could have imagined that, just over two years later, we’d celebrate being the first automated investment service to reach $2 Billion in client assets under management.

Morningstar Reaches Milestones, Aggregates More than $1 Trillion in Assets Daily With Access to 20,000 Financial Data Sources Through Morningstar ByAllAccounts Aggregation Service from Morningstar

[Related to online asset tracking is this is news from Morningstar, as the company announced its ByAllAccounts aggregation service now aggregates over $1 trillion dollars in investor assets. You may recall that Morningstar acquired ByAllAccounts back in April of 2014, and since then the number of supported data sources has grown to over 20,000 from 4,500. Can you say Yodlee?

So what does this mean for you? Remember, most of the online investment services don’t take into account the assets users have in their held away accounts. Personal Capital is one exception, but they’re not a pure online service, either. The rest don’t have the complete picture of their users’ net worth, so if you’re on the fence about incorporating account aggregation in your business, this is one area in your value proposition where you can outperform the online competition.] Morningstar, Inc., a leading provider of independent investment research, today announced a number of milestones for its Morningstar® ByAllAccounts aggregation service.

Review: Morningstar’s New iPad App from Financial Planning Magazine

[And finally, Morningstar also rounds out this week’s broadcast as Joel Bruckenstein reviewed their new iPad app built for the needs of financial advisers. I had the opportunity to recently test the app with Morningstar’s Mike Barad as he walked through the market research information, complete with embedded videos from Morningstar analysts, as well as the Clients and Portfolios view that advisors can use to stay up to date on client asset allocations, holdings, and more.

There are a few wish list items that Bruckenstein highlighted, such as the inability to conduct trading or rebalancing activity within the app, or to view Portfolio X-Ray reports on aggregated accounts. Still, for a version 1.0 app, advisors who use Morningstar Office or Workstation in their business should find the app useful for those times they’re away from their desktop computer.] While Morningstar has long been known as a leading provider of independent investment research, the company also produces a number of software applications for advisors.

Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Into The 21st Century, Finally from Financial Advisor Magazine

Years before there was Riskalyze or Pocket Risk, there was FinaMetrica, a comprehensive risk-profiling tool for use by advisors with their clients.

Wealth Access integrates with MoneyGuidePro from InvestmentNews

Wealth Access, a personal financial management platform, announced Tuesday its integration with MoneyGuidePro, a popular financial planning software.

Breaking Delivers the News to Your Mac or iPhone Notification Center from Lifehacker

OS X/iOS: Keeping up with the news is easy, but keeping up with news you care about can be trickier. Breaking is a new app that makes it easier.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 6, 2014

FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 4

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Bill Winterberg in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, Morningstar acquires ByAllAccounts for $28 million, how this deal might shake up the account aggregation marketplace. The SEC issues new guidance on social media and the testimonial rule. Find out what you can and can’t do online regarding client testimonials. And Wealthfront raises another $35 million in venture capital. Are you ready to take on the new technology funded by this war chest?

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by My Virtual COO, a leading practice management firm that helps advisors free up time so they can devote their energy to mission critical, profitable, and enjoyable activities.

To find out how you can implement a lean operations plan, download their latest white paper titled “The Lean Solution to Becoming a More Profitable, High Growth Advisory Firm” by visitingfppad.com/myvirtualcoo

Here are the links to this week’s top stories:

Morningstar, Inc. Acquires ByAllAccounts, Inc., Provider of Innovative Data Aggregation Technology for Financial Applications from Morningstar, and

How Morningstar’s $28 million acquisition of ByAllAccounts will change account aggregation (or not) from FPPad

[Leading off this week is an announcement from Morningstar that the company just acquired account aggregation provider ByAllAccounts for $28 million. For over a decade, ByAllAccounts has been feeding, scraping, and otherwise aggregating account data for held-away 401(k)s, annuities, 529 plans, and any other accounts not held at an advisor’s custodian of choice.

Account aggregation makes it possible to generate net worth, asset allocation, and other reports that accurately reflect a client’s total portfolio, not just for those assets held with one custodian. But ByAllAccounts goes one step further by providing reconciliation-ready data, meaning advisors can import transactions into their portfolio management software of choice and actually generate performance reports for client portfolios.

The only other provider of reconciliation-ready data is Aqumulate, formerly Advisor Exchange, so essentially these two hold a monopoly in this space, leading me to wonder why ByAllAccounts would be willing to be acquired by Morningstar at this point in time. There certainly are other aggregation options from Yodlee and Intuit gaining traction among RIAs, but they only provide holding and balance information and not the reconciliation-ready data needed for performance reports.

James Carney, President and CEO of ByAllAccounts, wrote in an email to customers that “for now, it’s business as usual,” so stay tuned to see how this acquisition may alter the playing field in the account aggregation market.] Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, today acquired ByAllAccounts, Inc., a provider of innovative data aggregation technology for financial applications.

Guidance on the Testimonial Rule and Social Media from SEC.gov, and

Yelp: Using a Business account from Yelp.com

[Next is an update from the SEC, who this week issued guidance number 2014-4 on the testimonial rule and the use of social media.
There’s a lot to this new guidance, but from a technology perspective, it clears the way for advisors to link their website and social media profiles to independent online review sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List, or even WalletHub.com without violating the prohibition against testimonials.

Now you can’t copy and paste select reviews from those sites and post them to your website. You have to copy all of the reviews together, but that requires too much ongoing maintenance to keep up to update.

Instead, you can embed widgets from sites like Yelp that display your average rating from all reviews, and since those widgets stay updated in real time, there’s no ongoing maintenance required on your part once you’ve embedded the code on your website.

Also, the SEC’s guidance clarified that you can include a partial list of clients on your social media profiles without triggering the testimonial rule, as long as the list doesn’t highlight your client’s experience or endorsement of you as an advisor.
Just take a look at Wealthfront’s website, which was just updated to include photos of sixteen influential investors from Silicon Valley. You can employ the same tactic if you think posting photos of some of your clients online will help you win future business.

And how does the new guidance affect LinkedIn? It’s clear that LinkedIn recommendations and endorsements still remain off limits to advisors, as you control what does and does not appear publicly next to your profile. That control can lead to cherry picking recommendations which is a definite no-no under the SEC’s guidance.] From time to time, we have been asked questions concerning the nature, scope and application of the rule that prohibits investment advisers from using testimonials in their advertisements.

Automated Investment Service Wealthfront Raises $35M From Index, Ribbit Capital from TechCrunch

[And speaking of Wealthfront, this week’s final story highlights the automated investment service’s latest round of venture capital, as the company raised $35 million led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Wealthfront also updated its Form ADV Part II as the company now manages over $800 million in assets on behalf of its users.

This brings the company’s total funding to $65 million, surpassing Personal Capital’s $54 million, which is a significant war chest to pay for additional development and new tools and techniques to further reduce the cost of managing investment portfolios. This places even more pricing pressure on advisors who charge high fees exclusively for their own investment management services and nothing else.

So if you’re not making investments in your own technology, or don’t clearly differentiate how the services you offer involve a lot more than just investment management, the time to start doing so it right now.] Financial services as an industry is a sector that is rapidly being disrupted from all directions.

And here are stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:

Smarsh Sites Delivers Professional, Modern Websites for Financial Services Professionals from BusinessWire.com

Smarsh®, the leading provider of hosted archiving solutions for business communications, today announced the launch of Smarsh Sites, the new website hosting and production platform optimized for the financial services industry.

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 4, 2014

How Morningstar’s $28 million acquisition of ByAllAccounts will change account aggregation (or not)

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Bill Winterberg in Portfolio Management Software, Technology

Morningstar buys ByAllAccounts

Morningstar buys ByAllAccounts for $28 million. What this means for financial advisers and the future of account aggregation.

News hit the wires late yesterday that Morningstar acquired ByAllAccounts for $28 million, subject to working capital adjustments. Read the press release from Morningstar.

“Business As Usual”

In an email to ByAllAccounts subscribers, James Carney, President and CEO of ByAllAccounts wrote, “For now, it’s business as usual. Going forward, we will be evaluating opportunities for closer collaboration with Morningstar in ways that benefit our customers.”

ByAllAccounts has a near monopoly, in my words, in the reconciliation-ready account aggregation marketplace. The company has over 2,100 clients, connections to over 4,300 custodians, and 40 platform and service providers as of the March 2014 acquisition.

ByAllAccounts Alternatives

The other reconciliation-ready provider is Aqumulate, formerly Advisor Exchange, which can be viewed as a value-added reseller (my words again) of the CashEdge aggregation service offered by Fiserv.

See, raw data from Fiserv’s CashEdge isn’t normalized, tech speak for “cleaned up” with usable data that can be imported into portfolio management software like PortfolioCenter from Schwab Performance Technologies®, Black Diamond Performance Reporting from Advent, Orion Advisor Services, and more.

So Aqumulate partners with Fiserv to access their network of over 14,000 financial services companies (more than three times ByAllAccounts’ connections), and then cleans up the raw CashEdge data so it can be easily ingested by advisers’ portfolio management software.

Why Reconciliation-Ready Data?

So ByAllAccounts and Aqumulate are the only two practical solutions for advisers who require reconciliation-ready account data for imports to portfolio management software.

But I see a trend among progressive RIAs who are dropping performance and rate of return calculations for client investment reports, especially among shops who embrace passive strategies of DFA and Vanguard funds.

Why continue to emphasize performance, performance, performance quarter after quarter when it’s a minority piece of the total wealth management framework?

Look at reports from Blueleaf (important distinction: they’re NOT statements) as an example of this trend. And they even use ByAllAccounts for some held away account aggregation!

And then look at the reports offered by the online advice providers with aggregation capabilities: Personal Capital and Learnvest exclusively highlight net worth, cash flow, and asset allocation, all powered by Yodlee aggregation.

But will users find actual statements on total investment portfolio performance?

No.

eMoney operates the same way. Over 90% of its custodial data connections are proprietary, with the remaining connections rounded out by CashEdge and ByAllAccounts, and you won’t find portfolio performance statements anywhere in the program.

Is individual stock and fund performance listed in these programs? In most cases, yes, because those stats come from Xignite and others and are not subject to knowledge of a client’s actual time-weighted rate of return for portfolio performance.

The Household Balance Report Standard

So household balance reporting, and not performance reporting, is gaining momentum, and that segment is being supported by lower-cost providers like Yodlee and Intuit in addition to ByAllAccounts and Aqumulate.

Remember, MoneyGuidePro struck a deal with Yodlee earlier this year to offer aggregation for less than $400 per year! See T3 2014: MoneyGuidePro to integrate Yodlee for account aggregation from FPPad.

So why should advisers pay thousands to ByAllAccounts when you can get client balance and holding information from Yodlee and Intuit for far less?

Once again, only those who need reconciliation-ready data for performance calculations were cornered into paying a premium to ByAllAccounts or investigating Aqumulate, and I think that population is slowly shrinking.

Did that influence ByAllAccounts’ decision to seek a buyer at the potential top?

One has to wonder.

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