In what’s becoming an annual tradition while attending the Schwab IMPACT® conference, I once again connected with John Connor, VP of Digital Advisor Solutions with Charles Schwab to tour a sampling of the vendors participating in the “Tech Alley” in The Exchange.
Join us as we engage six advisor technology vendors during our tour to learn how each of them helps advisors be more efficient when offering services to clients. Tour stops include:
Several big milestones were crossed in the last few days, with the XY Planning Network leading off with its announcement that the organization now serves 600 members as a part of the fee-only, fiduciary financial planning network. Founded in 2014, the XY Planning Network provides turnkey technology, compliance, marketing support and business coaching to financial planners looking to serve Gen X and Gen Y clients, many of whom offer financial planning on an hourly basis or a low-cost retainer without requiring substantial assets in a portfolio.
Also crossing another milestone is Envestnet | Tamarac, as the portfolio management, reporting, client portal, trading and CRM software provider recently surpassed $1 trillion dollars in collective assets under management among all the financial advisers that use the company’s technology. According to a recent press release, over one-third of registered investment advisory firms that manage $1 billion dollars are using the Envestnet | Tamarac solution, and the company says it maintains a renewal rate of 97% among its clients as a result of the company’s ongoing support, training, and consulting.
Morningstar Launches Quantitative Rating for Funds
And for a new milestone in mutual fund research, Morningstar just announced that the company has launched the Morningstar Quantitative Rating for funds, which generates ratings of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Neutral, or Negative for mutual funds based on a large set of quantitative factors like fund fees, manager tenure, firm success, and much more. Historically, Morningstar has generated Analyst Ratings for mutual funds, but the number of ratings has been limited by the size of the Morningstar analyst team. The Quantitative Rating uses machine learning models to apply the analyst’s decision-making process to the list of funds not covered by the analyst team, which allows the company to generate ratings on six times more mutual funds in the United States market.
Morningstar is the sponsor of this Flash Briefing for the month of March.
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.
Disclosure: Wealthbox compensated me to help create the marketing video for the launch of Wealthbox 3
Welcome to the FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
AdvicePay Launches with Support for Credit Card and ACH Billing
If you’ve wanted to take credit card or ACH payments for financial planning fee, there’s a new solution for you. AdvicePay just launched its payment processing solution this week for advisors who charge clients directly for financial planning fees instead of deducting a percentage of assets held by a custodian. Prior to AdvicePay, planners most likely received payments by check, as payment processors like PayPal and Stripe don’t work with financial advisory business, citing regulatory concerns. AdvicePay has over 280 advisors already using the platform and charges $50 a month per advisor plus transaction processing fees.
In the 401(k) retirement plan space, Vestwell announced it will offer a select list of investment options under Morningstar Investment Management ‘s fiduciary services program. This partnership comes as Vestwell continues to make progress in the retirement plan space with its technology platform that helps employers and plan sponsors offer affordable, diversified investment options to employees while helping plan administrators also meet their fiduciary responsibilities to plan participants.
Wealthbox Launches Wealthbox 3
And in CRM news, Wealthbox CRM just announced the launch of its latest version of the advisor CRM called Weathbox 3. To mark the occasion, I joined Team Wealthbox as they sabered a bottle of champagne in a video that you just have to watch! But first, here’s Wealthbox cofounder Dan Ferranti on the new features advisors will find in Wealthbox 3:
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.
Welcome to the FPPad fintech briefing, here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Outsourcing investment management just got a little bit easier for advisors using TD Ameritrade Institutional, as this week the company announced the introduction of its Model Market Center. The Model Market Center features 62 different investment models from eight investment managers, with notable managers including Meb Faber’s Cambria Investments as well as WisdomTree Investments, who made fintech news a few weeks ago with its investment in AdvisorEngine’s acquisition of Junxure. Model Market Center joins a growing market of outsourced investment management solutions which includes Orion Advisor Services, Riskalyze, and Morningstar, and others.
Online 401(k) manager blooom is helping investors protect their accounts against fraudulent activity with its new Suspicious Activity Alerts feature. Investors can connect their 401(k)s and other employe-sponsored retirement accounts to blooom which continuously monitors for withdrawals or loans on account funds, notifying clients via text message when blooom detects any suspicious activity.
And tickets are selling fast to the 2018 Fearless Investing Summit brought to you by Riskalyze, which blends the latest in investment trends and fintech innovation in its three-day agenda. Last year’s inaugural summit eventually sold out, so you need to act quickly to make sure you don’t miss out on this year’s event. Secure your tickets today by visiting fppad.com/flashbreifing for the links on today’s 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Despite end-to-end encryption, Qumram enables financial services firms to meet client demand for social media interaction, via WhatsApp, without compromising compliance.
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.
On the final day of the 2016 Morningstar Investment Conference, we wrapped up our vlog coverage with several discussions about things to implement as attendees return to their office.
We first attempted to capture sound bites on some of the best ideas heard at the conference, but this ended up unfolding in an unexpected way.
Next we connected with Blane Warrene and Marie Swift who have supported Morningstar’s social hub since it’s debut at the Morningstar Investment Conference five years ago.
We finished with varying perspectives from more key Morningstar employees, with one of them including, if you can believe it, a karaoke song about account aggregation.
I hope you enjoy the experience of day three of the 2016 Morningstar Investment Conference from our perspective.
Morningstar asked my executive producer Steve and me to attend their conference and create a daily vlog.
I hope you enjoy the experience of day two of the 2016 Morningstar Investment Conference from our perspective, including a new segment we attempted called “Escalator Interviews!”
On today’s broadcast, Wealthbox CRM releases 5 new integrations, Orion sends portfolio information to clients via text message, Morningstar ByAllAccounts introduces a new client portal, and more.
[This week’s top story comes from Wealthbox CRM, as the company took advantage of a Cinco de Mayo theme to announce five new integrations on 5/5. The new integrations include TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Veo Open Access, Riskalyze, Orion Advisor Services, Microsoft Office 365, and Zapier. If Zapier sounds familiar, that’s because you heard about it in last week’s episode, unless you missed it, which means you should take a few minutes to watch it and get caught up.
This is great news from Wealthbox CRM, as many advisors I know were discouraged from using it in the past because it lacked integrations with many core technology solutions. With that objection out of the way, you should update your due diligence matrix to see which CRM is the best fit for your business objectives over the next few years.] Today we’re happy to announce five new Wealthbox CRM integrations with leading technology partners.
[Next up is news from Orion Advisor Services, as this week the portfolio accounting service provider announced a new app called Notifications. Once clients register their mobile number using the Orion client portal, Notifications uses text messages to provide updates like your clients’ portfolio balance, performance information, or even RMDs. Oh, and for you compliance officers watching, all of the messaging are automated, meaning there is no personal communication between the client and the advisor.
Ever since I saw the Penny App at last year’s FinCon event, I’ve been waiting for an advisor fintech provider to roll out text messaging for updates to clients, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Orion is the first provider to do it.
Now one drawback I see is that clients need to learn special keywords like BAL, PERF, ADV to get information, so my challenge Brad and his team, you remember Brad, the potato chip guy from one of my vlogs, is to add in support for natural language processing so I can just ask the app, “What is my portfolio balance?” Sorry Brad!] Orion Advisor Services, LLC (“Orion”), a premier portfolio accounting service provider for financial advisors, is announcing the launch of the Notifications app, which allows advisors to communicate with clients more directly by sending portfolio updates and scheduling meetings all via a text alert platform.
[And finally, news from Morningstar wraps up this week’s broadcast as the company’s aggregation service, ByAllAccounts, released a personal financial management portal for advisors and clients.
The new portal is available as a complete solution with customized branding for your firm, or if you already use a portal or online dashboard from other providers, you can choose from a number of the ByAllAccounts portal elements to use as stand-alone tools. For this reason, pricing is going to depend based on your needs for a solution, but whatever you pay, account aggregation from ByAllAccounts is included for an unlimited number of clients and accounts.
But there are some caveats you should know: First, the aggregation data is not intended for data reconciliation, so it’s not suitable for detailed portfolio performance information. Reconciliation-ready data is part of the the traditional ByAllAccounts aggregation service.
Second, a minimum number of licenses are required to use the portal, so today, this solution targeted for the mid- to large RIAs and broker-dealers, yet I’m optimistic that over time ByAllAccounts can offer pricing and functionality that is attractive to advisors of all sizes.] Morningstar, Inc., a leading provider of independent investment research, today launched a new personal financial management portal in the firm’s account aggregation service, Morningstar® ByAllAccounts.
Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:
Demonstrating the intensifying race to dominate adviser technology, Pershing broadened the scope of its B2B digital advice offerings, announcing on Wednesday it was bringing startups SigFig, Vanare and Invesco’s Jemstep Advisor Pro onto its platform that also includes the still-developing robo Marstone.
Peter, Nick, and I are excited to announce that Cloak is now part of StackPath, a still-stealthy startup based in Dallas, Texas that has bold plans for online security.
Laserfiche today announced the availability of Laserfiche 10.1. The latest enterprise content management (ECM) offering builds on the features and resources of Laserfiche 10, released in January 2016, further enhancing teamwork and collaboration, refining case management capabilities and extending business analytics.
On today’s broadcast, Redtail is the beneficiary of two announcements, MoneyGuidePro releases G4, and see the latest audio and video solutions to enhance your online content
[This week’s top story is a two-for-one about Redtail Technology, as the CRM provider was first mentioned by Morningstar as the company is further expanding its integration with the popular CRM for advisors. Two years ago, Redtail users started accessing Morningstar research and analytics directly in the CRM, and with the latest integration, users of both solutions can transfer data between the two systems, reducing the amount of manual data entry as well as synchronizing client and account data viewed in Redtail CRM.
The second story from Redtail is the announcement of a new integration with Zapier, a popular web automation application. The connection with Zapier means that Redtail users can use triggers in Redtail, such as a new activity or a new contact in the CRM, to create an action in another program, which includes over 500 popular services like Slack, Google Docs, MailChimp and many more.
Other providers, including Wealthbox CRM, have been hinting at soon-to-be-released integrations with Zapier and others for several months now. So if you’ve been frustrated with the lack of direct integrations within your CRM, you’ll soon be able to build your own custom trigger and action workflows using apps like Zapier.] Redtail CRM is now available publicly in Zapier’s App Directory in beta version.
[Next up is news from MoneyGuidePro, as the financial planning software provider officially released the fourth generation of its software, aptly named G4. Advisors will definitely notice an updated look and feel to the user interface, but G4 largely retains many of the core features present in the prior version, G3, such as the Play Zone, Social Security Maximization, and the What Are You Afraid Of? modules.
One of the more significant changes is the addition of five pre-built workflows called “conversations” which are used to streamline the creation of an initial financial plan. Advisors can complete the conversation data entry alone or together with clients in a meeting, or decide to grant clients access to an online portal where they enter data completely on their own.
The pre-built workflows limit the amount of data needed to create a plan so that the entire process isn’t overly tedious. With a preliminary plan created, advisors can then drill down into more specific areas of the plan.] PIEtech’s vision, “Everyone needs and deserves a quality financial plan,” has never been truer – for both advisors and clients. Today, PIEtech released the fourth generation of MoneyGuidePro® to help financial advisors develop and deliver quality financial plans on an unprecedented scale.
[And finally, I want to wrap up this week’s broadcast with a heads up about the videos Steve and I made at the NAB Show last week. We featured the top video, audio, and technology gadgets, as well as whatever that thing is, from over 1,800 exhibitors that you can use to start making your own online content. You’ll learn about 360º cameras, wireless microphones, lighting, production resources and more that are all affordable and easy for you to use.]
Here are stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:
Advisors striving to improve the client experience by providing offerings tailored to their entire financial picture can now seamlessly aggregate their client’s data into a fully customized online wealth management platform.
Data Points announced today the release of its Predicting Wealth™ platform, which provides the financial services industry a scientific way to identify clients with the highest potential for building wealth across all market segments. The platform delivers analytics on the financial behaviors of clients and predictive assessments to drive financial success.
Today, United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (“United Capital”), a Financial Life Management firm, announces the launch of FinLife Partners, a turnkey advice and planning platform that allows independent advisers access to the firm’s proprietary Financial Life Management system, including adviser-branded client experience tools, digital workflow technology and personalized on-demand coaching.
The SEC has a long to-do list, but ensuring that advisors and other registrants are protecting clients’ sensitive information from cyber threats is right at the top, and more enforcement actions are expected.
Acorns, the investing app, is announcing a $30 million strategic investment from PayPal, with participation from the Rakuten FinTech Fund. This brings the team’s total funding to $62 million.
After 12 months of building the best way to save and discover mobile live streams, it is with great disappointment that we must announce that Katch will be shutting down.
Docupace Technologies LLC, financial services’ premier digital compliance and cyber security company, announced today that it will pursue growth independently of investment from RCS Capital Corporation
