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Our second stop in Washington DC is a visit with Alex Murguia and John Wotowicz of inStream Solutions. Hear how the need for a different approach to financial planning inside McLean Asset Management expanded to a dedicated solution for all financial advisors. .
This is an audio-only podcast of the FPPad Tech Tour interview with Alex Murguia and John Wotowicz of inStream Solutions. Click here to view the full video.
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As we make our way up the east cost, we could not turn down the opportunity to meet with Michael Kitces, a prolific contributor to the financial planning industry. We met at his home to talk about what drives him to create so many educational and business resources for financial advisors.
This is an audio-only podcast of the FPPad Tech Tour interview with Michael Kitces. Click here to view the full video.
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Our second stop in Charlotte, North Carolina is with Anthony Valente, Vice President of Business Development for Portfolio Pathway.
We picked up a hot dog and a soda before sitting down to talk about how Anthony first connected with Portfolio Pathway and why he works hard to support financial advisors.
This is an audio-only podcast of the FPPad Tech Tour interview with Anthony Valente, VP of Portfolio Pathway. Click here to view the full video.
Subscribe and listen to the five best podcasts for financial advisers
Note for September 2014: Like technology, podcasts change and get updated. Look for a new article covering the Best Podcasts of 2014 for Financial Advisers!
Here are the five best podcasts of 2013 featuring content specific for financial advisers
Few will argue that the amount of content online for financial advisers is exploding.
There are dozens of websites from traditional print publications that run digital editions of their magazines as well as online-only content.
Then there are several dozen more blogs and niche sites covering a wide range of topics relevant to financial advisers (with the top site being Michael Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog*)
But one media format with just a handful of “publishers” is the podcast.
Sure, there are many podcasts with consumer-oriented content, featuring personal finance advice on how to pay down debt, reduce fees on investments, diversify a portfolio, and more. Many of these podcasts are excellent, but they don’t include content that addresses the issues concerning financial advisers and operating an advisory business.
The number of podcasts being created with content exclusive for the financial adviser audience is extremely small. Like less than ten.
With so few podcasts being created for financial advisers, how will you discover those with content applicable to your needs?
The answer is in my list of the five best podcasts for financial advisers!
But wait, why just five? Because that is exactly the number of active podcasts (with activity over the past year) to which I subscribe that I know produce content specifically for the financial adviser audience.
So here is my personally curated list of the five best podcasts for financial advisers, free and clear of irritating pageview-increasing slideshow gimmicks! (You can thank me by sharing this list with your friends.)
First, let me first start off with a pre-list bonus, because I have a horse in this race, too. If you don’t already know, audio and video content from FPPad is available as a podcast on iTunes.
So if you’re not yet subscribed, subscribe now!
But why subscribe on iTunes if you can get the content on FPPad.com?
Because in the Podcasts app on your iOS device, you can download content for listening or viewing when you’re offline or away from a strong broadband connection. Also, the Podcasts app lets you increase the playback speed of content, so you can get your five-minute weekly technology update finished in just over three-and-a-half minutes! Now that’s an instant productivity boost of 33%!
The Social Media Minute Podcast by RegEd is the best podcast for advisers seeking information on all things related to social media. Blane Warrene is host and producer of the Social Media Minute Podcast and does an excellent job addressing the timely issues surrounding the social media landscape.
As Senior Vice President of Customer Communications at RegEd, Warrene knows his stuff on social media. Sure, the content helps build awareness of RegEd’s social media compliance and content products, and that’s partly the point. But know that this podcast is all about deepening the conversation around financial advisers and social media and is NOT a blatant product promotion.
NAIFA, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, publishes a new podcast once every two months with a variety of content centered around practice management and business building ideas.
Occasionally the content addresses issues in the insurance marketplace, such as disability income policy sales and long-term-care insurance updates, but many of the podcasts feature interviews with advisers and insurance agents discussing strategies they have implemented to grow their business and enhance client service.
Subscribe to the AdvisorToday.com podcast now as six episodes per year will not fill up your “to-be-listened-to” playlist, and your odds of learning a good business-building idea are pretty good.
The award-winning Journal of Financial Planning has been in print for over 30 years, and just over three years ago the publication started creating podcast content around many of its featured articles and authors.
The Journal of Financial Planning Podcast Page is somewhat of a best-kept-secret, since there is one simple icon on the navigation menu of the website home page, but each print article featuring additional podcast content directs readers to the website to listen to more information.
Journal of Financial Planning Podcasts are centered around the “10 Questions” interview features, giving readers a chance to hear from authors, financial planners, and thought leaders in the industry (self-promotion warning: I was interviewed in February 2013).
While not directly available as an iTunes podcast, you can still manually download and then drag and drop audio files to your media player of choice to listen offline, at the gym, or during your commute.
Securities America, Inc. is a broker-dealer that walks-the-walk on practice management advice. Not only does the company urge its reps to be more active with client outreach and marketing initiatives, Securities America publishes these podcasts for advisers to back up what they say.
Led by Kirk Hulett, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Practice Management, AdvisorPod releases monthly updates on a wide range of practice management tips, including outreach to CPAs and other COI individuals, retaining relationships through family transitions, mobile app reviews and more.
Build Online Influence is a podcast from Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor. Wired Advisor is a professional blogging platform for financial advisers and business professionals.
In Build Online Influence, Sammons reviews techniques financial advisers can use to increase their profile and brand recognition through the use of social media. Several of her podcasts include interviews with financial advisers who have created a large audience of people interested in financial planning (i.e. prospective clients) through their social media activity. Build Online Influence attempts to reveal what strategies work (and those that don’t) to help advisers compete in a social marketplace that is getting more crowded each day.
While Build Online Influence hasn’t been updated since January 2013, I know that Sammons is still active in her work with advisers, so I trust that a listing here in my top five podcasts for financial advisers will be enough motivation for her to pick up where she left off! Perhaps a tweet or two to Sammons wouldn’t hurt, either!
There you have it! My top five podcasts of content created just for you, the successful financial adviser.
Inevitably, I likely missed a handful of other podcasts out there publishing outstanding content for the financial adviser audience. Tell me which ones I missed in the comments below, and hopefully with enough submissions, I can double the list to include the ten best podcasts for financial advisers.
But first, I want podcasts with business building ideas, technology coverage, practice management ideas and so on. Podcasts with economic commentary, stock picking ideas, or investment-centric content can be curated by someone else!
So tell me what podcasts I missed in the comments below, send me a tweet, or email me offline.
Here are some of the podcasts recommended by readers since this article was posted on November 25, 2013.
*2013 top blogs according to the Zywave 2013 Top News and Blog Sites for Advisors Survey.
I’m recapping the best content found on FPPad in 2012. Previously I featured the top five videos from 2012 and the top five podcasts from 2012.
Today’s update is the last in the Best of 2012 series and highlights the twelve (for 2012!) most popular posts, as ranked by total views.
Before I begin, make sure that you’ve subscribed to my free newsletter so you don’t miss recaps of all the new posts, podcasts, and videos coming in 2013.
Here are the top twelve posts of 2012.
1. How to hide endorsements from your LinkedIn profile
Just like the most viewed video of 2012, readers wondering how to hide LinkedIn Endorsements generated the most visits to this FPPad post in 2012.
The relatively innocuous Endorsements feature LinkedIn added this year created a lot of frustration among registered advisers. While the feature is a convenient way for others to highlight an adviser’s skills and expertise, Endorsements skirt the gray area of testimonials that are prohibited by the SEC and FINRA.
Again, the conservative approach many advisers follow is to hide Endorsements altogether, and this post embedded a video to show how to do that.
I was bummed to learn that Tungle, my favorite online public calendar service, planned to shut down in December. Evidently, many other Tungle users felt the same way.
In this top post of 2012, readers wanted to know what alternatives they could use to replace the extremely useful and simple public calendar service from Tungle (no thanks to Research In Motion!).
3. Why advisers can’t trust their clients anymore
This is probably one of an adviser’s worst nightmare. They think they’re fulfilling a client’s withdrawal request to fund, say, a vacation or new car purchase.
But unbeknownst to the adviser, the client’s email account was hacked, and the request for funds was actually made by a hacker claiming to be the client.
If an adviser isn’t cautious, tens of thousands of dollars can be mistakenly distributed to a hacker, and not to the client.
This post covers ways advisers can spot identity theft, detect client “spoofing,” and implement techniques to identify clients before transferring any funds.
4. Yes, you can create financial plans in eight minutes
I think everyone would agree that having a financial plan is the best way to work towards financial success. But the ways financial plans are created vary widely across the industry.
One method growing among advisers is the creation of a quick financial plan.
In one of this year’s top posts, Neal Ringquist, President of Advisor Software, Inc. talks about the trend of quick financial planning tools and highlights his company’s goalgamiPro product in a video spotlight interview.
5. The Best Financial Adviser Technology of 2012
Advisers clearly want to know what technology will help their business in the years ahead. For a post that’s just three weeks old, it was so popular it vaulted into the top five of all content for the year!
Sure, you can read surveys and industry reports until your eyes glaze over and identify the most popular technology products out there, but what about those products that will help your firm truly stand out from all the others? That’s where my annual Best Tech for Advisers list comes in.
Read this year’s update to find products that will help you share documents with ease, broadcast yourself live over the Internet, and proactively plan for your clients’ needs.
6. How to hide LinkedIn Endorsements on the new LinkedIn profile design
See the top post of 2012? Here is its sister post, updated to reflect the new ways to hide LinkedIn Endorsements using the new profile design.
This post has the two minute screencast demonstrating how advisers can hide LinkedIn Endorsements, either globally or skill by skill.
7. The Financial Planning Flowchart (or why your clients will balk at paying your fees)
Here’s a post that is just FOUR days old, and it cracked the top ten of popular posts of 2012!
Why? Because advisers know that consumers (and clients) have more access to financial planning tools than ever before, including flowcharts like the one published in BloombergBusinessweek.
This post gained some serious traction on social media sites, generating a lot of traffic over the post- and pre-holiday weekend. Read it to find out why.
8. How financial advisers can improve their personal workflow
FPPad readers are always looking for ways to be more efficient and get more done each day.
That’s why a lot of content here focuses on tools and techniques to deliver on that premise.
In this post, I share one very cool app that I continue to use to this day to manage and organize personal workflow.
9. Should Financial Advisers use Google Drive?
In the same category as one of the top all-time posts at FPPad (see: Dropbox for Financial Advisers: Is it Safe?), I cover reasons why financial advisers should think twice about using Google Drive, the search giant’s online file storage service, for storing files with sensitive information inside.
10. Smarsh president Stephen Marsh addresses Pinterest and compliance
This is the first podcast update to break into the list of top posts of 2012, and that’s likely because it includes two topics of recent interest for advisers: Pinterest and compliance.
In this podcast, Smarsh president Stephen Marsh talks about the company’s latest product that can be used to archive content from new social media websites like Pinterest without depending on APIs or other data access methods that may not ordinarily be available from the social media site itself.
If you are one of those advisers who can’t wait to try out the next new social media website, then Smarsh’s new tool may be just the thing you need to manage your compliance requirements.
11. New LinkedIn profiles raise compliance concerns as there appears to be no way to hide endorsements
Notice a theme here? Yes, LinkedIn and their new Endorsements feature has generated a lot of interest and traffic here at FPPad.
This time, as new profile updates were being rolled out to LinkedIn users, it appeared that Endorsements couldn’t be hidden whatsoever.
One adviser who received the new profile design in an early rollout sent a screenshot to me, which was covered in this screencast update.
Fortunately, the final profile design includes an easy way to edit Endorsements and hide them, which you’ve already seen in the number six post of 2012.
12. Cloud computing for financial advisers: How to stay safe
And finally, here’s the post to round out the best of 2012. It’s all about cloud computing and the things advisers can do to stay safe when using cloud services.
This is a reference over to my article for the July edition of the Journal of Financial Planning that includes a list of ten things advisers should ask of their cloud service provider when conducting due diligence.
All of the answers provided should be saved to your compliance file, so when a regulator challenges you on the security of your cloud provider, you have all this information at the ready to satisfy the request.
And that’s it.
The most popular posts of 2012 here at FPPad, all rolled up into one convenient update for your reference.
Allow me to ask one more time for you to subscribe to the free newsletter so you can stay up to date on the best in financial planning technology content. I’d normally say “monthly” newsletter, but I don’t send updates on a monthly schedule. It’s less frequent than that, so 1) your inbox won’t be overloaded, and 2) you’ll receive quick links to some of the premium content posted here.
Have a happy, prosperous, and productive 2013!
I’m recapping the best content found on FPPad this year. A few days ago I featured the top five videos from 2012.
Today’s update highlights the five most popular podcasts (ranked by total listens), and my final update in the series will list the top posts of 2012.
And before we begin, make sure that you’ve subscribed via iTunes so you don’t miss the next podcast.
Here are the top five podcasts of 2012.
In this year’s top podcast, Jo Day, co-founder of Trumpet, Inc., walked me through her company’s latest integration with popular online document storage provider ShareFile (ShareFile was one of this year’s Best in Tech winners).
Trumpet’s suite of software can take hundreds (even thousands) or reports generated in a batch, append custom content (say, a newsletter or cover page), and upload all the individual reports to their correct destination within ShareFile.
Imagine if you or your staff attempting something on this scale by hand. You’d likely end up making simple copy-and-paste mistakes, or worse, publish the wrong report to your client’s ShareFile folder.
The runner-up podcast for 2012 is my interview with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band. Band describes Contactually as “a professional relationship manager application” which I initially discovered early in 2012.
Fast forward to today, as I still find that I use Contactually every day. It’s sometimes spooky at how it picks up on conversations that have gone dormant, but inevitably my proactive follow up rekindles relationships and discussions (and more often than not, new clients!)
To learn more about how financial advisers (and others) are using Contactually, listen to the podcast below.
This podcast features a new product from Socialware, the social media compliance and strategy provider to financial services companies, called Social Network Listening.
Even if you don’t tweet or post to social networking sites, you can gain a tremendous amount of insight by paying attention to the posts and updates of others.
But with thousands of first- and second-tier connections scattered across social media sites, how do you efficiently monitor them and identify the important updates?
Tim Walker, Marketing Program Manager for Socialware, tells me that Social Network Listening is designed to do just that, saving you valuable time while delivering the most relevant updates from your social networks.
One of the tools I’m starting to see more and more in the enterprise (read: your business) environment is the internal social network. One such product is Yammer, purchased earlier this year by Microsoft for $1.2 billion (yes, billion with a B!).
If internal social networks such as Yammer are to take off inside the financial services setting, advisers need a way to capture and archive the internal network messages, just as they currently for email.
In this podcast, Sam Kolbert-Hyle, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Smarsh, discusses their new product to archive content posted to Yammer and allow regulated organizations to add this new tool to their business without violating compliance requirements.
Finally, the podcast rounding out this top five list is a new one featuring PreciseFP. PreciseFP is a web-based data-gathering tool advisers can use to streamline the data collection and data entry process when signing up a new client.
Now I have an aversion to filling out lengthy online forms that ask for a bunch of redundant data my adviser should already know.
So in this podcast, PreciseFP co-founder by Don Whalen sets the record straight about how advisers can use this tool to collaboratively work with clients on data gathering, yet avoid many of the frustrations clients may normally encounter with custom-built online forms.
Also, Wahlen offers a discount promo code for podcast listeners, which likely explains how this podcast, barely two weeks old as the time this review was published, vaulted into the top five podcasts of 2012. Well, advisers love to save money, and this is one way to do so (and in full disclosure, the promo is not an affiliate code, so I receive no referral fees if you sign up).
I hope you enjoyed this recap of the best podcasts of 2012. Return to FPPad one more time to get the list of the most popular posts for the year.
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Don Whalen, co-founder of PreciseFP
Client data gathering and form filling are the least glamorous tasks that make up your workday, but the activities are essential to create financial plans with correct information.
Fortunately, there are a few solutions that can significantly streamline the arduous data-gathering process.
One product is PreciseFP, co-founded by Don Whalen and Sebastian Skwarek in 2008.
In what probably sets the record as the longest time between my initial discovery (see: Has Laborious Client Data Entry Met Its Match? from September 2008) and follow up, I connected with Don Whalen to learn about PreciseFP’s growth over the last four years and how PreciseFP has matured to be a reliable, cost-effective tool advisers can use to facilitate the data gathering.
Listen to the podcast below, and note that Whalen provides a discount code all listeners can use to receive 15% off their subscription to PreciseFP (not an affiliate code, I receive no referral fees if you sign up).
Podcasting isn’t for everyone, but financial advisers who include podcasts in their marketing collateral can score points with prospective clients.
In this FPPad On Air broadcast, I connected with Blane Warrene, senior vice president of client communications for RegEd, to talk about how advisers can record, publish, and syndicate their own podcasts.
In the broadcast, Warrene mentioned tools such as Audacity, Garage Band, and Blubrry advisers can use to get started with podcasting.
Be sure to subscribe to the Social Media Minute podcast on iTunes (and the FPPad podcast as well!)
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Have you heard of social currency before?
Justin Wisz, co-founder of Vestorly
Before you buy a book, do you visit the reviews on Amazon.com to read what other people said about it?
And before your next dinner out, do you pull up Yelp to find 4- and 5-star restaurant reviews nearby?
Those are examples of social currency. You’re seeking feedback curated by social networks to find the best resource (be it a book, restaurant, mechanic, etc.) for your needs. Many times, recommendations from your immediate social network on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter point you to products and services that have already been vetted by your friends and colleagues.
So how can financial advisers take advantage of social currency?
To answer that question, I connected with Justin Wisz, co-founder of Vestorly, an investment adviser matching service powered by social communities. Hear what he has to say about social currency and how Vestorly can help advisers get the most out of it.
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Zvi Band, co-founder and CEO of Contactually
How did one financial adviser boost his client retention rate from 90% to 98%? According to this Wall Street Journal story, the answer was more client follow up.
So how do advisers target their most important client relationships with relevant follow-up reminders?
One way is by using a program called Contactually.
I’ve been a Contactually user for about a year (likely equivalent to a decade in “app years”). I first wrote about my experience with the program in January for Morningstar (see: Add Automation to Your E-mail Follow-Up).
I recently had the chance to connect with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band to learn more about how financial advisers are using Contactually to cultivate new and existing relationships and ultimately grow their business. Listen to the podcast of that conversation below.
