Tag Archives: SEI Advisor Network

Wealthfront offers Path financial planning software free: Flash briefing for December 7, 2018

Here are the links to today’s top stories:

Introducing Free Financial Planning from Wealthfront

SEI Strengthens Automated Workflows through Strategic Partnership with Advizr from PRNewswire

See the New RightCapital/Advyzon Integration in Action from RightCapital

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

Introducing Free Financial Planning from Wealthfront

Today’s update is all about financial planning software, with the first story coming from Wealthfront, the Silicon Valley-based automated investment service with over 220,000 clients. This week the company announced it will now offer free access to its propriety financial planning software called Path with no investment account required.

Originally launched in February 2017, Path allows customers to illustrate the hypothetical growth of stock market investments, estimate home affordability, calculate projected college tuition costs, and more. Prior to the announcement, investors needed $500 to open a Wealthfront investment account in order to use Path, so the minimum fee to access the service was 25 basis points of $500, or just one dollar and twenty five cents.

SEI Strengthens Automated Workflows through Strategic Partnership with Advizr

Next up is news about Advizr, as SEI Investments recently announced an integration with financial planning software from Advizr to expand the company’s BusinessWise Program for financial professionals. SEI works with over 7,500 financial advisers under its SEI Advisor Network, which was recently rebranded to Independent Advisor Solutions by SEI, and the addition of Advizr to the BusinessWise Program is intended to offer financial professionals the choice of implementing a focused, modular financial plan or a completely holistic plan when engaging clients in the planning process.

See the New RightCapital/Advyzon Integration in Action

And finally, in news from from RightCapital, the financial planning software provider announced a new integration with Advyzon, a cloud-based wealth management platform for investment advisors. Soon advisors will be able to leverage data and portfolio account information maintained in Advyzon to quickly and efficiently populate an initial financial plan inside RightCapital without the need to duplicate data entry.

The companies will demonstrate the new integration in an upcoming webinar held on Tuesday, December 11, so be sure to visit FPPad.com/flashbriefing for a link to the webinar as well as all the links to today’s top stories.

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

FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 11

On today’s broadcast, a serious security flaw impacts two-thirds of the Internet. How this may affect the information you store online. Betterment announces the launch of an Institutional platform. Will they start winning turnkey asset management business from advisors? And learn how a new integration between Redtail and Riskalyze will help you monitor client portfolios to keep them in line with your client’s risk tolerance.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by Wealthbox CRM. Wealthbox is collaborative, social, and outrageously simple CRM for financial advisors.

Wealthbox CRM

Sign up for a free trial today by visiting fppad.com/wealthbox

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

Here’s everything you need to know about the Heartbleed web security flaw from Gigaom, and

The Heartbleed FAQ for financial advisers from FPPad

[Leading off this week’s broadcast is news of a critical security flaw in a web browser encryption standard called OpenSSL, in use by an estimated two-thirds of all the servers connected to the Internet.

To summarize, the flaw, called “Heartbleed,” allows an attacker to use messages called “heartbeats” to trick a server into passing along sensitive information from its memory, which could include account passwords or the server’s private encryption keys. When hackers get access to that information, really bad things can happen.

So what can you do in response to the Heartbleed vulnerability? In all honesty, not too much. Assume the worst-case scenario, that an attacker has compromised your online passwords, so consider updating your passwords for affected websites to one that’s longer and more difficult to crack. You should also activate multi-factor authentication for any service where it is supported.] Researchers have discovered a serious flaw known as Heartbleed that affects the security software that runs on about two-thirds of the servers on the internet and could expose user data, including passwords. Here’s what you need to know about it

Tiburon CEO Summit extrudes big news: Betterment Institutional is born from RIABiz.com

[Next is an update from the online investment advice category, as this week Betterment revealed plans to introduce an institutional version of its technology to financial advisors.

In a fascinating report, RIABiz detailed how plans for Betterment Institutional were made public this week at the Tiburon CEO Summit in New York, as Betterment CEO Jon Stein and new Betterment partner and investor Steve Lockshin, known for founding Fortigent and Convergent Wealth Advisors, were both in attendance.

The soon-to-be-released offering from Betterment takes direct aim at existing turnkey asset management platforms, or TAMPs, which include well-known names like SEI, Envestnet, Adhesion, and even Fortigent itself, with an ultra-low cost offering of around 35 basis points all in.

Cut-throat pricing isn’t the only attraction of Betterment Institutional, as both advisors and clients will likely benefit from access to Betterment’s slick online dashboards and mobile app support for Android and iPhone.
So if you’ve considered outsourcing your investment management and reporting to a TAMP, Betterment Institutional will be a solution that deserves your close attention over the coming months.] Steve Lockshin lays out his plans for TAMP-like venture and how Michael Kitces, a public critic of the Betterment CEO, very much fits in

Redtail and Riskalyze Launch Next-Generation Integration Partnership from Riskalyze.com

[And finally, rounding out this week’s update is news of a new integration between Redtail Technology and Riskalyze. Redtail, known for its CRM, email, and imaging solutions now synchronizes client assets with Riskalyze, a client risk tolerance assessment tool and my pick for best client-facing technology of 2013, on a nightly basis.

In the other direction, Riskalyze updates client risk scores based on the synchronized account information and pushes them along with the client Risk Numbers over to the client’s profile in Redtail CRM. This is a time-saving upgrade as users of both solutions will no longer have to manually switch back and forth to keep assets or Risk Numbers up to date.] Redtail, the industry leader in advisor CRM, email and imaging, and Riskalyze, the company that invented the Risk Number, today announced a next-generation integration partnership that delivers incredible tools for advisors to grow their practices.

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

The Advisor’s Technology Swiss Army Knife from Morningstar Advisor

One advisor technology startup combines a suite of disparate business-development tools into one effective solution.

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 11, 2014

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 11, 2014

T3 2014: SEI enters the integration arms race through strategic partnerships with Redtail Technology, MoneyGuidePro, and ActiFi

left to right: Redtail Technology CEO Brian McLaughlin, ActiFi CEO Spenser Segal, PIETech CIO Tony Leal, SEI Advisor Network Director of Research and Validation Raef Lee

left to right: Redtail Technology CEO Brian McLaughlin, ActiFi CEO Spenser Segal, PIETech CIO Tony Leal, SEI Advisor Network Director of Research and Validation Raef Lee

SEI announces strategic partnerships and enters the integration arms race dominated by four leading custodians

When you think of custodians that make headlines for technology integration initiatives, four institutions likely come to mind.

The “Big Four” Integrated Custodians

In no particular order, Schwab Advisor Services, Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, TD Ameritrade Institutional, and Pershing LLC are the custodians most advisers observe as each tries to one-up the other in the technology integration arms race.

On a side note, emerging advisers with small but growing businesses are paying attention to developments at TradePMR, Scottrade, and Shareholders Service Group.

SEI Enters The Integration Arms Race

But another custodian looking to enter the arms race of integration is SEI, the Oaks, Penn.-based company providing outsourced services to financial advisers for more than 20 years. SEI serves over 5,700 advisors who collectively manage over $41 billion in assets under management.

Raef Lee, Director of Research and Validation. SEI Advisor Network

Raef Lee, Director of Research and Validation. SEI Advisor Network

In a pre-conference meeting at T3 2014, Raef Lee, Director of Research and Validation for the SEI Advisor Network, revealed that the company is entering into a strategic partnership with leading technology and consulting providers Redtail Technology, MoneyGuidePro, and ActiFi.

In development for the last 18 months, and actively under construction for the last nine, SEI plans to rollout the complete solution to advisers by the end of 2014.

Cross Application Workflow Automation

“The partnership will provide the first true cross application workflow automation platform for end-to-end processing orchestrated across multiple applications,” said Spenser Segal, founder and CEO of ActiFi.

In other words, advisers using SEI’s new integrated solution will be able to initiate workflows in Redtail that then execute actions on the custodial side without ever leaving the Redtail environment. It’s the “without ever leaving Redtail” that makes this solution unique.

From Financial Plans to Proposals

Another key differentiator of SEI’s proposed solution is the ability to generate investor proposals using information previously created in MoneyGuidePro financial plans.

“There’s never been a good integration with a proposal system, so having this new integration to seamlessly pass account and client information is the most exciting thing about this solution,” said Tony Leal, CIO and partner at PieTech, the providers of MoneyGuidePro financial planning software.

No Cost Integration

SEI also announced that the new integrated solution will be offered at no cost to advisers who affiliate with SEI.

Advisers will need to purchase standard subscriptions to Redtail CRM and MoneyGuidePro, which combined cost less than $2,000 per year. However, activating and using the SEI solution is free.

For all the details on the upcoming SEI integrated solution, read the press release at MarketWire.com.