Tag Archives: Smarsh

FPPad Bits and Bytes for October 5

Posted on October 5, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Yes, it’s October already. How are you faring on your new technology initiatives for 2012?

If you didn’t attend FPA Experience last week, you still can get a great recap of my Transformative Technology You Can Implement Today presentation from this WealthManagement.com update, From FPA 2012: Transformative Technology That Doesn’t Cost a Dime, and Financial Planning magazine’s story, What’s the Most Important Tech Tool for Advisors?

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Schwab and Salentica Announce Launch of Integration for Independent Investment Advisors from Schwab Advisor Services

[Here’s the history on Salentica’s integration with Schwab: in May 2012, they entered a beta testing, transitioned to a pilot phase in August (see FPPad Bits and Bytes for August 3), and is finally in production to advisers using Salentica’s Advisor Desk. How many advisers can that represent? In the 2011 Financial Planning magazine software survey, 4% of 3200 respondents, or roughly 120, said they use Microsoft Dynamics for CRM. So some smaller percentage of that 120 are probably using Salentica. My guess is it’s less than two dozen.] Schwab Intelligent Technologies and Salentica Inc. announced today that Salentica Advisor Desk™ with Schwab OpenView Gateway™ is available to independent investment advisors after a successful pilot. Advisors who use Salentica Advisor Desk as their client relationship management (CRM) solution can now view real-time information on their clients’ financial holdings within their CRM.

Smarsh Launches Archiving & Compliance for Salesforce Chatter on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange from Smarsh.com

[Smarsh is building off its summer success of releasing Web Archiving (see: Smarsh president Stephen Marsh addresses Pinterest and compliance), and now the archiving vendor captures messages sent through the enterprise communication platform Chatter from Salesforce.] Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving compliance solutions, today announced it has launched Archiving & Compliance for Chatter on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s most popular cloud marketplace for social apps for business. Archiving & Compliance for Chatter enables organizations to capture, preserve, search, supervise and produce organizations’ Chatter files and communications in support of compliance, recordkeeping and e-discovery initiatives.

Fox and Redtail partner on work flow from InvestmentNews.com

[Back in 2011 I reviewed the latest refresh of Redtail CRM for Morningstar (see: A Popular CRM Gets an Upgrade), and at that time the CRM supported basic step-by-step workflow definitions. In it’s latest partnership, Redtail users can now open PDF files of workflow designs published by Fox Financial Planning Network directly within the CRM. As to pricing, the top tier purchase is around $6,000 and includes full training sessions, workflow system, resource center and coaching, with a nominal monthly access fee thereafter. I’ve seen discounts available for AICPA PFP section members, so ask if you’re affiliated.] Fox Financial Planning Network and Redtail Technology Inc. this week plan to announce a technology integration that allows for “one-click” deployment of FFPN’s comprehensive “client service delivery work flows” onto Redtail’s popular customer relationship management platform.

 

PODCAST: Smarsh president Stephen Marsh addresses Pinterest and compliance

Posted on August 29, 2012 by in Compliance, Podcast, Social Media

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Founder of email archiving provider says advisers can use Pinterest without skirting compliance requirements

I had the opportunity to connect with Stephen Marsh, Founder and CEO of Smarsh, Inc., a company well-known for its email and social media archiving services.

Smarsh Founder and CEO Stephen Marsh

By now, most advisers are aware of multiple archiving solutions for social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it’s not so clear whether updates to emerging social media sites like Pinterest can also be archived.

In this podcast, Marsh shares information on his company’s Web Archiving product and how it allows advisers to “pin” updates to Pinterest and archive them for compliance purposes.

Marsh also addresses the company’s annual Electronic Communications Compliance Survey report with key statistics.

After listening to the podcast, use the following link to download the free compliance survey: 2012 Electronic Communications Compliance Survey

Click to view/download the PDF podcast transcript.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for June 29

Posted on June 29, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

While last week was an onslaught of news, this week the flow was reduced to a trickle. Having returned from giving a presentation in San Francisco yesterday, my focus is now on my move to Atlanta in July.

First, be sure to read this month’s Quickview update at Morningstar Advisor, Supercharge Your Conference Calls

Have a great holiday week next week, and now on with this week’s stories of interest:

Schwab Launches Advisor App for the iPhone® from Yahoo! Finance

[Finally, Schwab gets onboard with iOS devices and now has an app for iPhone. But wait: it doesn’t feature trading, it doesn’t have streaming financial news… well, it’s a good version 1.0, but advisers already have more functionality out of the apps from Fidelity (see Fidelity WealthCentral Mobile now available for iPad) and TD Ameritrade Institutional (see Exclusive look at Veo® Mobile app updates for iPad from TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Jon Patullo).] After a successful pilot, Charles Schwab announced today that it will roll out the first version of the new Schwab Advisor Center app for the iPhone. Starting today, independent investment advisors who custody assets with Schwab Advisor Services can download the app to view their clients’ account balances, positions and transactions, allowing them to easily tap into the real-time data they need from Schwab Advisor Center while on the go.

Smarsh Report Reveals Challenges in Oversight of Electronic Communications from Smarsh

[Smarsh knows a lot about compliance and archiving, having a commanding presence in the broker-dealer industry as well as a decent number of independent RIA clients. In this second update to its compliance survey, you can identify the hot topics that concern compliance professionals. Hint: Mobile, social, and website archiving are trouble spots for advisers.]  Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, today released its second annual Electronic Communications Compliance Survey report, revealing the findings of a survey of compliance professionals in the financial services industry.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for June 22

Posted on June 22, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Woah, who turned on the firehose of releases this week? Maybe everyone wants to get all their news out to the world before taking off for summer vacations.

So I don’t interfere with your vacation plans, let’s move right into week’s stories of interest:

Schwab Performance Technologies Announces Development of Hosted Version of PortfolioCenter from MarketWire

[My Twitter followers found out Monday morning of Schwab’s latest plans to offer a hosted version of PortfolioCenter to advisers. Getting portfolio management software off of your local server is one of the last hurdles to cross in transitioning your business into one that can operate completely in the cloud.] Schwab Performance Technologies® (SPT), a subsidiary of The Charles Schwab Corporation and a leading provider of technology solutions for independent investment advisors, announced today that the company is building a hosted version of its flagship portfolio management software for independent investment advisors.

Schwab Announces Availability of 28 New Workflows for Independent Investment Advisors from MarketWire

[My vision for workflows is an online exchange advisers can upload and download workflow scripts for specific CRMs. Well, that assumes CRMs can import and export workflow scripts, which most can’t do, not even Salesforce, if I remember correctly. Until then, advisers will have to settle for “pseudo-code,” i.e. a high-level description, of what steps to follow in a workflow, delivered in a PDF or Word document. And that’s exactly what Schwab Intelligent Technologies is delivering.] In order to help advisors gain greater efficiency in their business practices, Charles Schwab announced today that a full library of 28 universal workflows are now available in the Schwab OpenView Workflow Library(TM) (Workflow Library) through Schwab Intelligent Technologies.

Cloud version of Junxure on the way from InvestmentNews

[Junxure Essentials is coming, well, soon, and we don’t yet know how much it will cost. Last year, August 24, 2011 to be exact, I relayed the company’s plans to release a cloud-based version of Junxure in Q4 2012. According to CRM Software’s Greg Friedman, now plans are to launch a beta version in the fall with general availability in 2013. Building this is not easy, and Junxure’s only going to get one chance, in my opinion, to get this right. Oh, and if you made it this far, Junxure posted a sneak peek of Joel Bruckenstein’s review from the Technology Tools for Today newsletter.] Junxure, a CRM application popular among registered investment advisers, is heading to the clouds.

Smarsh Acquires AdvisorSquare from Symantec from MarketWatch

[If you archive websites (see Smarsh releases Web Archiving, an automated solution to archive adviser websites), you might as well support the creation of them in the first place. Here Smarsh announces the acquisition of AdvisorSquare and their website support for “thousands of investment professionals nationwide.” I stopped recommending AdvisorSquare to my clients back in 2009. Will Smarsh’s investment reverse my opinion of their product and service?] Smarsh(R), the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, today announced the acquisition of AdvisorSquare from Symantec.

Junxure Launches Blog for Financial Industry from PRNewswire

[Junxure, a top-three CRM in use by advisers, now has a public blog. I contacted Junxure president Greg Friedman and asked that he set up an RSS feed with Feedburner to offer a few more flexible options for visitors to subscribe.] Junxure, an industry-leading CRM practice improvement firm that integrates technology, consulting, and training, has launched its Company blog at www.junxure.com/blog. The new Junxure blog will primarily focus on topics related to the financial industry, from technology trends to industry best practices. In addition, the Junxure blog will report important news and updates about its products and services.

 AssetBook and BlazePortfolio Announce Strategic Partnership to Deliver End-to-End Back Office Solution for Investment Advisors from BlazePortfolio

[Managing portfolios for your clients means more than just downloading and reconciling account positions. You also need a tool that scales your ability to place trades. Here’s a good development between trade order management provider BlazePortfolio and  online portfolio service bureau Assetbook (see AssetBook CEO Rob Major discusses advantages of hiring an outsourced portfolio service bureau.] BlazePortfolio Systems  and AssetBook today announced an integration partnership between software platforms which would provide AssetBook users access to BlazePortfolio’s real-time trade order management system, Atom Align.  The combined offering will provide enhanced flexibility for registered investment advisors who are seeking a best of breed approach to manage their portfolio management systems.

YouTube Integration Reflects Growing Use of Video as Social Tool for Business from Arkovi.com

[You no doubt have noticed the addition of video content here at FPPad. You’re likely considering making videos of your own (if not already) to feature your business. But any video you post is marketing material, and is therefore subject to the same capture and archive requirements in FINRA and SEC regulations. So how do you archive videos you post to popular hosting sites like YouTube? One option is Arkovi’s extended solution.]  Arkovi announced today at the Morningstar Investment Conference a new integration with YouTube, continuing a series of major releases on its social media archiving, compliance and monitoring platform. The YouTube integration includes a number of key features including publishing, compliance and supervision, reporting and search features.

Black Diamond’s Clientele Swells After Advent Merger from WealthManagement.com

[A little more than a year after being acquired by Advent for $73 million, Black Diamond continues its healthy growth. What I’d like to know from you is what has (or has not) changed with respect to the customer service you receive.] Not every advisor was pleased in May 2011 when Advent Software announced it was buying its smaller, younger rival, Black Diamond Performance Reporting.

See, I told you there were a ton of new updates this week!

Kitces: Eleven blogs for all financial advisers to follow from InvestmentNews

[It’s a privilege to have FPPad included among excellent blogs you should follow. I hope you continue to enjoy the Video Spotlight and Bits & Bytes content produced for you.] While there are many lists of blogs out there, financial planning’s own social media “power tweeter” Michael Kitces, partner and director of research for Pinnacle Advisory Group and publisher of The Kitces Report and his own blog, Nerd’s Eye View, maintains a list of blogs specifically relevant for financial advisors.

Smarsh releases Web Archiving, an automated solution to archive adviser websites

Posted on May 16, 2012 by in Compliance

New automated tool will help registered professionals eliminate tedious manual processes to meet FINRA and SEC requirements.

In a press release today, Smarsh, Inc., the Portland, Ore.-based company best known for email archiving, announced a new solution to help satisfy archiving and record-keeping requirements when it comes to adviser websites.

Web Archiving is the new solution, and Smarsh created a short explainer video to describe what it does, embedded below for your convenience.

(click to view on YouTube)

Web Archiving is designed to automatically crawl and capture the contents of an adviser’s website. In addition to archiving the full text of all website pages, Web Archiving also captures embedded media such as video, social media feeds, slideshows, and more.

According to the solution feature list, archived pages are rendered in their original format, preserving the “look and feel” of the website page as it originally appeared on the adviser’s site.

“Today’s Web is not static text, but rather an immersive multi-sensory experience. This complicates the critical need for organizations of all kinds to keep an accurate, uncompromised record of what has been published to the world via the Web,” said Stephen Marsh, Smarsh founder and CEO, in the release.

Without an automated tool, advisers may be forced to print individual website pages to PDF files and save them in a compliance file. This is a tedious, time-consuming process at best, and it doesn’t address media like embedded video or slideshows.

Website archiving is not very crowded with vendors. Alternate solutions can be found within the Advisor Websites platform (though an adviser’s website will need to be hosted with the company), Advisor Products (again, website hosting required), Arkovi, and a few others.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 27

Posted on May 27, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

This week’s Bits and Bytes is a big one! There are a few stories carried over from the previous week, as updating this page when traveling exclusively with an iPad is not the easiest thing to do, but a lot of great stories entered the wires this week, too.

And a reminder, Bill will be attending FPA NorCal next week in San Francisco, presenting Cultivating Clients in a Connected World on Wednesday afternoon. If you’ll be there, stop by and introduce yourself!

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Choosing Software That Works for Your Advisory Firm—Part 6: Ensuring New Technology Meets Your Business Goals from AdvisorOne.com

The sixth update in a series by Spenser Segal of ActiFi designed to present best practices to advisors on how to choose, implement and monitor new technology for an advisory firm.

Compliance and Connectivity from Financial-Planning.com

Well, well, it seems that Bill’s presentation Cultivating Clients in a Connected World has persuaded Bob Veres to consider adopting social media for purposes other than marketing and search engine optimization. See what he has to say about advisers considering this new communication medium (and follow @bobveres on Twitter).

Smarsh Report Identifies Electronic Communications Compliance Gaps at Smarsh.com

Smarsh, the email and social media archiving solution provider, released results from a survey of compliance professionals regarding the use of electronic communications including social media. In summary, it confirms what you already know: compliance professionals aren’t up to speed on supervising and archiving electronic communication, specifically social media.

Tweet on the Street from NYTimes.com

Morgan Stanley is ready to unleash its 17,800 brokers into popular social media service Twitter (their archive and monitoring solution is Socialware). But nothing they post will be unscripted. Good luck with that, we say.

IPS AdvisorPro® and Redtail Integrate Technology Systems from IPSAdvisorPro.com

IPS AdvisorPro® and Redtail Technology announced the availability of a new data integration between their industry leading technology platforms for financial advisors. The new integration will streamline the preparation of Investment Policy Statements (IPS) by automatically populating IPS AdvisorPro® fields with client information contained in Redtail’s CRM solution.

After tortoise-like beginnings, AssetBook is now on-the-hop in portfolio management software from RIABiz.com

One smaller but fast-emerging portfolio management software firm is AssetBook. Based in McHenry, Md., it has burst onto the portfolio management software scene thanks to a recent marketing push and now has 150 firms using its services.

 

FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 20

Posted on May 20, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

Bill is attending NAPFA National 2011’s final day today after appearing as a panelist for Thursday’s session on adviser technology. As always, look for the live tweets from this conference which can be found under the #NAPFA11 hashtag.

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Behind the scenes in social media at InvestmentNews.com

As regulators take their own sweet time coming up with guidelines for social media, the marketplace is coming up with its own solutions for financial advisers.

A blessing from Charles Goldman helped seal the Advent-Black Diamond deal from RIABiz.com

It was a big deal for the RIA business. Yet the planned combination of Advent Software and Black Diamond was not so large that investment bankers got called in to finance or advise on the transaction. What sufficed in place of Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Charles Goldman.

Tweets That Mean Business from Financial Advisor Magazine

Advisors are finding that social media is more helpful than just sharing silly things like what you ate for dinner last night.

 

 

FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 13

Posted on May 13, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

We’re attending the 2011 FPA DFW Financial Planning Symposium today (our second of four conferences this month!) and will be live tweeting updates using the #FPADFW hashtag.

In the meantime, below are this week’s best stories in financial planning technology.

Read this month’s column for Morningstar Advisor, A Popular CRM Gets an Upgrade

Over the last 12 months, Redtail product developers and engineers have been working hard to prepare a new version of its CRM, code-named Project Leapfrog, scheduled for official release in January 2012. In this month’s column, Bill explores the new features and design of Project Leapfrog and how they improve this already-popular CRM.

Cabinet NG First to Offer Scheduling, Workflow and Document Management in One Package from MarketWire.com

Cabinet NG, provider of document management and workflow management software, today announced the latest version of CNG-SAFE 7.0. The new version aligns document and contact management through its breakthrough scheduling capability making it an industry first with scheduling, workflow and document management in one core package.

Cambridge, Commonwealth vault advisors into social media; the boost is mostly free, for now from RIABiz.com

Sensing the urgency for advisors to have access to social media, Cambridge Investment Research and Commonwealth Financial Network have begun offering their advisors coaching and technology services to help them use social web sites.

Choosing Software That Works for Your Advisory Firm-Part 5: How to Implement New Technology from AdvisorOne.com

The fifth update in a six-part series by Spenser Segal of ActiFi designed to present best practices to advisors on how to choose, implement and monitor new technology for an advisory firm.

Actiance Selected by Smarsh as Social Media Compliance Partner from Reuters.com

Actiance, enablers of the safe and compliant use of unified communications, collaboration and Web 2.0, today announced that Smarsh, the managed service leader in secure and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, has expanded its agreement with Actiance to include the Socialite platform.

 

 

FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 15

Posted on April 15, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

Did you file your tax return yet? We managed to file a few days before the potential government shutdown.

But if you’re still scrambling to complete those last few client returns (or extension filings), here’s a 60-second breakdown of this week’s top stories in financial planning technology so you can get back to your forms.

The inside story of a giant RIA’s move to Tamarac from Advent from RIABiz.com

The thought process behind $2-billion Signature Estate’s move from Advent to Tamarac for its portfolio management technology.

Mobile Apps 101: 10 Must-Have Applications for Every Advisor from Financial-Planning.com

Whether it’s an iPad, Android, BlackBerry or iPhone, just about everyone these days is walking around with a digital appendage to keep themselves constantly in the know and able to communicate with friends, family and business associates around the clock.

Read this month’s MorningstarAdvisor.com column Avoid E-mail Audit Headaches to determine how technology can prevent last-minute scrambling to assemble e-mail records for examiners.

And finally, read part three of an interview AdvisorWebsites.com conducted with Bill on financial adviser technology:Bill Winterberg Talks Technology: Part 3 (read Part 1 and Part 2)