Tag Archives: T32011

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 11

Posted on March 11, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

Bill’s recovery from last week’s illness has been slow, so progress on projects at FPPad headquarters has been incremental this week. Nevertheless, we’ve made sure to scour the industry’s top sources of technology related articles for the financial planning community.

Here are this week’s top stories:

Socialware Joins with LinkedIn to Unlock Social Media for Financial Services from Socialware.com

Socialware, the leader in social media compliance and engagement, today announced an exciting relationship with LinkedIn that will enable financial services organizations and professionals to access the extensive networking, marketing and research capabilities available on LinkedIn while remaining compliant with SEC, FINRA, IROC, FSA and state regulations on electronic communication.

Eavesdropping on the FPA Business Solutions conference: Mobile apps, web-based marketing — and how you can make the most of the connected world from RIABiz.com

Fittingly located near MIT, the FPA Business Solutions 2011 conference had a technology bent in an agenda jam-packed with business and practice management content.

Best Minds Converge in Boston from ByrnesConsulting.com

Mike Byrnes of Byrnes Consulting published six articles and photo reviews of last week’s FPA Business Solutions 2011 Conference. Our favorites are Six Technology Tips From The FPA Conference and Social Media Compliance Is A Gray Area

Giant of the broker-dealer tech world takes aim at Advent at RIABiz.com

(Bill’s note: If you’re a big (>$500m AUM) firm that seeks an elite portfolio management platform, here’s one worth considering.) Vestmark, which provides the technology behind big name companies like LPL Financial and UBS, is taking its time-tested platform directly to RIAs.

And finally, this month’s technology column from Morningstar Advisor, New Trends in Tech at T3.

 

 

Download the Transformative Technology Presentation Slide Deck from T3 2011

Posted on February 20, 2011 by in General

Update 12/2011: The Transformative Technology slide deck is no longer available for download. Please see my speaking page for upcoming events you can attend to view my latest presentations.

Due to overwhelming interest in the T3 2011 Conference presentation by Joanne Day and Bill Winterberg, we are making the raw slide deck available free for download for a limited time to FPPad subscribers.

Subscribing is free! Enter your name and best email address below. Click the link in your confirmation email and you will receive a second message with the link to download the Transformative Technology slide deck from T3 2011.

T3 2011 Conference Live Blog: Fidelity Integration Panel

Posted on February 18, 2011 by in General

One of today’s sessions was a panel discussion featuring advisers on Fidelity’s platform follwing the keynote session by Brent Burns of Asset Dedication. Here are our most important takeaways from Fidelity’s panel.

The panelists included Tom Goyne, founder of Shamrock Asset Management in Dallas, TX, Rick Adkins, CEO of the Arkansas Financial Group, and Michael Lee, COO of Lord Capital Management

To start off the discussion, Goyne came right out of the gate stating that if an advisers’s firm manages less than $75 million in AUM, they can’t afford to stay in business with all the impending regulations coming.

On their approach to integration:
Adkins has a saying, “We can’t make that much baklava.” Each December his firm would make client gift baskets that included baklava, but as the number of client grew, they just couldn’t make all the baklava. He used that same analogy with firms running without integrated technology.

Adkins also postured, “We don’t make money clicking keys,” stressing the importance that while technology makes certain things capable, advisers must remember that the success of their business is contingent on maintaining connections with clients and not being buried in technology.

On Custodian Integration:
Lee’s firm is 100% Fidelity, Adkin’s firm is approximately 90% on Fidelity, and Goyne’s firm is all on Fidelity with the exception of bank assets.

On Regulatory Reform:
Adkines: Regulators seem to be more comfortable with advisers using cloud systems, knowing that it improves business continuity and leverages security policies of the hosting providers.

Lee’s firm went through an SEC audit six months ago months ago and easily satisfied the SEC’s data requests with their paperless environment.
Goyne cautioned that if advisers are going to fund the SEC examination budget of ~$1 billion, extrapolated across about 8,000 advisers, each firm’s share will be about $121,000. He predicts it’s going to become very expensive to be an RIA in the future.

That’s it for the Fidelity panel session. Please be sure to check back with us for more updates.

T3 2011 Conference Live Blog: Redtail Leapfrog CRM

Posted on February 17, 2011 by in General

Next up in the T3 pre-conference sessions featured Redtail Technologies CRM with Tim Minert, Director of Sales and Chris Roberts.

Roberts demonstrated Redtail’s refreshed Leapfrog CRM (Bill’s note: I’m sentimental to the “Leapfrog” name, having spent 8 years in software engineering for the educational toy company) to the standing room only crowd and commented that “most” of what was shown will be included in a release scheduled around March 1.

Redtail has been moving its database over to SQL 2008, which Roberts says increases the overall speed of Redtail CRM, making it “lightning quick.”

For those advisers who use Redtail’s hosted email, the company is migrating to email hosting from Zimbra, further strengthening the reliability and uptime of the hosted email system (Yahoo! Mail uses Zimbra, according to Roberts).

One nice feature of Leapfrog is the new calendar which looks, feels, and functions much like Google Calendar. The company significantly refreshed the CRM’s layout and navigation menus. One enhancement that drew “oohs” from the audience was the ability to use text and/or email reminders for outstanding tasks. Roberts said this alert feature will come later in the year, as the text option requires hardware purchases by the company.

Leapfrog is Internet browser agnostic, and according to Roberts, Leapfrog runs the fastest on Chrome, then Safari, and the slowest on Internet Explorer.

One final captivating announcement is Redtail’s plans for a “Workflow Exchange.” Advisers who design their workflows can publish them to the exchange and share them with other Redtail users and vice-versa.

That’s it for the Redtail session. Please be sure to check back with us for more updates.

T3 2011 Conference Live Blog: Junxure CRM

Posted on February 17, 2011 by in General

(Bill’s note: I brought just my iPad and Apple wireless keyboard to T3 and it’s proving to be a very flexible setup for blogging from the event. I’m being pulled in many directions, so I’ll blog when I have a few moments. Here’s the first in my series for T3.)

T3 2011 opened today with pre-conference sessions where vendors and technology companies demonstrated their products. Most vendors used the opportunity to demonstrate their products, talk about what’s new, and answer questions from the audience.

I first attended a split session with Junxure and Redtail CRM. Here are my notes from Junxure’s portion.

Robert DeFrancis, Director of Client Services and Sales for Junxure presented. Since Junxure is installed locally on most advisers’ servers (though it certainly could be installed on a virtual server), DeFrancis stressed the speed of desktop CRM. He pointed out that waiting 10 seconds for an online CRM’s screen to refresh could cost advisers up to 25 minutes a day in lost productivity.

He demonstrated both Junxure Mobile and ClientView Live, pointing out the Mobile runs well on iPads (roughly 10-15% of session attendees have iPads) My opinion is yes, Mobile runs well on iPad, but I find many screens are very overwhelming with a lot of data (e.g. the Junxure action screens).

Documents linked in Junxure can be viewed on iPads, but Junxure Mobile doesn’t export PDFs to iBooks or other apps. Orion updated their iPad app to do this, and I’d like to see Junxure do something similar.

Generally, I found Client View appealing and Junxure has taken care to design an attractive home page once clients log in. But one drawback is that Client View doesn’t yet support embedded video (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo) on the client home page. For advisers using more and more video in their practice, this is a nice value-add.

More notes like this will come over the course of the conference, so please check back at FPPad for more updates.