2019 TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC coverage sponsored by Envestnet | Tamarac Sign up for a demo at http://www.fppad.com/tamarac
I connected with technology executives from TD Ameritrade Institutional at the 2019 National LINC conference to get all the updates on how TD Ameritrade Institutional is pushing the envelope on Veo One, technology innovation, and enhancing the client experience.
Innovation and AdvisorClient Updates
First up is Jon Patullo, Managing Director, Technology Product Management for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss Innovation Alley, new TD Ameritrade Institutional skills for Alexa, and updates to the AdvisorClient user experience.
Growth of Veo Open Access
Then I met with Marcel Tsai, Senior Product Manager, Technology Solutions for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss the latest statistics of the Veo Open Access solution provider network and identify the vendors that are integrated with Veo One.
Veo One® Enhancements and Innovation Quest
Finally I met with Chris Valleley, Director of Technology Solutions for TD Ameritrade Institutional to discuss the functionality present in Veo One for financial advisers and highlight the new Innovation Quest competition being introduced at the 2019 National LINC conference.
Disclosure: Wealthbox and its owner Starburst Labs have purchased marketing services from Bill Winterberg in the last 12 months. See all disclosures here: fppad.com/disclaimer
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Robinhood Outage Impacts Options Trading
It was a tough week for Robinhood, the zero-commission stock and cryptocurrency trading app, as the company first suffered a significant outage related to stock option trading on Wednesday December 12th.
According to a Business Insider article, a Robinhood spokesperson said the outage impacted “a smaller percentage of customers” and trading was limited, “as a precautionary measure.”
Nevertheless, a number of Robinhood users voiced their frustration on Twitter, posting a series of tweets showing rejected option trades in their accounts and complaining of losses they felt they realized due to the outage in trading.
Robinhood Rescinds “Checking and Savings” Feature
Then on Thursday, Robinhood announced a new brokerage feature it called “Checking and Savings,” that promised a 3% interest rate on cash, support for bill pay and direct deposit, all of which Robinhood claimed was insured under SIPC protection.
But in response to swift industry backlash, Robinhood removed all of its marketing material for “Checking and Savings” just 36 hours later and replaced it with a reference to potential “cash management” features to be released at a later time. The most concerning feedback surrounding the feature launch came from SIPC president and CEO Stephen Harbeck, who went on the record to say that he doubted cash deposited for the Checking and Savings feature would be covered and insured under the non-government member agency’s rules and requirements.
TD Ameritrade Institutional and Wealthbox CRM Automate Account Openings
And switching gears to fintech news for financial advisers, Wealthbox, the provider of CRM solutions for advisers, announced a new automated account opening feature integrated with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Veo platform.
The integration allows advisers using Wealthbox CRM to pre-fill client information into Veo and Veo One account-opening forms directly from the contact record page in Wealthbox.
Here’s Wealthbox CEO John Rourke with more:
Wealthbox continues to fathom the depths of Veo One integration resulting in fewer steps.
For advisers to help investors the Wealthbox app is a breeze.
From millennials to empty nesters, opening new accounts is now done with ease.
For more information on this news and more, head over to FPPad.com/flashbriefing to find 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.
We met with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Jon Patullo and Chris Valleley to update financial advisers on what’s new with Veo One® and the addition of FA Insights benchmarking information to support adviser growth.
Our coverage of the 2018 National LINC sponsored by Envestnet | Tamarac. Visit http://fppad.com/tamarac to sign up for a demo today.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Orion Advisor Services, the industry’s premier portfolio accounting service provider for advisors. Orion integrates with several automated investment platforms, but you’re not sure if now the right time to add a robo element to your firm.
Find out if you’re ready, or not, to add your own solution by downloading a free copy of the Orion pre-robo checklist today by visiting fppad.com/robochecklist.
[This week’s top story is all about Betterment, because in the wake of last week’s Brexit vote, the company notified financial advisors on the Betterment Institutional platform that it had suspended trading from 10am to 12pm Eastern on June 24th, citing their expectation of “highly unpredictable volatility,” a decision which has triggered all sorts of discussions across the investment community.
First, a primer. Betterment uses ETFs for all customer portfolios, and when trading gets volatile, ETF pricing can get significantly disconnected from the value of the ETF’s underlying securities. Remember the flash crash of August 2015? ETF pricing was all over the map, especially for lightly traded and illiquid ETFs.
So, when Betterment’s team identified undesirable trading conditions, they suspend all trading. And as a discretionary advisor to retail customers, they can totally do that. It’s disclosed right there on page 65 of the retail agreement, which every customer acknowledges they read by checking the I agree box next to the Sign Up button. <wink wink>
But the exact same language is on page 70 of the Institutional Agreement, and I couldn’t find anything that said trading *authorized by the Advisor* would be treated any differently. In the RIABiz coverage of the event, Michael Kitces said that treating financial advisors the same as clients “creates operational channel conflicts.”
And there’s the rub. If you’re an advisor using Betterment Institutional for your clients, when you authorize trades, you need to know whether those trades will be subject to Betterment’s suspension criteria.
But that’s one risk of using ETFs in Betterment Institutional, or any automated investment service for that matter. Sometimes the pricing gets out of whack, and you won’t always know in advance when that happens.
So on a volatile day, you need to understand that, as of today, your trade authorizations might not be processed right away, and your trades will be in limbo for who knows how long until Betterment decides it’s ok to resume trading. I suspect that policy might soon be changing for Betterment Institutional users.] Betterment, LLC, a pioneer in the world of automated investing, made an unusual move and suspended all trading Friday morning as markets were roiled by the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union.
[My next story highlights TD Ameritrade Institutional, as I attended the custodian’s 7th annual technology summit in Dallas, and I made a vlog about it so you can get a glimpse of what the event is like, so be sure to check it out.
At the summit, executives offered updates on Veo Open Access, which now features 104 integrated solution providers, announced the introduction of Veo Advanced Alerts, and reiterated the pending release of the Veo One platform for late fall of this year.
There weren’t very many advisor dashboards available when Veo One was first announced in January of last year, but recently several tech providers have invested heavily in their own all-in-one dashboards, with notable names like Envestnet|Tamarac, supported by Envestnet’s acquisitions of Finance Logix and Yodlee, Salesforce, with its rollout of Financial Services Cloud happening now, and Fidelity’s Wealthscape platform anticipated by the end of this year, which will include technology from the eMoney acquisition.
So Veo One will go up against some stiff competition when it is rolled out later this year, so I recommend you make plans now to refresh what you know about the dashboard options for your business in the second half of this year.] A growing community of technology innovators, which has collaborated with TD Ameritrade Institutional1 to make Veo Open Access one of the industry’s leading platforms for independent registered investment advisors (“RIAs”), is again coming together to drive significant new enhancements to Veo and accelerate the pace of future Veo One integrations.
Here are the stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast:
Junxure, the industry leading CRM solutions and technology company for financial advisors, this week announced new enhancements to its cloud-based CRM platform, Junxure Cloud®. As part of its ongoing work to integrate with leading platforms serving independent registered investment advisors (RIAs), Junxure Cloud has expanded its integration with Veo®, TD Ameritrade Institutional’s comprehensive trading and account management platform.
Vestorly Inc., the leading content marketing and relationship analytics platform in the financial services industry, today announced a unique partnership with Dow Jones that will enable all Vestorly users to access Dow Jones content, including The Wall Street Journal, in order to engage clients and generate leads.
Today, the company behind one of the more popular solutions for helping consumers manage their online accounts, Dashlane, is making its move into the enterprise.
Pershing LLC, a BNY Mellon company, today launched a suite of technology enhancements that provide wealth management firms with greater flexibility to digitally transform their business.
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, Pershing partners with a new company for your digital advice delivery needs, Wealth Access continues its growth in the PFM space, and find out how open source code called Wealthbot could pose a serious challenge to automated investment services.
[Let’s jump right in to this week’s top story with a recap of the Pershing INSITE conference held in Orlando last week, as one of the top institutional custodians for advisors made several technology-related announcements. First up is news of a partnership to allow advisors to offer their own white-labeled online investment service which will be powered by a company called Marstone.
Now if the name Marstone doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry, because it’s only the second time I’ve even heard of them after a chance encounter I had with company executives at the IBM World of Watson event last month. In fact, the company is so new that their latest Form ADV disclosure shows assets of just $15,500 held in two clients accounts. That’s right, two accounts.
Now the few screenshots available from the Marstone website show a reasonably attractive interface, but with a retail investor offering that’s still in beta and an advisor solution that has yet to roll out, it’s just too early for me to say whether or not Marstone is going to gain wide adoption among advisors, especially when there are more seasoned competitors out there like Jemstep, Betterment Institutional, Oranj and more.
But, Marstone will be the first of several anticipated solutions that will integrate with Pershing’s NetX360 platform for advisors as well as the NetXInvestor solution for end clients.
Pershing also announced a new managed account solution called Managed360 that will leverage investment strategies and managed portfolio offerings from Lockwood Advisors, which also happens to be an affiliate of Pershing. Also coming in the future is a Pershing API store which is a catalog of APIs along the lines of the TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo Open Access platform, allowing third-party providers to more easily integrate with the Pershing ecosystem.] At its INSITE™ 2015 conference, Pershing LLC, a BNY Mellon company, today announced a multi-faceted digital enablement strategy designed to revolutionize how advisors and investors work together in 2015 and beyond.
[Next up is news from Wealth Access, the Nashville-based provider of a personal financial dashboard for high net worth clients, as this week the company announced the growth of its business with seven new hires in the last few months, as well as a 350% year-over-year increase in total assets aggregated in the platform, a figure that now exceeds $20 billion.
You know that merger and acquisition activity in the personal financial management space this year has been on a tear, with Fidelity acquiring eMoney, Northwestern Mutual scooping up LearnVest, and John Hancock picking up Guide Financial, so Wealth Access is pretty much one of the last independent PFM platforms out there serving advisors that has no direct custodial or insurance company connection. So like I’ve said in previous broadcasts, you would be wise to keep an eye on this company.] Wealth Access, an innovative high net worth personal financial management platform for advisors, announced growing momentum in the adoption of the Wealth Access technology solution by advisors, with record year over year growth and the hiring of seven senior technology and financial services veterans.
[And finally, wrapping up the week is an interesting discovery I made on the Internet called Wealthbot. Now stick with me on this one. Wealthbot is open source code published on the GitHub repository that can be used to create your own wealth management platform.
Not satisfied with the commercial wealth management solutions available today? That’s right, you can now build your own robo advisor, I mean, automated investment service. Now developers should get excited about the possibilities here, but advisors using Wealthbot directly? Well, that’s probably not going to happen without significant help from programmers.
But here’s the thing: online services like Wealthfront, Betterment, Future Advisor, even Schwab Intelligent Portfolios have attracted huge amounts of attention and venture capital for their software-based investment algorithms. So what happens to the value of those companies when code that mirrors their functionality is published on the Internet, for free?
Could Wealthbot be the next WordPress, OpenOffice, or Firefox of robo advisors? That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you’re watching FPPad Bits and Bytes.] Wealthbot.io makes it easy to launch a Wealth Management Platform. Build and customize your very own version of a robo-advisor.
On today’s broadcast, Shareholders Service Group is attracting the attention of independent advisors, and for good reason, Orion Advisor Services announces a new partnership in the robo-advisor arena, and, find out how you can stay one step ahead of the latest cyber attacks that have the potential to cripple your business.
This week’s episode of Bits and Bytes is brought to you by Total Rebalance Expert, the industry’s largest, privately owned portfolio rebalancing software provider.
TRX now offers TRX Edge, a completely rewritten rebalancing platform optimized for the web as well as mobile devices. Sign up for a demo of TRX Edge by visiting http://fppad.com/trx
[This week’s top story comes from Shareholders Service Group, as I spent the end of last week at the company’s annual conference for advisors outside San Diego. SSG is one of those institutions that flies below the radar of most advisors, but now with over 1,400 financial advisors leveraging the resources of SSG, the company is continuing to attract attention.
From a technology standpoint, Shareholders Service Group follows an open architecture approach powered by the custody services of Pershing, and SSG wants advisors to be able to choose the best of breed solutions they want to use, without being told what to do by the institution. While at the conference, I connected with CEOs from content marketing provider Vestorly as well as CRM provider Junxure to learn about the partnerships they recently formed with SSG.
I also connected with XY Planning Network co-founders Michael Kitces and Alan Moore to get their take on important trends advisors need to monitor, which, no surprise, include a number of technology takeaways.
There’s a lot more from the Shareholders Service Group conference, including conversations with CEO Peter Mangan and President Dan Skiles]
[Next up is news from Orion Advisor Services, as the company recently announced a new partnership with online investment provider Jemstep. Jemstep originally formed back in 2008 to deliver online investment solutions to retail investors, but now the company also offers Jemstep Advisor Pro as a solution you can offer to your emerging clients. Here’s a quick summary. You can embed Jemstep Advisor Pro on your website where new clients can complete a self-directed process to open an account, just like Redhawk Wealth Advisors has done.
Clients fill out a basic profile, complete a very simple risk questionnaire, and link investment accounts using account aggregation. Jemstep then generates a simple portfolio analysis using the client’s existing holdings and compares hypothetical performance to a target allocation of a portfolio allocation that you, the advisor, created and Jempstep matches to the client’s risk tolerance. If everything looks promising to the client, they proceed to the account opening stage where they complete account forms electronically.
So where does Orion fit in to the picture? New accounts created by Jemstep are custodied with TD Ameritrade Institutional, and those account details can then be fed into Orion using Veo Open Access. Once in Orion, all kinds of performance and analytics can be performed, which is what Jemstep, as of today, May 1, 2015, doesn’t currently provide. Now do you get it?
But if you’re NOT using Orion, Jemstep delivers the online investment interface, but it lacks the portfolio performance reports found in other solutions. That’s why the partnership with Orion is important, among other reasons.] Orion Advisor Services, LLC (“Orion”), the premier portfolio accounting service provider for advisors, announced that it has partnered with Jemstep, Inc., a leading provider of robo-technology solutions to advisors, to offer a new integrated technology solution for independent financial advisors.
[I need to move on to today’s final story on cybersecurity, as the SEC released new guidance this week with three important takeaways for advisors:
You need to periodically assess your cybersecurity risks, you need to identify how you will detect and respond to attacks, and you actually need implement your written policies and procedures and provide training to your staff.
So to do that, the SEC offered the following tips and resources to … oh, I’m being told they didn’t offer tips and resources, right, so I’m going to help you with the first takeaway which is cybersecurity threat assessment.
Do you want to know what threats advisors are actually facing every day? I set up a page on FPPad to collect threat information from advisors nationwide, and rank the top threats by the number of reports received. Plus, I’m going to highlight new attack techniques as they happen, so you can do your best to stay one step ahead of ever-more-sopisticated attackers. They’ve gone way beyond misspelled emails from Nigerian princes!] The Division has identified the cybersecurity of registered investment companies (“funds”) and registered investment advisers (“advisers”) as an important issue. Both funds and advisers increasingly use technology to conduct their business activities and need to protect confidential and sensitive information related to these activities from third parties, including information concerning fund investors and advisory clients.
Personal Capital revolutionized the free online financial dashboard. In one place you can now automatically track all of your investments, including retirement accounts. It shows your asset allocation and investing costs, and does so with amazing charts and graphs. All for free. Now the dashboard is available on the Apple Watch.
Addepar Inc. is angling to manage a major chunk of a $120 trillion of assets under management on Earth, including pensions, sovereign countries, private wealth and endowments, by attacking the challenge as a data management problem first and a design and analytics problem at a close second.
I just returned from TD Ameritrade Institutional National LINC 2015 Conference in San Diego where I produced a couple of videos covering the technology updates from the event.
Veo® Vendor Village
First, you can get a glimpse of the “vendor village” TD Ameritrade Institutional configures for the technology providers that are integrated with the open access capabilities of the Veo® platform.
Nearly 40 of the 85+ integrated providers were on site providing demos of their technology to the thousands of advisors in attendance.
With over 85 integrated vendors, you may see several new companies that you haven’t heard of before, including Advizr, Vanare, and Upside.
Veo One™
Next up is a preview of Veo One™, TD Ameritrade Institutional’s updated online dashboard designed to be a single source for an advisor’s daily workflow.
Veo One is currently in a private testing period with select advisers, and the official rollout is anticipated in late summer or early fall of 2015.
The first five Veo One integrations will include DocuSign® and Laser App Anywhere for account opening, financial planning software from MoneyGuidePro™, Orion Advisor Services for portfolio management, and Redtail Technologies for CRM.
On today’s broadcast, TD Ameritrade Institutional unveils a new interface designed to be “mission control” for advisors, how you can customize videos for hundreds clients with the push of a button, and a new provider delivers technology to simulate portfolio crash testing before the next crash occurs.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Mimic Technologies, providers of complete outsourced technology support, security, infrastructure and IT solutions exclusively for RIAs.
To learn how you can keep your data safe from attackers, download a free copy of their latest white paper on social engineering attacks by visiting fppad.com/mimic.
[Leading off this week is a recap of the first institutional custodian conference of 2014, as TD Ameritrade Institutional held its annual event in Orlando last week. In the past, TD Ameritrade Institutional announced a number of new innovations in technology, including the release of Veo Open Access platform and a free web-based version of iRebal for its advisors. This year’s technology announcements were a bit more subdued, but most relevant to advisors is the introduction of the new Veo Open Access Dashboard.
The Veo Dashboard is designed to be “mission control” for advisors, enabling access to dozens of integrated solution providers from one consolidated web-based screen. Early integrations include Redtail CRM, Orion Advisor Services portfolio management, MoneyGuidePro financial planning, and TD Ameritrade Institutional’s own iRebal software.
Tom Nally, president of TD Ameritrade Institutional, said that the first iteration of the Veo Dashboard is expected to come this summer.] Building on the success of its Veo® open access effort, TD Ameritrade Institutional will give advisors the ability to harness the collective power of more than 60 leading advisor technology providers integrated with its Veo trading platform.
[Another cool innovation announced at last week’s TD Ameritrade Institutional conference comes from Orion Advisor Services, who debuted a new client communication platform called Engage. Many of you might already be using mobile apps and video market commentary from Orion to enhance your communication with clients.
But what Engage allows you to do is further customize videos you make for clients. With Engage, you can retrieve things like performance data from Orion, the confidence meter from MoneyGuidePro, or calendar scheduling from Redtail CRM and embed that information using graphics right in your video. While you still can’t say client names or announce specific performance numbers, your clients receive a compelling video that contains personal details to help them not only hear about, but actually see the progress they’re making towards their wealth management goals.
Once again, if you’re not thinking about how you should be using video to enhance client relationships, I think it’s time you start creating a strategy new, and Engage from Orion gives you a pretty clever way to get started. Clients of Orion can use Engage for no additional charge, and pricing details for non-Orion customers will be coming soon.] Orion Advisor Services, LLC, a premier portfolio accounting service bureau, announces the release of a new web-based app, Orion Engage, which helps advisors communicate more effectively with clients by creating interactive videos that can present portfolio performance and other unique details specific to individual clients.
[And finally, one hot technology trend right now involves applications that perform macro economic analysis and portfolio stress-test simulations. By now you’ve likely heard of startups like HiddenLevers and MacroRisk Analytics, but a new provider in this space making waves is RiXtrema. In a recent Financial Advisor column, Joel Bruckenstein reviewed the company’s Riskostat product, which offers patent-pending technology to assess stock market behavior in times of crisis.
Bruckenstein offered a favorable review of Riskostat, and with a list price of $300 per months, feels it is competitively priced in a market that’s a small, but growing segment, of advisor technology.] Now a third firm, RiXtrema, is launching a software product called Riskostat that is designed to help advisors analyze the vulnerability of their clients’ portfolios to various macroeconomic risk factors as well as help advisors explore opportunities to hedge away some of those risks.
Stories that didn’t make the cut for this week’s broadcast:
Advisor Software, Inc. (“ASI”), a provider of wealth management solutions for the financial advisor market, announced today a partnership with Orion Advisor Services, LLC (“Orion”) to integrate the two companies’ software applications for financial advisors.
