I connected with Neal Ringquist, President of Advisor Software, Inc. and talked about the trend he’s seeing of advisers turning to quick financial planning tools in their business.
One of Advisor Software’s initiatives for 2012 is to supply advisers with that tool, a web-based program it calls goalgamiPro.
“[Advisers] can quickly generate a plan and a conversation with a client, collate the material, so the discussion with the client is about goals. It’s about them, and it personalizes that discussion,” said Ringquist in an interview.
For more information on goalgamiPro and the trend towards quick financial planning tools, view the video interview.
TD Ameritrade Institutional’s integration of an award-winning trading platform will help advisers manage options strategies in just a few clicks
Time and inflation are eating away at your clients’ portfolios in the current low-return market environment. In response, many of you are considering options to diversify investment strategies, hedge specific sector exposure, or increase portfolio income.
But implementing complex options strategies across hundreds of client accounts exponentially increases the resources you must allocate to traditional portfolio management.
In my latest video spotlight, I spoke with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Jon Patullo about the company’s recent integration of thinkpipes®, named “Best for Options Traders” in 2011 by Barron’s Online Broker Survey, into the Veo® platform.
Patullo also provides a brief overview of the thinkpipes dashboard and how easy it can be to roll a set of options contracts forward across multiple accounts.
Faced with extreme margin compression, hundreds of broker-dealers closed their doors in 2011. One technology provider can help others avoid that fate.
In the first quarter of 2011 alone, 137 broker-dealers closed their doors (see Are the days of the small Broker-Dealer numbered?), leaving affiliated reps scrambling to find new broker-dealers for their support.
Since the onset of the Great Recession five years ago, broker-dealers as a whole continue to face anemic trading volume, declining ticket charges, and increasing regulatory costs. All these factors combine to put extreme pressure on profit margins, according to Atindra Barua, President and CEO of TrustFort, and technology and back-office service provider to financial companies.
I recently sat down with Mr. Barua and discussed what firms must do to fight margin compression and return to a cycle of growth and expansion. Here is the interview below.
In the second video below, I asked TrustFort President & CEO Atindra Barua about the company’s background in aggregating and normalizing investment portfolio data and also about the latest partnership with AssetBook to enhance their go-to-market strategy.
In an announcement sent to users today, Redtail CRM announced the release of completely new mobile apps for use with iOS, Android, and Blackberry devices. All mobile apps can be downloaded for free and the company has eliminated the monthly access fee it used to charge for use of its mobile apps.
In the spotlight video below, Redtail Technology CEO Brian McLaughlin tells me about how the company developed the new apps in-house, focusing on the security of web streaming but preserving the speed and responsiveness of a native application.
“Redtail first released a mobile application for accessing Redtail CRM in 2009. Since that initial release and through subsequent versions of Redtail Mobile, we have been fortunate enough to receive invaluable feedback from our subscribers as to what we can do to make the mobile experience of Redtail CRM better,” the company said in its statement.
Redtail’s existing mobile apps generally received lukewarm reviews in the various app stores. Most notably, users expressed dissatisfaction that an additional monthly access fee was charged to enable mobile device access to CRM data.
TrustFort, a Woburn, Mass.-based technology provider, is seeking to expand its recognition among broker-dealers and investment advisers.
Founded in 2004, TrustFort has primarily stayed behind the scenes, powering a growing number of broker-dealer technology platforms, including portfolio reporting and client portal functions. Now the company is expanding its relationships and taking on a more public profile.
To learn more about the company and its value proposition, I met with TrustFort’s President & CEO Atindra Barua. I filmed several segments on a variety of topics, the first of which addresses how TrustFort can enhance back office scalability to better serve today’s client in a mobile and social world.
All-day training helps advisers and operations staff get the most out of the popular online CRM.
As you review the CRM you use to manage client relationships, you probably recognize that you’re only using a small portion of all the features the program offers. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get exposed and trained on some of the advanced features that improve your firm’s client communication (and your bottom line)?
Redtail CRM, the leading provider of web-based CRM software to financial advisers, provides an all-day training course to its users called Redtail University.
I recently met Redtail CEO Brian McLaughlin at a recent Redtail University event in Dallas and asked him about the value the course provides to advisers.
“With every new tool or software [advisers] get today, they’re only using 10, 20, 30% of the application. This is an opportunity to learn everything we have to do, take it back home, and hopefully implement one, two, or three new things,” said McLaughlin.
Veo® Open Access, the award-winning integration platform initiative launched by TD Ameritrade Institutional last year, is getting additional upgrades this summer to further simplify advisers’ processes.
Several weeks ago, I met with Chris Valleley, director of the new Technology Solutions group for TD Ameritrade Institutional, and asked him about what’s in store for advisers currently using Veo®, the custodian’s account management and trading platform (see TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Jon Patullo discusses electronic signature and future enhancements of Veo® Open Access). The number of supporting integrations with Veo® Open Access Architecture continues to grow, now surpassing 60 vendors in all.
He discussed three key workflow enhancements planned for the near future: trading and rebalancing, management fees, and client on-boarding and electronic signature.
For example, Valleley highlighted how updates to Veo can streamline the quarterly process of submitting management fee invoices for accounts held at TD Ameritrade Institutional.
“Instead of creating [an intermediate] file and all the manual work that goes along with that, the [integrated portfolio management] vendor can then push the invoice directly to Veo,” he said.
Watch the full interview to get all the information on the progress TD Ameritrade Institutional is making with its integration platform.
Financial advisers can quickly assess technology integrations with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s analysis tool
How well does one CRM integrate with financial planning software? What about integrations between portfolio management software and rebalancing software?
To answer those questions, TD Ameritrade Institutional created the Integration Analyzer. Available to all of its affiliated advisers, Integration Analyzer quickly displays how well one software program integrates with another, and with Veo® Open Access.
For insight as to how Integration Analyzer works, I met with Chris Valleley, Director of Technology Solutions for TD Ameritrade Institutional at the custodian’s offices in Fort Worth, Texas. View the video below for the demo.
In my final spotlight interview from FinovateSpring 2012, I asked Bo Lu, co-founder of FutureAdvisor, about his company’s service offering to the retail investor.
Hear how the platform is designed to deliver personalized, actionable advice to all investors and the company’s plans to incorporate financial advisors via recommendation marketplace.
