Tag Archives: Watson

FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 13, 2016

Posted on May 13, 2016 by in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, learn about top advisor technology from the Finovate Spring 2016, two lessons you should learn from a Salesforce database outage, hear top technology tips from industry experts, and more.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now!

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by Riskalyze, the company that invented the Risk Number™ and twice named as one of the world’s 10 most innovative companies in finance by Fast Company Magazine.

Riskalyze

Advisors use Riskalyze to show prospects they’re invested wrong and prove to clients they’re invested right. See how Riskalyze creates fearless investors by visiting riskalyze.com/fppad to book a guided tour.

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

Client Insight for Wealth Management from IBM, and

IBM Watson-infused robo wants to help advisers, not beat them from Financial Planning

Envestnet Advisor Now demo from Finovate Europe 2016

[This week’s top story covers the Finovate Spring 2016 event held earlier this week in San Jose, California. With over 70 demos spread across two days, here are my picks for the most promising solutions for financial advisors.

First is IBM, as the company demoed its Client Insight for Wealth Management solution, designed to deliver better insights about your clients powered by, you guessed it, IBM Analytics. The Client Insight dashboard segments your clients by their behavioral profiles, predicts the likelihood of clients experiencing a significant life event, and automatically generates a list of top actions clients should take to make progress on their financial goals.

The analytics-powered insight is great, but it’s not yet clear to me if the solution is something you can buy today or if it requires an integration with the technology providers that you use, particularly with your CRM software. One third-party example I can think of is the automated investment service from Marstone, which to me, still seems to be evolving and appears to be rolling out at a very measured pace. So, if you want to start seeing some of these cognitive-powered insights in the tools you use, I think you need to prepare to spend a little bit more on your technology to make these benefits a reality.

The second demo of note came from Envestnet, as the company highlighted Advisor Now, which is now being positioned as an online financial planning tool that can be white-labeled by financial institutions or you, the independent financial advisor.

Advisor Now’s capabilities are quite a bit different than this time last year when the solution was first announced, as Envestnet is further leveraging its technology acquisitions of Upside, Yodlee, and Finance Logix.

Next week I’m headed to the Envestnet Advisor Summit in Chicago where I plan to get more details on Advisor New, but in the meantime you can watch a recent Advisor Now demo from Finovate Europe] IBM offers you a whole new level of insight to serve your customers with the most relevant offerings that helps you drive new revenue. It enables you to segment your customers quickly and analyze their behavior to deliver cross sell/ up sell offers which helps increase loyalty, retention and customer satisfaction.

Envestnet thumbnail

Salesforce outage persists across US, CEO wades in from ZDNet, and

The Burning Irony of Salesforce’s #NA14 Social Media Nightmare from Medium

[Next up is news on Salesforce, as the company unfortunately suffered a failure in one of its critical databases this week affecting several thousand of its customers in North America. The outage of the NA14 database lasted for about a day and a half, causing many users to publicly vent their frustrations on Twitter.

Closer to home, I didn’t hear from any advisors who were affected by the downtime, which is good, but there are still two lessons I want you to take away from this incident.

First, when you use any cloud-based system, especially a CRM, be absolutely certain that you have an offline backup of the critical information you need to take care of clients. Make it part of your process now to export data like names, phone numbers, and email addresses so you can stay in touch with clients if and when your online systems have extended downtime.

And second, make plans now for what you’re going to do when your firm experiences a crisis. How will you contact clients? Will you post information on your website, or provide updates on Twitter? Whatever you do, identify your process in your disaster recovery and business continuity plan, and if it’s been a while since you tested your communication in a crisis, well, you might want to do something about that.] A Salesforce database failure has left some clients unable to access their services across the United States, prompting the firm’s chief executive to step in.

2016 SSG Conference Technology Panel from YouTube

[And finally, wrapping up this week’s broadcast is news from Shareholders Service Group, as I attended their annual conference in San Diego a few weeks ago. One of the general sessions I attended was a panel discussion on technology opportunities that lie ahead for independent financial advisors, so I caught up with each of the panelists,

Greg Friedman of Private Ocean, Dave Welling of SS&C Advisory Market Group, Tim Welsh of Nexus Strategy, and Joel Bruckenstein of Technology Tools for Today, to get their main takeaways from the session and hear best advice for advisors from a technology perspective.

The full video from the event is embedded over on website along with a few additional stories that didn’t make this week’s broadcast.]

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

Docupace Closes on Management Buyback Transaction from BusinessWire

Docupace Technologies LLC, a premier digital compliance and cyber security company in the financial services industry, completed its planned repurchase of the majority interest in the company previously held by RCS Capital Corporation.

New Marketing Materials from Hidden Levers

HiddenLevers now provides pre-made marketing materials that can be used with clients. These include printable brochures, embeddable videos, website and signature plugins.

 

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 13, 2016

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for May 13, 2016

IBM World of Watson and what the future holds for financial advisers

Posted on May 7, 2015 by in Conferences

What does “cognitive computing” mean for financial services? To find out, I went to IBM’s World of Watson event held this week in New York City.

Get an up close perspective of this unique event! (total runtime: 3:17)

FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 17

Posted on April 17, 2015 by in Bits & Bytes

On today’s broadcast, Grendel updates its CRM and portfolio reporting engine to help you be more efficient, find out what IBM Watson has to say about your personality, and a new app helps “Crystal”-ize what you know about your clients and prospects.

So get ready, FPPad Bits and Bytes begins now.

(Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes on YouTube)

Today’s episode is brought to you by ITEGRIA, providers of complete outsourced technology support, security, infrastructure and IT solutions exclusively for RIAs.

itegria - providing a 360-degree, comprehensive approach to financial advisor IT needs

In their new book titled Red Flags, you’ll learn how to protect your firm from cyber-attacks, disasters, and IT compliance risks. Learn more about the Red Flags book by visiting fppad.com/itegria.

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

Tech Review: Upgrade for Grendel from Financial Planning

[This week’s top story comes from Grendel Online, as the technology provider is evolving from a stand-alone CRM solution to a fully-featured wealth management platform. Now the move towards platforms is definitely a growing trend in the industry, because if you remember last year, inStream Solutions, which started out as a financial planning software program, also added features and adopted the wealth management platform moniker.

This week, Joel Bruckenstein provided an update of Grendel, which features a web-based CRM that stores all the essential contact information and notes about your client interactions. In addition, Grendel now offers performance-reporting modules available through a strategic partnership with First Rate, a performance solution provider for SEI, SunGard and more. So now advisors can view portfolio holdings and performance within the Grendel platform, and they can customize client reports using a report builder that has roughly 100 widgets that can be arranged with a simple drag and drop editor.

Bruckenstein does mention some concerns about the lack of comprehensive trading and rebalancing functionality and limited of integrations relative to other wealth management platforms, but Grendel certainly isn’t asleep at the wheel. While Grendel might fall short of the features offered by established platforms like Envestnet | Tamarac and Orion Advisor Services, Grendel isn’t going to come with the premium price tag, either. Grendel offers a pathway for advisors using stand-alone CRMs who are looking for something a bit more comprehensive, but also want something that won’t break the bank.] Advisors tend to overlook Grendel Online — and I sometimes do as well, for a couple of reasons.

Personality Insights Demonstration from IBM

[Next up is news from IBM, yes, that’s right, THAT IBM. Now on the technology side, you probably associate IBM with its super-computer named Watson, especially after the artificial intelligence computing system decimated human contestants in the popular TV game show Jeopardy.

Anyways, IBM is now actively seeking opportunities to enhance financial services by applying Watson’s enormous capabilities to better address client needs. I admit this might sound a little to like science-fiction, but here’s how you can test the power of Watson today.

IBM has a page online where you can paste in a block of text written by anyone and instantly receive personality insights about the author of the text. The link is in this week’s top stores. Try it with something you’ve written, and then see what happens when you enter text typed by a colleague, or even a client. The more text you have, the more accurate the insights should be, say, for example, using an epic blog post from Michael Kitces. It’s pretty amazing, and also a little creepy at the same time. He has an affinity for blue shirts, huh, who knew?]

Stalk everyone you know with this eerily accurate app that tells you how to talk to people from The Next Web

[And finally, if you think IBM’s personality insights are creepy, a new app out this week called Crystal takes things a step further. Crystal scours the Web for public information written by your connections and then builds a personality profile for that person. If there’s enough public information available, Crystal offers insights on what to say in a conversation, how to compose emails to that person, details on that person’s work style, and what to do when you’re conducting a sales process.

So instead of you doing all the information discovery on clients and prospects to paste into IBM’s personality insights tool, Crystal does all the heavy lifting for you. Say you want Michael Kitces to respond to your emails, for example: here’s a hint, don’t use sarcasm.] Crystal, a new app that analyzes public data to tell you exactly how to communicate with people, has had us all at TNW looking up our friends and family today (as well as ourselves, of course) to find out what it knows about us.

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

AdvisoryWorld Unveils Advisor Proposal Generator from Marketwired.com

AdvisoryWorld, the leading provider of investment analytics, portfolio modeling, and proposal generation technology for the financial services industry, today announced the release of AdvisoryWorld’s Advisor Proposal Generator application.

 

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 17, 2015

Watch FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 17, 2015