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FPPad Bits and Bytes for February 18

Posted on February 18, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

We’re attending the T3 Conference as you read this (follow the Twitter backchannel under #T32011), but through the magic of the Internet we’re able to post our week in review of all things tech in financial planning.

This week’s stories of interest start out with the recent request by the SEC to review advisers’ use of social media:

SEC Wants To Follow You On Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube… at Forbes.com

(Bill’s comment: Reporter Halah Touryalai raises the fair point that the SEC might have better issues to tackle than to babysit advisers’ social media profiles. But such is the consequence of the regulatory enviroment to which advisers are subject. All it takes are a few tweets from fraudulent advisers to ruin it for everyone. Can you imagine “RT @bernardmadoff: Just one week left to enroll in our 8% monthly guarantee fund. Accredited investors only please!“)

File this one under: “There Are Better Things The SEC Can Be Doing.” Financial advisors’ online activity on social media websites is being scrutinized by the SEC, according to a compliance consulting firm and a report in Investment News.

FINRA to Look at Social Media–Again at Financial Advisor Magazine

The issue of how to deal with social media isn’t going away for regulators of the securities industry.

CRM systems for the big guys from InvestmentNews.com

For larger advisory firms, choosing the right CRM system is like selecting the right marriage partner.

TradeWarrior and AssetBook Announce Integration Partnership at Marketwire.com

TradeWarrior and AssetBook are pleased to announce an integration between their software programs. The integration partnership between the two companies will provide AssetBook users access to TradeWarrior’s powerful rebalancing and trading capabilities. This integration marks the first 3rd party rebalancing integration available to AssetBook users.

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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.

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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.

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Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go Drops $40 Plan, Rolls Out $50 2.5GB Plan

Posted on February 16, 2011 by in General

We logged in to our Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go account today to buy some bandwidth for our MiFi 2200, but were surprised to see the $40 unlimited plan we wrote about in September is no longer offered!

As of yesterday, Broadband2Go no longer offers the $40 “unlimited” plan. Instead, the large bandwidth plan has increased $10 to $50 and comes with the disclaimer that Virgin Mobile:

reserves the right, without notice, to temporarily limit throughput speeds when monthly data usage on the $50 Broadband2Go Plan exceeds 2.5GB

The full details on changes to the Broadband2Go plan can be viewed on Virgin Mobile’s website.

Oh well. $50 still isn’t bad considering most hotels where conferences are held (e.g. T3 and FPA Business Solutions) charge at least $9.99 a day for Internet, and usually one pays extra to connect via hotel Wi-Fi. So $50/month is still a competitive price if you use the device for more than a few days.

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T3 Begins Thursday; Follow the Conference Twitter Backchannel

Posted on February 15, 2011 by in General

The second large industry conference of the year for independent financial advisers kicks off this Thursday.

The Technology Tools for Today (T3) Conference, a joint effort by T3: The Newsletter producers David J. Drucker and Joel P. Bruckenstein, begins with pre-conference sessions by many leading technology vendors and service providers.

Pre-conference sessions include presentations by Junxure, Laserfiche, Tamarac, MoneyGuidePro, and Smarsh to name a few.

Presentations

I’ll be there presenting two sessions. First, I’ll be a panelist in Friday’s session titled iPad: How Advisors Are Using it Productively along with Sandra E. Goodstein of Goodstein and Associates, LLC, and Russell Dunkin of McKinley Carter Wealth Services. Diane MacPhee, CFP®, Business Coach and owner of DMAC Consulting Services, LLC will moderate the panel.

Second, I’m teaming up with Jo Day of Trumpet, Inc to present Transformative Technology You Can Implement Now on Saturday. We have assembled a slide deck full of resources advisers can add to their practice to make clients and colleagues speak highly of their firm.

Visit the T3 Conference website for the full conference agenda.

Twitter Backchannel

Just as with TD AMERITRADE Institutional’s 2011 National Conference, attendees of T3 are encouraged to use social media to connect and communicate through the backchannel.

The primary Twitter account for T3 is @T3fan and the hashtag being used for conference-related tweets is #T32011.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/t3fan/status/19631983814508545″]

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Fidelity Releases WealthCentral Mobile for iPhone, iPod touch

Posted on February 14, 2011 by in Technology

The race between custodians to support mobile platforms is quickly reaching a blazing pace (see Fidelity, Schwab and TD Ameritrade prep for arms race in mobile technology for advisors at RIABiz.com). Just two weeks ago, TD AMERITRADE Institutional announced it is currently developing a mobile app scheduled to be released this April (according to this Financial Planning article).

And just this morning, Fidelity Investments and National Financial Services released their WealthCentral Mobile app in the Apple App Store. While the app is compatible with iPhone and iPod touch, it does not take advantage of the iPad’s larger display, and instead runs on the iPad as a scaled-up iPhone app.

Click here to view WealthCentral Mobile on the iTunes website.


From the provided screen shots, WealthCentral Mobile appears to be for adviser use only and does not provide access by clients of advisers who custody with Fidelity. Adviser options include a list of client account, client contact information, alerts within the WealthCentral platform, and delayed stock quotes for individual equity positions.

We don’t yet have a demo account for WealthCentral Mobile, so if you’re an adviser with an active WealthCentral account and have downloaded the app, we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment below or e-mail Bill at bill [at] fppad [dot] com.

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FPPad Bits and Bytes for February 11

Posted on February 11, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

We’re taking today off (psst: it’s Bill’s birthday!), but before we go, here are this week’s stories of interest in financial planning technology:

Navigating the CRM labyrinth from InvesetmentNews.com

It’s obvious from my recent conversations with advisers that customer relationship management software still causes plenty of confusion.

Socialware Secures $3 Million in Funding at Marketwire.com

Socialware, the leader in social media compliance and engagement, today announced that it has secured $3 million in additional funding from existing investors, including FLOODGATE, G-51 Capital and Silverton Partners.

Fidelity® Unveils New Technology Strategy to Meet Rapidly Evolving Needs of Advisors and Investors at Fidelity.com

National Financial®, a Fidelity Investments® company and the nation’s 2nd largest provider of clearing services to broker-dealers1, today unveiled a comprehensive new technology strategy that will focus on making significantly larger investments in key areas its broker-dealer clients have indicated would best support their overall growth and efficiency objectives.

And Bill’s column Hop on the Mobile Bandwagon at MorningstarAdvisor.com

Orion’s MobileAdvisor provides another reason to embrace mobile computing.

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SunGard Enhances Protegent with Social Media Surveillance

Posted on February 8, 2011 by in Compliance

There’s yet another player in the social media archiving and surveillance space.

Yesterday, SunGard, the mammoth software and technology provider to the financial services industry, announced that it added Social Media Surveillance to its Protegent compliance supervision and surveillance tool.

Click here to read the press release on SunGard’s website.

Here’s a clip from the release:

Protegent Social Media Surveillance is the result of a partnership between SunGard and SiteQuest Technologies Inc., a leading provider of social media Web archiving tools. The new solution leverages SiteQuest Technologies’ Web consumption technology and SunGard’s Protegent comprehensive compliance rules library to automate monitoring of social networking activity.

SiteQuest has not come across our radar for social medial archiving, so this is a new vendor for us in this space.

The closest comparison we can make to SunGard’s offering is the recent partnership between MarketCounsel and Arkovi featured in our Bits & Bytes post for November 19, 2010. Arkovi’s Enterprise package, starting at $99/month, offers message surveillance prior to public posting on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

We don’t yet know where Protegent falls in the pricing spectrum, but when we find out we’ll be sure to update our resource information as appropriate.

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FPPad Bits and Bytes for February 4

Posted on February 4, 2011 by in Bits & Bytes

The mega-storm that blew across the Central and Eastern United States glazed the streets of Dallas with ice, so we’ve been juggling our schedule this week with primary care responsibilities for our two-year-old son.

We’ve postponed four days of work, but we still made the time to monitor the industry’s best tech-related stories for your education. Without further ado, here they are:

Silent Partner at Financial-Planning.com

(Bill’s note: If this testimony isn’t enough to make advisers want to run out and sign on to Tamarac Advisor X, I don’t know what is.) As breakaway RIAs, we also knew that our business would not survive on investment acumen and our new independent business model alone. We knew that our operations could make-or break-our dreams.

Third-party vendors vouch for TD Ameritrade’s API at first general session at RIABiz.com

Three third party vendors sat on a panel at the first general session of TD Ameritrade’s 2011 national conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego and explained why they’re buying into the custodians’ approach to creating a big ecosystem of technology in the RIA business. The company is making its data readily available to all legitimate comers.

The Lab at Financial-Planning.com

As custodians battle for the hearts and minds of advisors in the years ahead, Fidelity possesses a weapon that no other firm can currently match: The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, known as FCAT.

Tamarac is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner at TamaracInc.com

Tamarac Inc., a leading provider of integrated portfolio management software and services, today announced being awarded Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status with competencies in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and hosting for its Advisor CRM offering.

BlazePortfolio announces release of Atom Align 1.3™ at BlazePortfolio.com

BlazePortfolio today announced the public release of Atom Align 1.3™, the web-based portfolio rebalancing and trading solution for investment professionals

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