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Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the news that Franklin Templeton is acquiring O’Shaughnessy Asset Management and its ‘Canvas’ direct indexing platform, as yet another traditional asset manager stakes a view that the future will increasingly be built not on mutual funds and ETFs but the use of technology to build more customized portfolios down to the individual stock level (configured via a software interface, and implemented as an SMA that asset managers can charge for?).
Also in the industry news this week:
- An RIA is forced to pay out nearly $1M in restitution as a settlement for charging advisory fees on “house accounts” without assigning an advisor to service those clients
- FINRA institutes a new rule that will allow ex-brokers to reinstate their Series licenses within 5 years (instead of ‘just’ 2 years) as long as they complete their FINRA CE requirement and pay a (nominal) fee
From there, we have tax planning articles, including:
- End-of-year tax planning strategies for the fourth quarter, which are taking on a greater focus with the potential for significant tax law changes that may come into effect for 2022
- A look at how ultra-popular GRATs have become with ultra-HNW clients (with one estimate that more than 50% of the top 100 wealthiest families are using the estate planning strategy)
- The outlook for the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) tax incentive that may be halved (from $10M to only $5M of capital gains that can be excluded) in the years to come
We've also included a number of marketing-related articles:
- How to structure an advisory firm if it wants to serve multiple niches at once (hint: each niche needs its own team of advisors within the firm)
- Why client satisfaction isn’t just a function of the service they receive, but their expectations of those services
- How the future of growth is all about formulating expertise and making it more ‘visible’ to prospects (e.g., through blogging, social media, and other digital marketing channels)
We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of how technology is reshaping our world:
- Why the rise of technology platforms for small businesses is making it easier to be a successful solopreneur (despite the calls that firms must achieve greater size and economies of scale to survive)
- The ways that Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and the blockchain could change the financial services industry (by becoming the next generation of broker-dealers and RIA custodial platforms?)
- How the intersection of human and artificial intelligence is proving to be more effective than humans or AI alone… suggesting that the future of financial advice is less about robots versus humans and more that success will be defined by the human advisors who best augment themselves with technology!
Enjoy the 'light' reading!