feed - Part 51

Differentiating Your Advisory Firm’s Brand By Finding The Opposing Category In Your White Space

October 28, 2019 07:12 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

In the early years of the financial planning profession, advisors were able to effectively differentiate the brand of their advisory firms by relying on language such as “trustworthy”, “knowledgeable”, and even “fiduciary”, to distinguish themselves from often-poorly-trained broker-dealer and insurance company salespeople. But with the rapidly growing number of CFP professionals who provide fiduciary best-interests advice for their clients, built on their years of experience in providing customized financial planning advice, these terms no longer differentiate a financial advisor, and instead simply describe ‘table stakes’ – bare minimum requirements that any financial advisor is expected to possess. Which raises the question of how, with more and more financial advisors joining the industry or continuing to pivot away from products and into fiduciary advice, do talented advisors cope with this rising ‘crisis of differentiation’ and actually brand themselves in a way that stands apart from the rest?

In this guest post, Amy Parvaneh, Founder and CEO of Select Advisors Institute, explains the process she uses to help advisors develop an effective brand for their firm by identifying the valuable, qualitative factors that make an advisor (or their practice) unique, and targeting the right (not already overly saturated) client segment. By delving into these two key branding strategy elements, a financial advisor can create a strong, relevant message that can promote an individual (or their firm) and elicit client engagement from the exact type of clientele they’ve chosen to serve.

The first of these key branding elements is the firm’s "Opposing Category", which consists of the firm’s qualities that go beyond the mere ‘table stakes’ that all advisory firms must have, and distinguishes the advisor as unequivocally unique from others, such as a unique financial planning process that the firm uses or a specific field of expertise the advisor has.

The second key branding element is the firm's "White Space", which includes any client segments that are underserved by other competing advisory firms, which, by definition, means there would be little competition to serve such clients (and ideally, will include clients with whom the advisor would enjoy working in the first place!).

While Opposing Categories can be identified by an introspective assessment of services offered and qualities that an advisor feels are special, White Spaces are best determined by examining current client characteristics, such as demographic criteria and less frequently examined psychographic traits (which describe a client’s habits, beliefs attitudes, and values), to spot where the advisor may have already found some White Space that can be delved into further. Once the Opposing Categories and White Spaces are identified, the advisor can then create an appropriate, personal, and impactful brand, and then use the brand to synchronize the business image, marketing messages, and operations processes.

Ultimately, going through the process of developing a brand message is crucial for advisors who want to hone their existing client segment (or shift their focus to a different segment altogether). By investing the time and effort needed to develop a relevant, genuine branding message, financial advisors will find their marketing efforts are more effective, as they highlight their specific value proposition to a specific (White Space) clientele to grow a successful practice in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

#FASuccess Ep 147: Developing Next-Generation Advisor Talent With An Internal 2-Year Mentoring Program, with Jeff Dobyns

October 22, 2019 07:09 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 147th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Jeff Dobyns. Jeff is the founder of Southwestern Investment Group, a hybrid advisory firm based in the Nashville area that oversees nearly $3.5 billion of assets under management.

What's unique about Jeff, though, is the way he's been able to develop next-generation talent in his firm, with a deliberate focus on not hiring experienced career changers or advisors with an existing book of business, but instead bringing in new advisors in their 20s and giving them the opportunity to learn alongside experienced advisors from day one in a 2-year mentoring program.

In this episode, we talk in depth about the two-year mentoring program that Jeff's firm has built. Why Jeff views it as so critical for new advisors to spend the bulk of their time sitting alongside a senior advisor in every client meeting. How they compensate their new advisors while they're effectively being paid to learn, how they split the cost of talent between the firm itself and the senior advisor who's being supported, and the tasks that they ultimately hand off to the new advisor to create value for the firm while the learning process is still ongoing.

We also talk about the marketing approach that Southwestern Investment Group has used to grow to nearly $3.5 billion of assets under management over the past 17 years. The way the firm got so deeply involved in Dave Ramsey's Endorsed Local Provider, ELP program, the effective return on investment that Jeff's firm has gotten by proactively spending money to get leads, and how Jeff handles the concern that Dave Ramsey is viewed as somewhat controversial by some within the advisor community itself.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jeff talks about the way he structured leadership within the firm to handle the load of managing more than 100 employees, the way he involves senior advisors of the firm in leadership decisions by creating a Leadership Board, and why he continues to be so focused on attracting and retaining even more next-generation talent into the firm.

Scaling The Efficiency Of Comprehensive Financial Planning By Creating Repeatable Expertise

October 21, 2019 07:48 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Social Image Scaling The Efficiency Of Comprehensive Financial Planning

In the early days of being a “financial advisor” at a broker-dealer or insurance company, having ’expertise’ meant being well-trained on the company’s products and their features and benefits. ‘Training’ at large financial services firms was primarily focused on product training (and perhaps training in how to sell those products), with the benefit that when the scope of required knowledge is fairly understood – just the features of a handful of the company’s most popular best-selling products – it takes relatively little time to train in the first place. In other words, training up an advisor’s expertise was rather simple and speedy, because the advisor just had to master the inner workings of a few select products.

In the modern era, though, as financial advice is increasingly comprehensive and holistic, the breadth of what it takes to have ‘expertise’ goes far beyond what was required in the product-centric world of 20 years ago. Yet unfortunately, the reality is that the minimum bar to become a “financial advisor” – generally, a Series 6 and 63, 7 and 66, or a Series 65 exam – is largely unchanged through this shift, built around 3 hours of regulatory exams that most can study for and pass in just a few weeks. The end result is that ‘advisors’ are licensed to provide comprehensive financial advice, with no actual requirement to have any training, education, or experience, in personal finance or advice itself.

On the one hand, a voluntary desire to improve financial planning expertise has led to rapid growth of CFP certification in recent years, with more than 5,000 CFP candidates completing the exam process in 2018, up from approximately 3,000 in 2013. Still, though, the total penetration of CFP certification is still less than 86,000 out of approximately 311,000 financial advisors (or barely more than 25%). Which makes it incredibly difficult to deliver financial planning advice efficiently… when the advisor has to research any and every question the client asks, because they lack the depth of expertise to actually know those answers offhand in the first place.

In fact, recent Kitces research on “How Financial Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning” finds an emerging “Experience-Expertise” gap, where having CFP certification reduces the time it takes to complete the first-year financial planning process by 22%, and that amongst the most experienced advisors, having CFP certification reduces the time of the financial planning process by a whopping 44%. As the more experienced the financial advisor, the more confident they tend to be, and the more affluent and complex clientele they tend to attract… which means advisors with more experience actually end out spending even more time to get through the financial planning process (despite the availability of technology, and their years or decades of experience doing it!).

Similarly, more experienced financial advisors also tend to increasingly struggle with the time efficiency of financial planning, because an increasingly complex range of clientele means an ever-widening range of complex situations that the advisor must provide advice on. Notably, though, the real challenge isn’t that more experienced advisors tend to have more sophisticated clientele with more complex needs, but that their needs are differently complex. Which means formulating a niche or more specialized expertise for a particular target clientele can not only be effective for marketing purposes, but also becomes a substantial efficiency improvement, as once the advisor researches and ’learns’ how to handle a particular complex situation, it becomes repeatable expertise for the future as well.

In addition, crafting a more repeatable financial planning process also makes it possible to improve the efficiency of financial planning by leveraging paraplanners who can do not only a portion of the back-office work in financial planning preparation, but even limited-scope portions of the financial planning meeting process as well. Such that, in practice, solo advisors who leverage a paraplanner are able to service an average of 64% more clients and generate 80% more take-home pay by better aligning the tasks being done to the skill and experience (and compensation) level of the team member.

The bottom line, though, is simply to recognize that the majority of the time spent in the financial planning process isn’t actually in the phases of Analyzing and Developing the financial planning recommendations themselves, but also in Establishing the relationship, Gathering data, Presenting the plan, Implementing it, and the ongoing Monitoring process (and the never-ending stream of financial planning questions that crop up from clients along the way). Most of which are human-to-human interactions and communication (either in-person, by video, or via email)… which means the key to improving their efficiency is not necessarily investing in the technology to better automate those processes, but instead investing into the human capital of advisors themselves with deeper and more focused expertise, and a wider range of skill levels to which various financial planning tasks throughout the process can be appropriately (and cost-effectively) matched.

FPA Selects Largest Corporate Sponsor As First Ever Vendor Representative To Become National Board President

October 17, 2019 03:25 pm 27 Comments CATEGORY: Industry News

Over the past year, the Financial Planning Association (FPA) has been no stranger to controversy. After years of declining revenues and membership levels and ongoing organizational struggles, the FPA rolled out its OneFPA Network initiative last November, which in effect would have nationalized its existing chapter system, centralizing all decision-making and budgetary control at the National level. Not surprisingly, given the FPA's history of chapter autonomy and a long-standing concern that the National organization is out of touch with its chapters, the OneFPA Network rollout met with a significant backlash from members and chapter leaders, forcing the FPA just a few months later to roll back most of its planned changes.

Yet even as the FPA National organization tries to smooth over its increasingly tense relationship with its chapters, this week as the FPA Annual Conference gets underway the organization dropped the bombshell announcement that its new and incoming President-Elect and future Chair will be Skip Schweiss of TD Ameritrade, who serves as Managing Director of TDA's Trust Company and its Retirement Plan Solutions platform for advisors. Which is significant because it means Skip Schweiss is not only not a financial planner himself (or from an advisory firm or organization that teaches financial planning, as every prior FPA president has been in the past), he will be the first-ever FPA Chair that doesn't actually hold the CFP marks (even as FPA promotes itself as the principal membership association of CFP professionals), and the first-ever FPA Chair who represents a vendor whose business is selling solutions to FPA members.

However, even more concerning is the fact that TD Ameritrade itself has been the FPA’s leading top-tier sponsor nearly every year for more than a decade, which means that, with its current "Cornerstone Partner" $200k annual sponsorship commitment, TD Ameritrade has cumulatively written upwards of $1 – 2 million in sponsorship checks over the past decade! And while it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the Board to have representation from vendors (since vendors that serve financial planners are themselves stakeholders in the FPA and the broader financial planning community), there’s a difference between having representation on the FPA board and having a non-CFP representative of a vendor (which is ‘coincidentally’ the FPA’s largest sponsor) be the President of the entire organization (that can influence, amongst other things, its policies with vendors that FPA relies upon for its financial viability).

And if that apparent conflict of interest weren’t enough, perhaps most problematic is the reality that TD Ameritrade has a history of lobbying on regulatory issues in a manner that directly opposes the FPA’s own advocacy for a uniform fiduciary standard for all investment advisers and broker-dealers providing financial advice. In fact, earlier this year, TD Ameritrade went so far as to threaten to discontinue offering services in the entire state of Nevada if the state imposed a uniform fiduciary duty on its brokers... a uniform fiduciary duty that the FPA directly supported along with the rest of the Financial Planning Coalition in its own public comment letter. Which means that, after spending a cool $1 to $2 million in FPA sponsorships over the past decade, TD Ameritrade now has one of its executives in a position to strongly influence the direction of FPA's advocacy efforts that have a history of conflicting with TD Ameritrade’s own business interests! If the future CEO of TD Ameritrade someday calls Skip Schweiss and asks him to dissuade FPA from advocacy for a fiduciary standard that harms TD Ameritrade's retail business interests, how exactly is Schweiss supposed to handle that conflict if his job is on the line?

Putting aside these deeply concerning conflicts of interest between FPA's board leadership and TD Ameritrade's executive representation, it's also notable that the FPA’s decision means, for the first time ever, the majority of its Executive Committee will consist of non-practitioners with no leadership experience within the FPA’s local chapter system. Just as the FPA National organization struggles in its chapter relations in the wake of the failed OneFPA Network rollout. And more broadly, of the newly elected slate of Board candidates, only two members even have CFP certification, one of whom is an international representative whose CFP marks are based in the Netherlands (and may not be valid here in the United States, which would actually mean the FPA no longer has sufficient representation of CFP professionals on its Board of Directors to meet its own Bylaws requirements!).

Perhaps the upcoming restructuring of the Nominating Committee, of which half will be comprised of FPA chapter leaders going forward, will provide a good first step towards unwinding some of the FPA’s recent missteps... except given that the FPA National Board has still retained the right to veto chapter leaders from the nominating committee, to veto nominees that chapter leaders select for the board, to substitute its own candidates and override the nominating committee anyway, while stacking the nominating committee with the President-Elect and President in all the meetings and the National Chair presiding over the nominating committee and casting its tiebreaker vote over chapter leaders... it's still not clear that the FPA is even serious yet about really adopting a more "participatory governance" structure in the future?

Ultimately, though, the key point is simply that if the FPA is going to get back on track and growing again - recognizing that if the FPA merely maintain its market share of CFP certifications since it was first formed, it should have over 50,000 members today, instead of barely 23,000 - it desperately needs to focus on the real needs of its chapters and the 60,000+ CFP professionals who are not currently members... and it's hard to see how that goal will be achieved by reducing chapter leadership experience on its Executive Committee, and reducing CFP representation amongst its entire Board, even as the FPA continues to try to grow an 86-chapter system while holding itself out as the principal membership association for CFP professionals.

#FASuccess Ep 146: Systematizing Financial Planning Progress For Clients With Your Own Wealth Management Index, With Ross Levin

October 15, 2019 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 146th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Ross Levin. Ross is the co-founder and CEO of Accredited Investors Wealth Management, an independent RIA based in the Minneapolis area that oversees nearly $2 billion of assets under management for 475 affluent clients.

What's unique about Ross, though, is the way he systematized the financial planning process across the firm by developing his own Wealth Management Index that prompts clients with specific exploratory questions in each of the core financial planning topic areas and converts the results into a score that clients can use to track their progress over time.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Ross developed his Wealth Management Index system and the relative balance of delving into the technical topic areas of financial planning, versus trying to ask the right questions to explore the client side of those issues in the first place. Why it's so important to have a systematized process both to do thorough data gathering and to track how clients are progressing in those areas, and why ultimately, Ross decided to retain the Wealth Management Index questions but to actually stop tracking clients' progress scores over time.

We also talk about the path that Ross went through in building Accredited Investors to become a multibillion-dollar RIA with more than 50 employees. The in-depth hiring process they've developed in conjunction with an outside industrial psychologist to ensure prospective hires would be a good fit for the firm's "we over me" team-oriented culture, the succession plan the firm established after losing an initial succession partner that has now brought in more than 10 additional shareholders and will eventually force the co-founders to sell all their shares over the next decade, and the personal mental shift that Ross went through in the early years to better appreciate the value of having a partner who was less focused on business development but more focused on actually building and scaling the business systems and staff of Accredited Investors itself.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Ross reflects on the challenge of trying to maintain a small firm mentality that focuses more on increasing services to clients rather than just trying to get bigger, the way the firm is aiming to leverage technology to speed up the 'fast' work so that they can have more time to do the 'slow' work of client conversations and building relationships, and why Ross believes that the most important thing for advisors to do in building their own advisory business is to figure out what they want to be first or, as Ross puts it, risk ending up with successful businesses but bankrupt lives.

The 20 Best Conferences For Financial Advisors To Choose From In 2020

October 14, 2019 07:46 am 10 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

It was Benjamin Franklin who once famously quipped “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”. The caveat, however, is that like any investment, it’s still important to do your due diligence in researching whether any particular allocation of dollars will be a good investment. And with the proliferation of financial advisor conferences in recent years, it has become more and more difficult to figure out which events are most likely to actually provide a good “Return On Investment” (ROI) in fruitful knowledge that advances your success as an advisor. Even if it often takes just one good takeaway from a conference that can be implemented to make the whole trip worthwhile.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that advisory firms themselves are evolving in an ever-wider range of directions, with small, mid-sized, and large firms, independents versus employee advisors, RIAs versus broker-dealers, and an ever-growing range of niche specializations… which means an objectively ‘good’ conference may be the absolute ‘best’ conference for one advisory firm (or one advisor within a firm)… yet be totally irrelevant for another.

As someone that has been speaking at nearly 70 conferences a year for almost a decade myself, I’ve seen the good and bad of our various industry events, which are spread across membership associations, broker-dealers, insurance companies, RIA custodians, product manufacturers, trade publications, private events, and more. And as a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry’s ‘best’ conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of ’best-in-class’ top conferences for financial advisors in various categories (to allow advisors to match the available conference specialties to their own needs), and have updated it every year since, in what has become one of our most popular annual articles.

And so now, I’m excited to present my newest list of “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for the upcoming 2020 year, broken into 5 broad categories: Go Home (to your broker-dealer, RIA custodian, or network conference); Go Local (to network at your membership association's local chapter meetings); Go Scale (whether it’s making your big advisory firm bigger, or your lifestyle practice more efficient); Go Specialize (in the various industry niche conferences for those cultivating deep subject matter expertise); or Go Broad (to one of the major regional or national association conferences).

In addition, we've also launched a new "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2020, for both advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend, and vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

So I hope you find this year’s 2020 conferences list (and our new Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd’s Eye View readers!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Oct 12-13)

October 11, 2019 02:50 pm 2 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the news that Fidelity has not only decided after all to match competing custodians with zero-commission trades on US stocks and ETFs, but is further accentuating how it provides better default money market options and eschews payments for order flow in an even further amplification of the competitive pressures of the RIA custody model.

From there, we have several more articles beginning to explore the implications of the industry's rapid shift to zero-ticket-charge RIA custodians, including how the collapse of trading commission revenue could force RIA custodians to assess new custody fees (or else have to cut services given the lost revenue?), the way zero-commission trading may further accentuate the differences between broker-dealer platforms and RIA custodians (and further accelerate the breakaway broker trend), and the compliance issues that suddenly have emerged for RIAs that previously negotiated asset-based pricing on trades and especially those that bundled their asset-based trade pricing into a holistic wrap fee that may no longer be priced appropriately in a zero-trading-fee world.

We also have a number of articles on RIA and broker-dealer industry trends, from a look at the latest FINRA data showing that the number of brokers changing broker-dealers or switching to the RIA channel is actually declining (at least for now?), to the challenges of large broker-dealers that aren't always leveraging their economies of scale for better service to their brokers (and sometimes use their scale to negotiate better distribution agreements for themselves instead), whether the industry is starting to shift away from revenue-based compensation for advisors (and how the rise of Merrill Edge could drive the shift in large firms), and how advisory firms learning to bring in their own clients (whether by centralized marketing or inorganic acquisitions) are leading to a rise of restrictive non-compete and non-solicit agreements in the RIA channel that may even be more limiting than the wirehouse channel those independent firms criticized just a few years ago.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of how we find and consume good news and other content in an increasingly complex (and algorithm-driven) world: the first provides some recommendations on less-commonly-known blogs and news sites to help advisors who want to try and figure out what the market 'consensus' is (in order to identify potentially-market-moving news); the second offers up another series of blog and media site recommendations for content that will challenge you to think differently; and the last takes a fascinating look at how after nearly a decade of increasingly-algorithm-driven content recommendations, companies from Netflix to Apple are bringing back human curation to provide the contextually relevant suggestions for readers/viewers that algorithms just haven't seemed to be able to master (or at least, haven't yet?).

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

#FASuccess Ep 145: Systematizing Reviews Of Client Tax Returns By Building Software To Automate Them, with Roger Pine

October 8, 2019 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 145th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Roger Pine. Roger is the co-founder of Holistiplan, a new kind of tax planning software for advisors built to systematize and automate the process of reviewing a client's tax return to find the potential planning opportunities.

What's unique about Roger, though, is that he previously spent 10 years as a financial advisor in an independent advisory firm where he taught himself computer programming on the side implementing custom technology improvements for his own firm, before deciding to shift into becoming a full-time FinTech entrepreneur himself.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about the Holistiplan software that Roger developed. From leveraging optical character recognition to scan all the relevant information from an entire tax return PDF in just seconds, to converting that information into relevant tax observations about the client's tax bracket, phased-out deductions or tax credits, and the eligibility for tax preference contributions to retirement accounts, to the forward-looking tax planning tools that Holistiplan is now building to identify the client's true marginal tax bracket, taking into account all the phase-ins and phase-outs to make better forward-looking tax recommendations.

We also talk about the ever-blurring line between where a CPA's tax services end and a financial advisor's begin, the dynamics of trying to balance providing tax guidance and not unwittingly competing against potential CPA referral sources, and why Roger views Holistiplan's tax analyses as only the beginning of developing a comprehensive expert system that helps financial advisors craft more consistent recommendations across the full spectrum of the financial planning body of knowledge.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Roger shares his own journey and what it's like to transition from being a financial advisor to an advisor tech entrepreneur. Why he ultimately decided to take the leap despite being on a partnership and succession track in his current advisory firm, and his suggestions on what other advisors can do if they too see an opportunity to develop advisor technology solutions to fill the gaps in today's marketplace.

So whether you're interested in learning about the process behind taking an idea for an application and actually bringing it to market, lessons Roger learned when transitioning out of the advisory business and launching a startup, or about his goal to advance the financial planning profession by helping develop "normative practices", then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

Highlights Of The 2019 FinTech Competition Finalists At XYPN LIVE

October 3, 2019 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Conferences

Last month, XY Planning Network held its fourth Annual FinTech Competition in the Union Station Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Each year, the FinTech Competition showcases software providers serving financial planners that are startup companies with either $1 million or less in revenue, or that have been in business for less than one year.

In this guest post, Bill Winterberg – financial technology consultant and founder of the tech blog FPPad.com – provides a recap of each finalist’s fintech presentation demo, which included a range of tools and services for financial planners, from tax planning and college financial aid planning software, to commission-free custody services and client survey software.

Bill kicks off with highlights from Holistiplan’s presentation on their innovative tax planning software, and how it can take a client’s entire tax return, digitize the data, and produce a client-friendly detailed report in less than a minute. The company aims to fill an important gap with its fintech offering by serving the large majority of financial advisors (estimated at over 90%!) who may collect tax documents from clients but have no tax planning software used in their businesses to support the analysis of all that tax information.

From there, additional XYPN FinTech Competition highlights, in the order of presentation, include:

Altruist (commission-free RIA custody services), which bills itself as a “commission-free digital custodian” providing a low-cost option for financial advisors to manage and report on their clients’ accounts held across traditional custodians, including account aggregation tools for outside investment accounts. Advisors can create custom reports with an option to set up a client-facing dashboard for clients to access and view their reports. Portfolio rebalancing tools also help the advisor manage and submit trades, and include automatic rebalancing features, trading of fractional shares, as well as commission-free trading.
Knudge (client engagement software) offers financial advisors a tool to help their clients stay on track with shared to-do lists. The software integrates with CRM systems, and lets advisors send custom reminders to their clients to keep them on track with given tasks they need to accomplish to achieve their financial planning goals. Clients can access their ‘nudges’ either through email or phone app.
College Aid Pro (college financial aid planning) offers software tools that help advisors guide their clients through the process of evaluating and selecting undergraduate colleges as well as the financial aid options available to attend each school. The software also creates custom reports that show details such as anticipated college expenses, grant and scholarship availability, and projections of anticipated earnings after graduation.
Anvil Foundry (form-filling document automation) aims to streamline the (digital) completion of routine paperwork in a financial planner’s daily workflow, including tasks such as opening new accounts and onboarding new clients (and simultaneously populating that data into other technology systems the advisory firm uses).
NEXA Insights (client survey software) provides a client survey tool that helps advisors create customized surveys helping them identify and track client trends, as well as assess client feedback in relation to other firms also using NEXA. The ultimate goal of the software is to provide information that will help advisors increase engagement and enhance the value-add offered to their clients.

After all finalists presented, a panel of judges – including Michael Kitces, guest-post author Bill Winterberg, and Robert Sofia (co-founder of Snappy Kraken and winner of the 2016 XY Planning Annual FinTech Competition) – named Holistiplan the 2019 winner of the competition for its easy-to-use analysis tools, and for providing a much-needed tax analysis option for use by financial planners. The judges also awarded an Honorable Mention to College Aid Pro for tackling the challenge faced by millions of students annually of evaluating undergraduate institutions and financial aid for families.

The Fifth Annual FinTech Competition will take place on October 12, 2020, at next year’s XYPN Live conference in Denver, Colorado.

#FASuccess Ep 144: The Past, Present, And Future Evolution Of The RIA Custody Model, with Tom Bradley Jr.

October 1, 2019 07:05 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 144th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Tom Bradley. Tom is the former president of TD Ameritrade Institutional, one of the leading RIA custodial platforms serving nearly 7,000 independent RIAs with almost $600 billion of assets held in custody.

What's unique about Tom, though, is that he led the original Waterhouse Advisor Services platform when it was first started back in 1992, and has been a part of the growth and evolution of financial advisors operating as independent RIAs on the custodial platform for more than 25 years.

In this episode, we talk in depth about the evolution of the RIA custody model itself. From the early days when advisors had no direct means to actually trade across multiple client accounts and had to manually enter transactions off paper trade confirmations into their portfolio performance reporting systems, to the development of the first wave of RIA custodial tech integrations when few advisors had more than $20 million of AUM and couldn't demand much of their providers, to TD Ameritrade's unique pivot into an open architecture system with its Veo Open Access platform, because their acquisition by Ameritrade in 2006 gave them a unique opportunity to leverage the first wave of APIs that other RIA custodians hadn't fully developed yet.

We also talk about the nature of the RIA custodial business itself. The not always apparent ways that RIA custodians generate their revenue from advisors and their clients, why the RIA custodial options for how cash is invested has become such a hot-button issue, what it really costs an RIA custodian to service an advisor on average and what clients actually pay as a percentage of their assets, and what it would take to develop an RIA custodial platform that itself operated on a truly fee-only basis.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Tom shares his perspective on the future of the RIA custodial business. The gaps he still sees in how advisory firms manage succession plans and the transition of clients after a founder passes away, and why in the end, the fact that RIA custodians may also compete with their RIAs for end investors in their retail brokerage businesses can still be a net benefit to most advisors because it brings down the cost of the custodial platform in the first place.

« Previous
1
…
49
50
51
52
53
…
97
Next »

Differentiating Your Advisory Firm’s Brand By Finding The Opposing Category In Your White Space

#FASuccess Ep 147: Developing Next-Generation Advisor Talent With An Internal 2-Year Mentoring Program, with Jeff Dobyns

Scaling The Efficiency Of Comprehensive Financial Planning By Creating Repeatable Expertise

FPA Selects Largest Corporate Sponsor As First Ever Vendor Representative To Become National Board President

#FASuccess Ep 146: Systematizing Financial Planning Progress For Clients With Your Own Wealth Management Index, With Ross Levin

The 20 Best Conferences For Financial Advisors To Choose From In 2020

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Oct 12-13)

#FASuccess Ep 145: Systematizing Reviews Of Client Tax Returns By Building Software To Automate Them, with Roger Pine

Highlights Of The 2019 FinTech Competition Finalists At XYPN LIVE

#FASuccess Ep 144: The Past, Present, And Future Evolution Of The RIA Custody Model, with Tom Bradley Jr.

Nerd’s Eye View Praise

Nerd’s Eye View Praise

Showcase YOUR Expertise

Stay In Touch

Questions?

Please contact your Firm's Group Admin

Search results for: "feed"

Nerd’s Eye View Praise

Showcase YOUR Expertise

Stay In Touch

Questions?