IN Tech
May 17, 2013
Takeaway from Google conference: Get ready for video
I honestly had little time to spend on this year's annual Google i/o developer conference but I did sit in on several online keynotes and demonstrations over the course of the three-day event this week.While most advisers are going to see little immediate direct benefit from the conference, it's worth a few minutes to check out some of the content produced there.Make sure you have decent bandwidth and a device of recent enough vintage to easily support streaming video. If that is the case, you can expect a sense of where the Internet is heading in terms of virtual conferences. Not only that, but to me, it's a sign of the momentum behind video conferencing.By that last I simply mean that during the events I could click over to Google's main event page during any part of the day and reliably see an engrossing demonstration on stage by some developer or other.More than that though it just all worked — mostly, that is — there... Read full post
May 17, 2013
What's now and what's next for Morgan Stanley's new trade tool
Morgan Stanley rolled out a new set of tools on its 3D platform this week — now available to all the firm's wealth management financial advisers.Called Trade Flow Insights, the suite of tools is meant to help inform brokers about which of the company's products are proving popular and with whom, at least from a demographic perspective. In a nutshell, Trade Flow presents advisers with anonymized data on top product purchases, along with related information on the purchasers' asset allocations. And that data can be sorted based on asset class, client age and amount of client holdings. Advisers can also look more broadly at a macro, firm-wide level, or, in future, advisers will be able to more easily correlate and compare findings to their own book of business.“What I would say is, think of [Trade Flow] more as a form of social data sharing,” said Jeff McMillan, head of investment platforms at Morgan Stanley Wealth... Read full post
May 16, 2013
NetDocuments launches an Apps Marketplace
Cloud-computing content management provider NetDocuments has had a busy year so far.After two major releases they recently announced availability of a NetDocuments' Apps Marketplace.For those unfamiliar, NetDocuments is a big cloud-based provider of document management services to large enterprise companies as well as law firms and financial services firms — and is used 140 countries.Today's news should be of some interest to those readers that are also users of the Schwab Performance Technologies turnkey Integrated Office platform. That platform includes a customized version of Salesforce CRM.For those not on the platform, the NetDocuments piece acts as an advisory firm's document management and e-mail archiving system, and thereby provides a firm's advisers with a centralized, searchable and outsourced online hub for storing client documents and communications.And the NetDocuments Apps Marketplace is a centralized location for... Read full post
May 14, 2013
Attention rocket scientists: Quantopian launches trading pilot program
Just a quick post to pass along news from Quantopian, the open algorithmic trading development platform, trading platform and social hub for quants I first wrote about back at launch in January.Today, the firm introduced the notion of paper trading and announced the launch of the Quantopian Live Trading pilot program. They did so as part of FinovateSpring, a conference showcasing the latest innovations in finance and banking technology, being held in California today and tomorrow (some might recall that Mint.com got a boost after pitching itself at a Finnovate conference way back in 2007).Paper trading, according to today's prepared statement, allows users to test trading algorithms against live market data, which is critical to optimizing the algorithms during development.The pilot will initially be open only to a select group of users, with availability to the mass public of clamoring quants later this year."Anyone with a mind for... Read full post
May 13, 2013
Cloud cover: Hosted version of Schwab's PortfolioCenter now available
Schwab Performance Technologies officially announced the availability of PortfolioCenter Hosted last week.Basically this means that an adviser's full iteration of the portfolio management application can be migrated from running on their own on-premises systems or that of another third-party hosting provider over to SPT, thereby getting the adviser out of the IT management business, at least so far as regards portfolio management.SPT announced in June 2012 that it would be building a hosted version of PortfolioCenter, the company's widely used portfolio management software.I spoke to Brian Shenson, vice president of Advisor Technology Solutions for Schwab Advisor Services, about the rollout last week.“We had a pilot running over the first quarter with a small group of advisers and have been onboarding others and since the announcement we have had 15 commitments from current PortfolioCenter clients to adopt the hosted solution,... Read full post
May 10, 2013
Android dominating much of the mobile world
First-quarter worldwide shipments of smart mobile devices: 308.7 million units.That according to market research firm Canalys' latest estimates. The firm includes notebook computers, tablets and smart phones in that count.Advisers continue to frequently ask me about which mobile operating system is dominating these days.Despite our own survey last year which showed that 85.8% of advisers were using an iPad, Android is coming on strong in the general market thus far in 2013.(It was interesting that last year saw Android break into double-digit usage among advisers, with 13.3% of our survey takers indicating they had one.)One of several flavors of the Android operating system were loaded onto 59.5% of all smart mobile devices shipped in the first quarter of 2013, according to Canalys.... Read full post
May 9, 2013
Advisers discuss the operational complexities of trading
One thing that intrigued me at the Envestnet | Tamarac Advisor Summit in Chicago this month was the diversity of the audience.By that I mean I could never be certain of the job title of the person sitting next to me in a session — especially the general sessions.For the first time, the combined firm was having a single user conference. In years past, each held its own meeting and I attended last year's Tamarac gathering in Seattle. Around 500 participants converged there, but at this year's Advisor Summit there were more than 1,100 — a mix of advisers and operations professionals who use one of the firms' platforms.I will share the best example I experienced during the meeting, which occurred Thursday over breakfast with three different professionals.First, I met Tiffany Lessler, a client service manager with Golub Group, on my way down the escalator. Her registered investment advisory firm is based in San Mateo, Calif.,... Read full post
May 7, 2013
Davis D. Janowski: How does Schwab PortfolioCenter rate with advisers?
Schwab PortfolioCenter received an overall rating of four out of five stars.So says the new Schwab OpenView MarketSquare site built by Schwab Intelligent Technologies, which was announced as open for business Monday.Five stars is the highest rating a product can receive and the review was based on a total of 71 user-generated reviews. Those reviews were in turn edited by the folks at SIT and the highlights consolidated into a single text passage of a few hundred words (see the inset screenshot, below right, for this very example).The text was not a whitewash and noted some semi-harsh criticism of the venerable application including that while it is reliable it feels dated, “vintage” according to one reviewer.This was the singular example put out in PDF form along with a prepared statement Monday from SIT.Since MarketSquare was announced in Nov. 2012 the SIT folks have received 400 reviews from among the almost 7,000... Read full post
May 2, 2013
Envestnet levering HiddenLevers onto its platform
I am always happy when some technology offering I have gotten enthusiastic over during a demonstration -- or one that I've kicked the tires on -- ends up being adopted by larger providers.So I was able to experience a bit'o happiness this morning when it was formally announced by Envestnet president Bill Crager that third-party macroanalytics technology provider HiddenLevers is being added as an integrated partner to the firm's platform. While not yet directly accessible through the Envestnet wealth management platform, development work is underway and will be fully production-integrated in June.What that means is advisers on the Envestnet platform will be able to perform portfolio or security-level stress tests to measure macro-level risk on them.Praveen Ghanta, founder, chief executive and programming guru at HiddenLevers, has, in a nutshell created a series of dozens of hypothetical macro-level risk formulas based on world events... Read full post
May 1, 2013
Finect: They have built it (more or less). Will advisers come?
I really want to like Finect, the new social-media network that was launched into open beta Tuesday.In an overly simplified nutshell, it purports to be an open, inherently compliant social network for the financial services industry and its constituents.That includes advisers, product companies, broker-dealers, all their ilk and relatives and, of course, end clients.Again, in an overly simplified explanation, the network is meant for you, the adviser, to share with and connect to your clients in a secure, compliant, archived environment with analytics tools on the back end that eventually will allow rich examination and analysis of traffic and the parties on it.And that is the key: Getting a critical mass of large users.Right now, Finect needs advisers a lot more than advisers need Finect — that is if advisers already are in a social media comfort zone (see below).OriginsI met and spoke with the service's president, Jennifer... Read full post
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