There has not been a lot of news coming out of this year's Technology Tools for Today conference (it is being held in Weston, Florida this year).
The first official announcement came with yesterday's unveiling of the Fidelity
WealthCentral Mobile iPhone application for advisers, which is now available for download (not to worry an Android version is in the development pipeline).
On the other hand news is not at the heart of this conference anyway. It is much more focused on connecting technology-hunting advisers with the right vendors (around 70 vendors have booths set up; there are between 469 and 500 attendees, around 300 of them advisers).
It is also a prime time for third-party vendors to network with one another and discuss the possibility of integrating their applications.
This year has also seen the arrival of all the major custodians and several up-and-coming or boutique custodians as well.
Things on this morning's schedule had to be juggled a bit as Quantuvis Consulting's Stephanie Bogan had to cancel at the last minute for unspecified reasons but the show went on.
Attendees turned out in large numbers to hear the morning's SuperSession speakers. First up was Edward O'brien of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services discussing the WealthCentral platform along with three adviser panelists who shared their own stories of adoption and platform usage.
Following that came Neesha Hathi, head of technology for Schwab Advisor Services. She largely re-hashed the presentation she had given at the
FPA national and Schwab Impact conferences last year.
It was also entertaining for me to note that competitors Pershing LLC and TD Ameritrade Institutional were also present at both of these sessions and listening attentively.
Ms. Hathi did have one bit of news she shared during the presentation. In the few minutes left for Q&A an adviser asked her about the timetable for delivery of the new Schwab Intelligent Integration platforms. She said that she expected to have implementations ready in time for the custodian's national Impact conference in November. This includes iterations of both the turnkey platform, which has Salesforce CRM as its centerpiece, as well as one version of the Schwab Openview Gateway that has either Junxure CRM (from CRM Software Inc.) or a customized version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at its heart.
Not to worry though, there are plenty of other things going on behind the scenes that I will be building into stories or columns in the days and weeks to come. Stay tuned.
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