E*Assist compliance automation calculator

Your input needed in first-ever InvestmentNews technology survey Just a gentle reminder, if you were one of the lucky few who were randomly selected to receive a link to complete the first-ever InvestmentNews technology survey, please fill it out. The questions are simple — most are multiple-choice — and it shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes to complete. We’ll be running the results in our June 16 issue. Advisor Products rolling out collaborative features and integrations with other products I recently received an interesting demo from Andrew Gluck, the well-known financial services writer and chief executive of Advisor Products Inc. based in Westbury, N.Y. He showed me some soon-to-be-available features of the company’s top-shelf adviser website offering. The most interesting of these are “to do” features that allow for collaboration between advisers, their clients and other allied professionals, such as accountants, tax- and estate-planning attorneys and others. These new offerings are at the forefront of a wave of similar collaborative features we’ll soon be seeing in various platforms and online applications. “We’re building a Web 2.0 interface that moves the industry forward; an interface that will support a much more transparent relationship between client and adviser — that’s something that has really been lagging when it comes to empowering advisers [with] the ability [to] leverage the Internet,” Mr. Gluck said. Advisor Products has some 1800 clients. Another interesting wrinkle is the company’s upcoming integration of these same features with the CRM offering from Redtail Technology Inc. of Gold River, Calif., that is used by 4,000 adviser firms. Visit Advisor Productsfor more information on their offerings. E*Assist introduces compliance automation calculator, could show B-Ds the way to savings through automation Next week E*Assist will unveil an online calculator that brokerage firms can use to determine the extent to which manual tasks can be automated. The idea was to help firms calculate the exact cost savings and growth potential they could achieve through automation, Ted Tsung, chief executive of E*Assist, a New York-based provider of compliance management solutions, wrote in an e-mail. “Armed with this information, firms can make informed technology decisions, knowing exactly what the bottom line benefit is and how much they can afford to spend.” For more information visit E*Assist. For an early look at the calculator, visit link.