The Revport Revenue and Expense Management software suite has added another arrow to its quiver of compliance-monitoring tools. The new fund-rebate functionality manages and calculates diverse fee types, enabling firms to deal with fund or distributor rebates, retrocessions and fund expense management.
“With regulations such as Dodd-Frank and Retail Distribution Review (RDR) imposing stringent fee transparency standards on the mutual fund and fund management businesses, firms need to be accurately billing fees,” says Chris John, chief executive officer of Bonaire Solutions, LLC., Revport's developer. “Firms are highly susceptible to errors in their fund rebates and fund expense management. Our new technology will ensure firms can efficiently and accurately calculate these fees, and perhaps more importantly, comply with new regulations.”
Key features include calculation of fund or distributor rebates; computation of retrocessions, trailers, sub-advisor payouts and fee splits; monitoring of retrocessions, trailers, sub-adviser payouts and fee splits; and calculation of fund and distributor rebates with invoicing (along with invoice fee calculation); all centered on a rules-based workflow running parallel to exception processing.
The fund rebate capability is offered with straight-through-processing (STP), so users will see accrual calculations and gains and losses posting and reversals.
For more information about Bonaire Software Solutions Revenue Management and fee billing platform, visit www.bonairesoft.com.
CRM app promises instant karma
Good customer service breeds good business, whether you sell a product or offer financial advice.
The recently beta-fied KarmaCRM (Customer Service Management) wants to help you help your clients by keeping company communications unified, with online correspondence between staff and contacts consolidated and shared company-wide as it becomes relevant.
Software developer John Paul Narowski, who helped found MetaSpring LLC, created KarmaCRM for his own use.
“We initially didn't use other similar web-based platforms because they are too complex, and difficult to collaborate with other programs,” says Narowski. “Customers, including myself, have come from other platforms saying that there's too much going on; the workflow just isn't right, or the companies won't get back to us quick enough.”
The KarmaCRM e-mail function merges all company and client sales leads, listing them by priority. Contacts can be imported from third-party systems like Google Mail, MailChimp, Highrise, and FreshBooks. You can attach photographs to contact information; putting a face to a name whenever you have to pull up a client's profile and making you look like the most caring service provider with which he or she has had the pleasure of doing business.
Users can also designate software administrators and allot tasks and contacts to staff members, who will receive text notifications as deadlines near. Supervisors can keep tabs on everyone's performance with the ability to check the status of deals, as well as who is running overdue. Employees can interact with each other via personal or group chats.
A report organizer presents information in pie-, funnel-, or table-chart formats, and can create deal projections. Are you working with international clients? KarmaCRM converts currency in real-time; a screen-shot of the product showed values in the pound and euro.
The company offers seven pricing plans, ranging from “Always Free”, which allows two users to manage 300 contacts and companies between 10 deals, to the “Premier” plan, which usually costs $139 per month and accommodates 150 users supervising forty thousand contacts and companies. The trial period runs until June 1, after which users must pay for karma with a credit card, or endure a downgrade to the Always Free plan.
For a tour of the program and pricing plans, please www.karmacrm.com.
Arkovi bulks up compliance suite with social media archiving
Complying with industry regulations is taking up an increasing amount of advisors' time. The integration of Arkovi, social media archiving service for the financial industry into new content-management system MarketeRIA platform, developed by Triplestop LLC, may help speed things up.
The integration provides the archiving of social-network interactions for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs through one turnkey marketing system. Advisers can manage websites, add new content and communicate through several networking programs from one dashboard while Marketeria captures and archives activity.
“It was a natural to embed Arkovi within Marketeria,” said Joe Polidoro, president of Triplestop LLC. “With Arkovi integrated, our clients can set it and then forget it.”
“Archiving is a new, required step, but it doesn't have to be burdensome,” assures Blane Warrene, chief executive of BMRW & Associates, Inc., developer of Arkovi.
The partnership is Arkovi's fifth arrangement, ensuring that customers are covered in all the ways that Finra and the Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the social-media use of investment professionals.
For more information, please visit www.arkovi.com or www.triplestopllc.com.
