I got a sneak preview of a white paper from IPS AdvisorPro that sheds light on the time, costs associated with creating investment policy statements.
By one estimate, it can take the typical financial adviser 155 minutes to create an investment policy statement from scratch using a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word.
To refresh your memory, an IPS is a written document agreed to by both an adviser and client that outlines goals, policies and procedures to be used by the adviser for managing investments.
Such statements are required these days where a fiduciary relationship exists.
The above estimate is by Norm Boone, president of San Francisco-based Mosaic Financial Partners Inc. and co-creator of the popular IPS AdvisorPro software and online application from Blips Partners LLC in Miami.
While the white paper is clearly meant to urge advisers to buy the firm's software, the estimates included in the white paper, “Investment Policy Statements: The Technology Return on Investment for Financial Advisors,” seem reasonable and should be of interest to advisers in terms of comparing their current procedures and the time involved in preparation of policy statements.
For example, Mr. Boone breaks down the production of a statement using manual means into the following chunks: filling out the client questionnaire and organizing client data, 15 minutes; finding and inserting asset allocation models, 15 minutes; selection of benchmarks, 15 minutes; customizing the IPS for specific client requests, 30 minutes; entering client recommendations and proofreading the entire document, 60 minutes; and compliance review, 20 minutes.
Grand total, as mentioned above, is 155 minutes.
Mr. Boone claims that the same tasks performed on IPS AdvisorPro would be 57 minutes.
In addition to the time breakdown, the article also has cost estimates for creating and updating statements manually versus using an online tool.
For example, Mr. Boone estimates that a 50-client firm will spend $22,500 in policy statement creation using a manual process, while a 250-client firm will spend $112,500.
He estimates a cost savings from $16,300 to $81,500 if advisers use an online solution instead.
For more information on the software, visit
IPS AdvisorPro online.
Firefox reaches a billion downloads
Since it was introduced in November 2004, Firefox web browser software has had over billion downloads of That milestone was reached last night, as tracked by the download counter at the
spreadfirefox.com site.
The browser was created and is maintained by the Mozilla Foundation based in Mountain View, Calif. with the help of thousands of volunteers.
The browser remains Redmond Wash.-based Microsoft Corp.’s top competitor despite entries by the Safari browser from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. and the Chrome browser from Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.
The choice of web browsers is going to continue to be of interest to advisers as a significant percentage are now favoring applications hosted on the Internet. In a
technology survey conducted by
InvestmentNews last June, 24% of respondents preferred web-based applications, edging out the 23% who favored desktop or self-hosted applications.
Meanwhile 40% of advisers were in favor of a combination of both.
For more information visit the
Mozilla blog and
Spread Firefox website.
