More adviser tools coming to smart phones

NEW YORK — Financial advisers who use a BlackBerry or other smart phone soon will be able to access a wider range of financial tools and applications. Smart phones — the catchall term for any hand-held device that supports voice calling, Internet browsing, e-mail and third-party mobile applications — already can access portfolio management and customer relationship management applications. In the very near future, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. plans to bring real-time stock quotes to smart phones. “We’re ready to go and are just waiting on the [Securities and Exchange Commission],” said Katie Jacobs Stanton, strategic-partner manager and director of Google Finance. “We’ll have data available from all the major American financial markets.” Independent broker-dealer Delta Equity Services Corp. of Bolton, Mass., which uses NetExchange Mobile, a service of Pershing LLC of Jersey City, N.J., expects to add a new mobile feature next month. “We and our advisers are looking forward to the ability to have real-time alerts sent out to the mobile device notifying them that a transaction has been processed,” said Kathy Anderson, manager of operations and business development Advisers can enhance their productivity by using smart-phone applications, said Chris Jolley, group marketing manager in the financial-products group at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., which offers a free mobile version of MSN Money.
Fitting in “Two key ways we add value to a financial adviser’s work are by making their relationship with their clients more productive and efficient,” he said. “A big part of where we see ourselves fitting into their world is the education process of their clients — when their clients come in more prepared, it’s a more efficient use of everyone’s time,” Mr. Jolley said, adding that clients can input their portfolios into MSN Money and then access the information on their smart phones. Google and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! Inc.’s Yahoo! Finance also provide substantial free financial-information offerings for mobile devices. The integrated search, contextual charts and news content that are available for the personal computer version of Google Finance, for example, were made available to mobile users in June. Some smart phones, say analysts, are better at financial tasks than others. In particular, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. of Waterloo, Ontario, is cited as a leader. “RIM and its developer community have some incredible stock-trading and hard-core financial apps available for the BlackBerry,” said Sascha Segan, lead analyst for mobile phones and personal digital assistants at PC Magazine in New York. Mr. Segan, who is responsible for testing, benchmarking and evaluating mobile phones and other hand-held devices for the magazine, said the other major smart-phone platforms proving popular with applications developers are those running the Windows Mobile 6 and Nokia Symbian operating systems. He said that the Palm OS platform, which powers the very popular line of Treo smart phones, is not keeping pace. “It’s sad, really, because so many Treos are out there, more are being sold every day, and lots of applications are available,” Mr. Segan said. “It’s just that application development for the Palm OS is pretty much stalled.” Pyxis Mobile Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based developer of mobile applications that serves financial services companies exclusively, has focused largely on the BlackBerry platform. In order for advisers to use Pyxis’ mAdvisor product on their BlackBerry, a company or firm must have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed on its network and connected to its e-mail server. (The BlackBerry software acts as a link between the device and a company’s enterprise applications and wireless networks.) “We can tailor our applications specifically to the work flows of the sorts of people we are working with,” said Shane Hughes, chief executive of Pyxis Mobile. Various components of his company’s overarching mPlatform suite are currently in use by 27 of the nation’s top 50 asset managers.