Michael Kitces: The Latest In Financial Adviser FinTech — September 2018

Welcome to the September 2018 issue of the Latest News in Financial Advisor #FinTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors and wealth management!

This month’s edition kicks off with the big news from Schwab that, after years of promising that it is working on a next-generation multicustodial replacement to PortfolioCenter, the new PortfolioConnect solution will only work directly with the Schwab custodial platform… but will be more deeply integrated, and more importantly free to Schwab advisors, in what could become a major inducement to advisory firms to join or consolidate with Schwab given that portfolio accounting software is the most expensive line item in most RIAs’ technology budgets. In the meantime, for those who want to remain multicustodial, Schwab noted that PortfolioCenter will also be receiving an upgrade this fall, to ostensibly remain as the multicustodial server-based alternative that independent RIAs can choose to purchase separately.

From there, the latest highlights also include a number of interesting advisor technology announcements, including:

• JPMorgan Chase launches a new “YouInvest” trading platform that will provide 100 trades for free with no account minimums, and indefinite free trades to those in its Private Client group, putting newfound pressure on independent RIA custodians to justify why their advisers should be at a competitive disadvantage.

• RightCapital launches the first dedicated student loan planning module in a financial planning software package

• MoneyGuidePro deepens its integration with WealthAccess as advisers and clients apparently prefer the third-party PFM solution to MGP’s own client portal

• Galileo Processing announces a new debit card structure that can allow clients to spend directly from an investment account that stays fully invested without the need to hold any cash aside in advance

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in adviser technology, including Orion adding its own “planning light” tool in partnership with FinMason, UBS deciding to wind down its internally built SmartWealth robo platform and go all-in with its SigFig partnership, FMGSuite acquires Platinum Advisor Strategies to build out its “HubSpot for Advisors” content marketing platform (as ousted former Platinum co-founder Robert Sofia spins up his own HubSpot-for-Advisors competitor SnappyKraken), and the CFP Board demonstrates a novel application for applying blockchain in financial services: a public ledger to verify who is a CFP certificant, replete with an authenticated “digital CFP certificate” that advisers can use on their websites and in their email signatures.

And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular new “Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map” as well!

I hope you’re continuing to find this new column on financial adviser technology to be helpful! Please share your comments at the end and let me know what you think!

*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to [email protected]!

Schwab Reveals That Next Generation PortfolioConnect With Be Free… And Schwab Only. Nearly 20 years ago, Schwab acquired CenterPiece, one of the early players in the 1990s world of third-party portfolio accounting solutions, redubbed it PortfolioCenter, and announced that they would limit it to work with only their own data feeds as a way to entice independent RIAs to custody exclusively with Schwab. After a major backlash, though, Schwab backed away from the plan, and PortfolioCenter has simply existed as one of several competitors with a desktop and then cloud-based multicustodial portfolio accounting solution. The challenge, though, was that once PortfolioCenter was not a Schwab-only offering, there was limited strategic value for Schwab to grow and scale the service, and as a result its relative development pace has lagged for years, allowing “upstarts” like Orion Advisor Services, Tamarac, Black Diamond, and others to gain market share. Nonetheless, the reality is that most RIAs actually do use a single RIA custodian, and despite years of lagging development PortfolioCenter still has the largest market share of portfolio accounting solutions according to the latest T3 Advisor Tech Survey, which has continued to leave the door open for Schwab’s ongoing announcements that it has been planning to create a new rewrite of the multicustodial PortfolioCenter solution (dubbed “Project PM2”). But after nearly 5 years of promising that Schwab was “getting there” on its PM2 initiative, no solution has been forthcoming, and now Schwab has finally revealed that while its next-generation solution may finally be approaching, it will not be the full-capability next-generation multicustodial portfolio accounting solution once promised. Instead, Schwab announced this month via Joel Bruckenstein’s T3 Technology Hub that its new “PortfolioConnect” solution will be a more “streamlined” platform compared to others in the market, and will work only with the Schwab platform… but, it will be deeply integrated into the Schwab custodial platform and will be made available for free to firms that custody with Schwab. At the same time, though, Schwab also announced that there is a major upgrade coming to PortfolioCenter as well, suggesting that the coming PortfolioConnect will not be an alternative intended to fully replace PortfolioCenter and its multicustodial capabilities; instead, PortfolioConnect will simply be a more-deeply-integrated streamlined alternative for Schwab-only advisers. In other words, Schwab appears to be adopting a similar model to TD Ameritrade with its purchase of iRebal, which similarly runs a multicustodial desktop version for a (substantial) fee or a streamlined online version that is available for free to advisers who custody (solely) with TD Ameritrade, and lets advisers choose how they want to engage. Nonetheless, Schwab’s announcement to make PortfolioConnect free is a game-changer in the world of portfolio accounting solutions, given that Schwab is the largest custodian that already has the biggest base of advisers, and that a firm’s portfolio accounting software solutions is typically its most expensive technology line item (at a cost of $50+/account/year for 100 clients who each have 2-3 accounts, the typical advisory firm may pay $12,500/year or more for each adviser “full” of clients!). And while making PortfolioConnect a Schwab-only solution means that PM2 will not compete directly with Orion, Black Diamond, Tamarac, and the like, if only multicustodial advisers want to use those outside solutions, it still dramatically narrows the potential RIA marketplace for competitors. In addition, the free PortfolioConnect solution will provide multicustodial RIAs a substantial incentive to consolidate with Schwab (and eschew their other custodians to save on the cost of that third-party multicustodial portfolio accounting software solution, especially when considering that PortfolioConnect will also save firms the staff cost of handling still-common downloads and reconciliation obligations). And even for single-custodian RIAs, offering an RIA’s most expensive technology line item for free as an inducement to be single-custodial with Schwab, and not with Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, or others, will be a substantial incentive. Of course, the reality is that Schwab’s solution still isn’t really “free” – instead, it’s paid for indirectly by clients in the form of sub-TA fees, revenue-sharing agreements from asset managers for Schwab distribution, ticket charges, and Schwab’s infamously-low-yielding cash sweep account to its affiliated Schwab Bank. Yet in the long run, perhaps that means Schwab will use PortfolioConnect as the groundwork to pivot away from trying to make money off the investments that RIAs implement with their clients, and instead implement a custody fee in the form of a “technology fee” for a growing base of proprietary Schwab technology instead (at least for its smaller advisory firms)? In the meantime, though, Schwab appears to be clarifying its competitive positioning at the table, where Fidelity provides Wealthscape for wealth-management-centric firms (including multicustodial capabilities), TD Ameritrade is the open architecture platform for the most independent-minded advisers, and Schwab will use its size to continue to be the largest, most-scaled, lowest-cost provider for RIAs focused solely or primarily on investment management (and expanding its third-party integration capabilities to fill in the rest of the gaps).

Orion Adds “Planning Light” Tools As More Investment-Centric RIAs Expand Towards Wealth Management. For the subset of advisers that have already adopted a financial-planning-centric wealth management approach, there is a wide range of available financial planning software solutions, with various integrations to portfolio performance reporting and other tools. However, financial planning software takes a non-trivial amount of time to use, and can be complex to implement for historically-investment-centric firms that are still trying to inch their way towards becoming more planning oriented. In this context, it is notable that Orion Advisor Services announced two new integrations this month. The first is with FinMason, which is rolling out a new “5 Minute Financial Plan” module that does a quick Monte Carlo projection using the client’s current assets (aggregated from Orion) and future savings and spending rates to see if the client is on track for retirement. The second is with AssetMap, a financial-adviser-specific mind-mapping tool that provides clients a one-page visual summary of their household balance sheet (and now automatically updated with Orion’s data feeds). For wealth management firms that are already planning oriented, the FinMason integration in particular will likely seem “lightweight” compared to more robust financial planning software alternatives, but Orion specifically notes demand from a subset of their firms for a “lightweight planning” solution. On the other hand, even planning-centric firms may be interested in the AssetMap integration, as a way to provide clients a more holistic summary view of their wealth than “just” logging in to Orion itself to see (only) their investment accounts. Ultimately, though, in a world where many “planning light” software solutions have come and gone with limited adoption, the real question is not whether the integration itself is valuable, but simply whether or how many investment-centric firms are really ready to cross the divide into doing more financial planning, or if investment-and planning-centric firms will instead evolve increasingly different technology stacks over time instead.

JPMorgan Chase Accelerates Transaction Fee Price Wars By Launching “Free” YouInvest Platform. Last year, Charles Schwab roiled the competition in low-cost trading by dropping its transaction fee to just $4.95/trade, forcing Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and others to follow suit. And earlier this year, Vanguard announced that it was making all ETF trades entirely free on its platform, with a 1,800 ETF line-up far broader than just the pay-to-play No-Transaction-Fee (NTF) lineups of their competitors. Now, JPMorgan Chase is taking the competition one step further, by offering a new digital investing service called “YouInvest” that provides up to 100 ETF or individual stock trades per year entirely for free (down from $24.95/trade). The service will have a $0 account minimum, and those with at least $15,000 in their accounts will get another 100 free trades every year, while Chase Private Client customers will get unlimited free trading indefinitely. The YouInvest solution will ostensibly compete most directly against other no-trading-fee stock trading apps like Robinhood and Stash, but retail online brokerage firms like Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade all traded down on the news of a major new competitor entering the landscape to compete for Millennial (and other) new investors. And from the financial adviser’s perspective, the emergence of yet another competitor with no trading fees, especially one that is offering unlimited free trades to its advisory (Private Client) investors, raises the question of whether RIA custodians will feel compelled to match the offer on their institutional platform to avoid putting their independent RIAs at a competitive disadvantage to Chase Private Client. Of course, financial services firms must still make money somehow, but JPMorgan appears to be content offering YouInvest for free in the hopes of attracting more wallet share from its affluent clients, and using the foregone trading revenue from YouInvest as a form of client acquisition cost to get new customers who may eventually expand their relationship to use more of JPMorgan Chase’s credit card, banking, and lending solutions in the future (or move up to their Private Client advisory services).

UBS Folds Its U.K. Digital Advice Platform SmartWealth To Go All-In With SigFig Globally. As large financial institutions increasingly seek to adopt “digital advice” robo tools to improve efficiency, expand wallet share, and reach new (next generation) markets, the “buy, build, or lease” decision looms large for firms to figure out whether to innovate internally, acquire technology firms, or simply ‘lease’ the technology from a growing crop of B2B providers. And while a number of major firms have decided to build their own solutions, wirehouse UBS was noted back in 2016 for its decision to instead partner with SigFig (once of the many early B2C robo-adviser solutions that was in the midst of pivoting to a B2B solution instead) in the US, even as UBS hedged its bets by also building its own SmartWealth digital advice platform in the UK at the same time. Earlier this year, UBS formally launched its SigFig partnership – dubbed UBS Advice Advantage – and now just 6 months later, UBS has announced that it is shutting down its SmartWealth platform and selling its IP to SigFig, a major testament to SigFig as UBS goes all-in with them, and SigFig itself gains both a channel to go global through UBS’s international presence and an immediate toe-hold in the UK digital advice market. The significance of the deal for the industry at large goes beyond just SigFig’s own substantial business opportunity, though, as the apparent success of the B2B partnership emphasizes a sea-change underway amongst large financial services firms that appear to be increasingly willing to embrace and partner with outside innovation, rather than continue to suffer the Innovator’s Dilemma of struggling to build innovative technology themselves… which bodes very favorably for a growing number of startup opportunities for B2B adviser FinTech companies in the coming years.

Bambu And DriveWealth Team Up To Produce Yet Another Digital Advice Platform As Market Saturates. The initial traction of robo-advisers, combined with eye-popping venture capital valuations, spawned not only a massive number of startup competitors here in the US, but also inspired robo-adviser startups in most other countries with developed markets as well. And now that most US robo-advisers have struggled to gain traction and pivoted to a B2B model instead, so too are many robo-advisers in other countries looking for a B2B shift. Except the challenge is that other countries have both far smaller financial services institutions and systems than the US, and many have tighter regulations and less open ecosystem to gain B2B market traction. In this context, it’s notable that Bambu, a 2-year-old Singapore-based robo-adviser, has announced plans to launch a digital advice solution for advisers here in the US, building in partnership with DriveWealth, a tech-centric custody and clearing firm with a history of partnering with non-US firms to help access US markets. However, it’s not entirely clear what type of adviser or institution the new partnership aims to reach, as most RIAs and broker-dealers already have existing custody and clearing relationships and may not be interested in disrupting existing ties for technology that is increasingly accessible either directly or through partnership with almost all other existing custody and clearing firms serving US advisers. In other words, while advisers increasingly demand more “robo” solutions to improve their own back-office efficiencies, the more that existing custody and clearing firms improve their own capabilities in this regard, the less advisory firms need any kind of third-party digital advice solution at all, as the core capabilities (e.g., automated onboarding with straight-thru processing) simply become a native part of the clearing firm’s own process. Which means that at best, Bambu and DriveWealth will have to compete in some narrow niche that can perhaps leverage their unique global cross-border capabilities. And the mere fact that it’s so increasingly difficult to differentiate one “digital advice” solution from another suggests that perhaps the entire digital advice marketplace has quickly become saturated (before the growing capabilities of custody and clearing platforms potentially make them a moot point anyway?).

Orion Expands Fee-Based Annuity Data Integrations With Allianz Partnership. While select companies like Jefferson National have marketed a fee-based variable annuity to RIAs for years, it wasn’t until the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule proposal that most major annuity carriers gave serious consideration to the possibility that the future of annuities could be fee-based products distributed through RIAs, rather than commission-based products sold by broker-dealers and annuity agents. Over the past two years, this has led to a rising number of fee-based annuity products being rolled out for use by independent RIAs… with the caveat that while RIAs do need no-commission products for their clients (as a standalone RIA can’t legally accept the commission in the first place), RIAs also lack the systems necessary to manage annuity products as part of a more holistic portfolio and investment management process. As a result, a number of annuity providers are now also beginning to build data feed integrations directly to portfolio management tools, with Lincoln Financial announcing earlier this year a data feed integration to Orion, followed by another announcement that Allianz Life (one of the top 3 providers of fixed and indexed annuities) has built a daily-download data integration to Orion as well. Ultimately, it still remains to be seen whether RIAs will really begin to adopt annuity products en masse, but at the least, a growing number of data integrations will ensure that RIAs can implement annuities and still be able to implement their portfolio performance reporting and billing processes.

RightCapital Launches Student Loan Module For Servicing Next Generation Clients. Historically, financial planning has been focused primarily around the products that advisers were paid to implement, with financial planning software being particularly effective at demonstrating the need for life insurance and contributing to college and retirement accounts. And as the advisory industry has increasingly shifted towards the fee-based AUM model, advisers’ clientele have increasingly shifted to those approaching or already in retirement… leaving an advice gap for next-generation clients whose primary focus isn’t insurance or investments, but dealing with a cumulative $1.5 trillion student debt load, which has a complexity around various forgiveness and Federal repayment programs that makes Social Security rules look “simple” by comparison. In this context, financial planning software newcomer RightCapital announced this month the first student loan advice module, where clients can either account-aggregate or manually enter their student loan data, and RightCapital then provides an interactive flowchart of repayment options including IBR, PAYE, REPAYE, and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) programs (as contrasted with other planning software tools, where the actual student loan payments can be entered as cash flows in the overall plan, but there’s no way to model the alternatives/trade-offs of refinancing and various Federal repayment programs). Ultimately, it’s not clear how significant the demand really is amongst advisers yet for student loan planning tools, especially since advisers are not typically compensated for student loan debt consolidation/refinancing programs, but with the ongoing growth of fee-for-service advice models, it seems likely that adviser demand will only increase as more and more work with next-generation clients who have the financial wherewithal to pay for advice directly, and want advice on their most pressing financial issues.

MoneyGuidePro Deepens Integration With Wealth Access To Fill Void For Holistic Client PFM Solution. In a world where financial planning software calculations themselves are increasingly commoditized, MoneyGuidePro has differentiated itself by focusing more and more on the client experience of their collaborative planning tools that allow advisers to deliver their advice interactively with clients. The caveat, however, is that collaborative planning tools are only relevant to clients the 1-4 times per year they are meeting with their financial adviser – as contrasted with personal financial management (PFM) tools that remain relevant and valuable to clients the other 361+ days of the year. As a result, eMoney Advisor, and its native PFM dashboard for clients, has managed to gain market share from MGP in recent years, despite selling for a whopping 3X the price, and increased pressure on MGP to come up with its own solution. Strategically, MoneyGuidePro has decided to focus on its core collaborative planning and projection tools, though, compelling it to find PFM partners instead, leading to a 2015 integration with then-newcomer adviser PFM portal WealthAccess. And now, MoneyGuidePro and WealthAccess have announced an even deeper integration, including a single-sign-on passthrough from WealthAccess and into MoneyGuidePro, along with sending the MoneyGuidePro Confidence and Monte Carlo Meters into the WealthAccess portal and sending a MoneyGuidePro plan into the WealthAccess vault. Which is significant, as it suggests (not surprisingly) that advisers and their clients increasingly prefer to log into their PFM portal first (via WealthAccess), rather than access that information directly from MoneyGuidePro’s own portal. For MoneyGuidePro users who have been frustrated by the lack of PFM portal capabilities, the deeper integration to WealthAccess that allows it to be the primary or sole login point for clients for all their financial planning needs will likely be a welcome change and provides WealthAccess with a pathway to a substantial MoneyGuidePro user base. On the other hand, given that virtually all other financial planning software providers have been building their own PFM portal solutions in recent years, the question arises as to whether WealthAccess may become too reliant on its MoneyGuidePro partnership (lacking other planning software tools to integrate with), whether MoneyGuidePro may become too reliant on WealthAccess (ceding control of what increasingly is a core functionality for how advisers use financial planning software), or whether in the end MoneyGuidePro and WealthAccess may end out being merged (or acquired) together anyway?

MyRepChat Text Messaging Compliance Solution Rolls Out Protective Client Private Data Filters. In the early years of email in the 1990s, compliance departments were very wary of what information was communicated to clients via email, leading to a requirement that compliance had to pre-approve every email before it was sent … and driving most advisers to decide to just rely on telephone calls to clients instead of adopting the new technology. It wasn’t until email archiving solutions rolled out over the subsequent decade, making it possible to email with clients in real time and have compliance review the communication after the fact, that email communication between advisers and clients became mainstream and accepted. A similar evolution is now underway with text messaging, which became popular as a general communication tool over the past decade with the rise of the smartphone (as the original iPhone just celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year), but has only recently witnessed the rollout of compliant archiving solutions for text messaging like MyRepChat. The appeal of text messaging as a form of communication is that it goes directly to the intended recipient, with estimates that upwards of 90% of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of receiving it, allowing for quick and easy communication. The challenge, though, is that some clients treat text messaging as so direct and intimate, that they’ll share otherwise secure private information via text message, like Social Security or investment account numbers. To help prevent this exposure of private client information, MyRepChat has announced the launch of a new “Data Loss Prevention” feature, that allows compliance officers to set patterns (e.g., ###-##-####) or keyword triggers that will immediately quarantine text messages that clients may transmit with needs-to-be-secure information. With the added bonus that those filters will also catch and quarantine messages from advisers who unwittingly communicate inappropriate private client information as well.

Advisor Marketing Firm FMG Suite Acquires Platinum Advisor Strategies To Deepen Outsourced Inbound Marketing Services For Advisors. Industry benchmarking studies show that the typical advisory firm spends no more than about 2% of its revenues on marketing, leaving most firms few alternatives for growth besides relying on organic referrals from existing clients. And realistically, most advisory firms couldn’t effectively compete in traditional advertising markets anyway, being entirely dwarfed by traditional financial services firms will 100X the marketing budget. However, rising competition for clients is causing slowing growth for most advisory firms, even as the internet opens up new possibilities for adviser marketing, supporting a shift towards more niche-based inbound marketing strategies that have become very popular in other industries over the past decade, leveraged by rapidly growing software solutions like InfusionSoft and HubSpot. Amongst the financial adviser community, though, few advisory firms have figured out how to embrace inbound marketing, especially with relatively complex tools not built for the financial services industry, which has opened the door for providers like FMG Suite over the past decade to become an adviser-industry-specific inbound marketing solution. And now, FMG Suite has announced that it is acquiring Platinum Advisor Strategies, which provides outsourced marketing consulting and support to advisers. When coupled with also recently acquiring Peter Montoya’s Marketing Pro, which had one of the largest libraries of pre-written marketing content for advisers, FMG Suite now has an increasingly holistic outsourced marketing solution for advisers to drive their inbound content marketing efforts. The timing of the Platinum Advisor Strategies sale is somewhat surprising, though, as its owners Robert and Thomas Fross have sold the company barely 6 months after they were forced in arbitration to pay over $1M to acquire the shares of improperly terminated former Platinum COO and co-founder Robert Sofia, for which the Fross brothers bragged that they were able to force Sofia’s liquidation via arbitration for “a fraction of the value of his shares.” And ironically, then Sofia went on to found SnappyKraken, which won the XYPN FinTech competition in 2016 for its “HubSpot for Advisors” #MarTech solution that would compete directly with the inbound marketing technology solution FMGSuite is reportedly building.

CFP Board Leverages Blockchain Technology To Provide Digital CFP Certificates. While the media has been abuzz about the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and the financial services industry has reportedly been investing heavily into creative ways to leverage blockchain technology, thus far most financial advisers still view cryptocurrencies skeptically, and there have been few practical applications of a public ledger blockchain relevant to financial advisers. But this month, the CFP Board revealed in its monthly newsletter one interesting application – using a public blockchain ledger to validate a “digital CFP certificate” that advisers will be able to share via an embedded link on their website or in an email signature block. Of course, the CFP Board already provides a public tool to verify that someone is a CFP professional, and in theory a bad actor could simply make their own fake look-a-like CFP digital certificate themselves (albeit at the risk of being sued for infringing on the CFP Board’s trademark), but if the CFP Board ultimately leverages its ongoing public awareness campaign to draw consumers to a particular digital CFP certificate brand or image to verify the authenticity of their CFP professional, it provides a unique means of unified branding amongst all CFP certificants to advance the brand of the CFP marks.

New Product Watch: Could The Galileo Securities Solution Make Holding Cash For Client Spending A Moot Point? One of the fundamental tensions of investing client portfolios in recent years, particularly for retirees, is that retired clients need to take ongoing cash flows from their portfolio to support their spending, but cash has had such minuscule returns that advisory firms try to keep clients fully invested and don’t want to hold any more cash than they absolutely need to. However, an upstart payment processing firm called Galileo has launched a new “Securities Solution” designed to allow clients to make debit card payments directly against an investment account, making it feasible for clients to keep their brokerage accounts fully invested until the exact day that the payment occurs, at which point a sale can occur to free up the necessary cash to cover the payment. Currently powering the InteractiveBrokers Debit Mastercard, the appeal of the Galileo Securities Solution is that it provides a means for advisers to further consolidate all of a client’s assets, without even needing to hold aside cash for spending purposes. Of course, it’s equally important that the advisory firm has a fee-based wrap account arrangement (to avoid clients being chewed up by even small per-trade transaction fees that can add up quickly), and may necessitate additional rebalancing and trading software capabilities to help manage a higher volume of ongoing small trades efficiently. Although ironically, in a world where RIA custodians and broker-dealers often make more in profits from cash holdings (in the form of money market fund expense ratios or net interest margin on affiliated bank holdings) than they do from transactions or fully invested portfolios, it’s not clear whether most of today’s adviser platforms will even be willing to facilitate such a solution without first adjusting their own business models. Nonetheless, the Galileo Securities Solution arguably provides a fascinating glimpse into the potential future of fully integrated wealth management and generating spending cash from retirement portfolios… where clients have a near-frictionless opportunity to liquidate and spend directly from their investment portfolios at the exact moment they need (and in small enough transaction sizes that it may even reduce sequence of return risk!).

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In the meantime, we’ve updated the latest version of our Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map with several new companies, including highlights of the “Category Newcomers” in each area to highlight new FinTech innovation!

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Click here for a larger version of the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map

So what do you think? Will Schwab lose business by walking away from their multicustodial PortfolioConnect solution, or win business by offering otherwise-expensive portfolio accounting software for free? Does the ability to get direct annuity data feeds increase your interest in using an annuity in a fee-based world? Would you have your retired clients set up a debit card to do their spending directly from their retirement accounts if it meant being able to stay fully invested without any cash drag? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

Michael Kitces is a Partner and the Director of Wealth Management for Pinnacle Advisory Group, co-founder of the XY Planning Network and AdvicePay, and publisher of a continuing education blog for financial planners, Nerd’s Eye View. You can follow him on Twitter at @MichaelKitces.

Related Topics: Fintech for Advisers