With Schwab, advisers voice their views in the MarketSquare

Schwab PortfolioCenter received an overall rating of four out of five stars from advisory firms on the new Schwab OpenView MarketSquare site — built by Schwab Intelligent Technologies — which opened for business last Monday. Five stars is the highest rating a product can receive, and the review was based on a total of 71 user-generated reviews. Those reviews were edited by the folks at SIT and the highlights consolidated into a single text passage of a few hundred words. The text was not a whitewash: It noted some semi-harsh criticism of the venerable application, including that while it is reliable, it feels dated — “vintage,” according to one reviewer. This was the only example included with a prepared statement from SIT. Since the MarketSquare site was announced last November, SIT has received 400 reviews from among the almost 7,000 advisory firms keeping assets under custody at Schwab. Those reviews span 80 products. Along with last week's launch came reviews of 15 of those products, including customer relationship management, portfolio management, document management, trading and re-balancing, and financial planning applications. Third-party technology providers agree to have their products reviewed on MarketSquare and are allowed to post a response to the reviews. Forty companies have agreed to participate, among them CRM Software Inc. creators of Junxure CRM; Envestnet | Tamarac; Salentica CRM (which is built on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM); Morningstar Inc.; and, of course, Schwab Performance Technologies (the Schwab subsidiary behind PortfolioCenter). According to the statement announcing the rollout, “MarketSquare reviews consist of a combination of both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Advisers rate a product on a five-point scale across several categories, including feature and functionality, setup and implementation experience, and customer service and support. They can also include lengthy written comments. “The reviews are then categorized and analyzed so that prevailing sentiments are identified and a consolidated review is produced. Common themes are highlighted from adviser comments — both positive and negative — that include verbatim quotes that help amplify the voice of advisers. Only products with a minimum of five reviews are candidates for inclusion.”