by Andrew Gluck
1/15/2010 3:04:00 PM
When I was in graduate school in 1978, one of the members of Monty Python Flying Circus was a guest lecturer at journalism school. He was there to talk about a parody paper he published called Not The New York Times. It was an exact replica of the real newspaper, but it was all fake news.
That summer, Pope Paul VI died and was succeed by Pope John Paul I, who died 33 days after being elected. This led the faux paper to write a fake news story saying the third Pope that month, "John Paul John Paul," died 18 minutes after he was elected. "Pope Dies Yet Again," read the headline, "Reign is Briefest Ever," said the subtext, which added, "Cardinals Return From Airport."
I am not sure whether the speaker was Graham Chapman or John Cleese. But I do remember clearly that he told us that the fake New York Times was a new business idea called custom publishing. "Someday, there will be a magazine called 'Fred,'" he said, "dedicated solely to people named Fred."
That line about Fred magazine has always stuck in my mind. As ridiculous as it sounded, the idea of personalized publishing tantalized me.
Thirty-two years later, I can tell you that Advisor Products is making that prediction a reality.
Client Portals from Advisor Products lets an advisor create a personal electronic newsletter for each individual client. You can profile each client as retiree, pre-retiree, or business owner, and you can choose from a list of topics that would interest each client from our list of 100 wealth management topics.
Those two settings determine which stories from Advisor Products' proprietary content library of hundreds of articles will appear on the client's personal web page. Those settings also filter the topics of wealth management articles we do not write but that we allow into the client's personal portal.
In addition, you can bring in RSS feeds about entertainment, sports, health, food, and myriad other topics from other websites.
Personalizing financial articles is only one small part of the Client Portal platform. It also integrates with many CRM, financial planning, and performance reporting applications and includes a personal vault for each client. To learn more, call us at 516 333-0066 ext. 223.
by Andrew Gluck
1/6/2010 4:41:00 PM
Advisor Products this week upgraded AdvisorSites Compliance Engine to streamline advertising compliance for independent advisors and broker/dealers.
Advisor Products hosts websites for 1,200 independent advisory firms, and provides them with AdvisorSites BackOffice, a content management system that enables technology novices to add new text, graphics, and pages to their websites.
AdvisorSites Compliance Engine (ACE) is a component of the BackOffice content management system. When an advisory firm changes tax, graphics, or pages on its website, ACE automatically notifies the advisory firm's compliance specialist, typically at an independent broker/dealer. ACE can be enabled on any firm’s website and provided to broker/dealer or compliance consultant.
With ACE, a compliance specialist can accept, reject, or require revisions to the content, and the changes made by the advisory firm must be submitted and then approved by the compliance specialist before they are displayed on the firm's website.
The upgrade to ACE eases the workflow and organizes information between the advisory firm and its compliance officer when changes are needed to the advisory firm’s website. Here's a summary of the new features.
Attach Notes. An advisory firm can attach a note to any new content it submits for approval and the note is visible to the compliance analyst reviewing the content. An advisor can attach a note to a submission telling the compliance analyst that the content was previously approved and providing a reference number for the earlier submission, or an advisor can simply attach a note to a submission for his own reference.
A compliance analyst can also attach notes to a submission. If, for instance, content submitted by an advisory firm is rejected and requires changes, the compliance officer in rejecting the content can attach a note about changes required for approval.
Compliance History. The entire compliance history of each page of the advisor's website is saved and available to the advisor and so are all notes attached to each submission. The Compliance History Report lists dates of all content submissions and their results. An advisor and B/D can go back and see when a page on the website was last changed, or how long it takes for a compliance analyst to review submissions.
The Compliance History Report creates an ongoing record that the advisor and B/D compliance officer can make available in the event of an audit by FINRA, or state or federal securities regulators. The report displays the compliance history an advisory firm's entire website or the history of a particular page.
ACE has been used by scores of independent broker dealers for over a decade. It also automatically creates archives of advisory firm websites whenever changes are made to a site.
While ACE is used predominantly by independent broker/dealers to streamline compliance workflow, it can also be used by Registered Investment Advisers to outsource advertising review to a compliance consultant.
Advisor Products added the new features to ACE after a compliance analyst at a broker/dealer suggested ways to ease his workflow. If you are an independent broker/dealer or RIA and have suggestions for improving Advisor Products systems, please let me know.
by Andrew Gluck
12/23/2009 4:15:00 PM
A4A aggregates news for advisors. Every business morning by 8:30 a.m., we post the major news stories advisors need to read and email it to members. Now all of that, along with our own content, is searchable.
Essentially, Advisors4advisors' news aggregation is a searchable database for advisor information.
The power of that is big. We're reading all of the trade magazines, and many sites that are off the beaten path, to create a reading list for advisors every business day. It's the best of the best articles for advisors, a huge time saver.
Mary Rowland, who wrote a personal finance column every Sunday in The New York Times for about a decade, aggregates the market and economy news. Bob Casey, former Editor of Bloomberg Wealth Manager, aggregates the industry news each morning, and I aggregate technology news.
All of the news we aggregate is indexed by our site’s search engine. So when you run a search on A4A, you're searching our collective database of major stories from many trade publications and industry-related websites.
For instance, A search of the term "rebalancing" turns up 16 results from a range of websites frequented by advisors plus a few that advisors probably don't read, like the SEC's website.
If you compare A4A's search results to other sites frequented by advisors, you'll also see how our tight focus on practice management provides information not available anywhere else.
Of course, the search feature is only one small part of what Advisors4Advisors delivers. Among the many other benefits you get by joining Advisors4Advisors:
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Reviews by advisors of all software products used in the industry—like product reviews on Amazon.
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Blogs by experts on compliance, technology, operations, document management, and other topics.
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A social network of advisors using the same CRM, financial planning, and portfolio reporting systems as you.
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A way to compare advisor software applications feature-by-feature, side-by-side.
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Free CFP CE credit 24/7 for replays of the weekly Financial Advisor Webinar Series.
At $60 a year, we're providing a lot of value. But don't take my word for it.
Check it out yourself. Register now for a free one-month trial.
by Andrew Gluck
12/6/2009 6:41:00 PM
Advisors who attended last Friday’s webinar on secure hardware generally gave the session very high ratings.
We managed to have some fun with this very serious topic when we raffled products provided by each of the vendors. Before the session, I wrote down a series of numbers between 1 and 100 and attendees chatted in guesses. (Though I momentarily feared the chat surge might crash the webinar, we averted disaster.)
Seagate donated a Dell Latitude D620 Notebook with a self-encrypting hard drive, which was won by Ross Heart of Heart Capital.
IronKey provided three of it 4 GB USB drives, which were won by Linda Cordoba of John Lyman Wealth Advisors, Mary Rose Sanger of Legacy Capital Partners, and Art Papale of QS, Inc.
Five one-year licenses to Lo-Jack For Laptops were awarded to Gene Gurley of Miller Equity Capital Advisors, Jason Kley of Vector Wealth Management, Susan Burns of Hall & Burns Wealth Management, Cheryl Morhauser of Cheryl Morhauser & Associates, and Adam Mosely of Charles Schwab.
While we normally try to avoid product pitches at the Financial Advisor Webinar Series, presenters were asked to talk about their products because that was the best way to tackle a topic so far afield from wealth management. Judging from the attendee comments, the direct approach worked just fine.
The three presenters each had a different security solution for advisors, but advisory firms probably need all three to begin to create a secure environment for client data.
Seagate’s Joni Clark talked about self-encrypting hard drives that come built into Dell, Lenovo, HP and other PCs and provide encryption without degrading performance. Hardware-based encryption is very different from drives secured by adding software and it is widely regarded as the strongest protection from traditional software attacks because the full drive is always encrypted and the encryption keys never leave the drive.
IronKey’s John Jefferies talked about his company’s secure USB drive that essentially self destructs if someone incorrectly enters a password repeatedly, and it also has a password management program, is waterproof, scans for malware, provides protection against key loggers, and other features.
Absolute Software’s Pam Seale spoke about LoJack for Laptops, a product that can be found at Best Buy and other retail outlets and that is an add-on option for many new computers. If your computer is lost or stolen, not only can police track it down but you can disable the drive remotely.
Join us this Friday, December 11 at 4 ET for our next webinar, when our presenter will be Ben Norquist of Convergent Retirement Plan Solutions. Ben specializes in teaching and training advisors about all aspects of the qualified retirement plan business and is focusing this session on how advisors can talk with clients and prospects about the Roth IRA conversion opportunity. This is the biggest strategic financial decision clients have had to make since the financial crisis. Norquist says that if you do not by the first of the year have a strategy for approaching and advising on a Roth conversion, you’ve probably missed the chance to get it right.
Below are the unedited comments submitted by attendees who were kind enough to fill in our survey and provide feedback about last week's session. Apart from one person who thought the session was “boring” and a couple of advisors who thought it was too technical, attendees appreciated our deep dive into a technology topic that does not get much attention in the trade press because it is so technical.
Here are the comments we received.
· Very good except for audio on the first speaker.
· Excellent. I will be purchasing each presenter's products in the near future.
· Improve it......make me a door prize winner :-)
· Very practical solutions to an important problem.
· It was great. Thanks for the opportunity to win things we can use in the office.
· Please create a compliance security checklist and the appropriate devices/software to implement compliance. Also cover using and securing Blackberrys and netbooks.
· Great information!
· Very Good
· Very good and informative to the risk and solutions in insurance and advisor maket.
· Very good, Needed more time to address all questions. Thanks
· Very timely info and very key to my needs of secure devices.
· Too long of commercial at the beginning.
· Good overview of a complicated subject. I didn't realize how much we were missing
· Would not accept access code when called in by phone.
· It was great!
· How can I think of any improvement when I hear my name winning a new laptop?! Fantastic! Seriously, it was a great topic that I have very little knowledge in but concerns with. (Guessing many other advisors as well.)
· Good but too technical. Not sure how the USB drive works. Do you put all your data on it? Just your secure data? Isn't that then easier to lose? Was really looking for a way to secure my existing data. The Seagate drive seemed to be the only automatic option.
· Great overview of three relevant products. I appreciate that the presenters offered lots of info while sticking to their allotted times.
· Improvement: put slides on AP website, not just a bit.ly link
· Lots of great information.
· Would have given 5s had there been more advisor-centric security discussions, such as responsibilities and notification requirements after security breaches and/or lost/stolen equipment.
· This was a great one. Highly relevant. Thank you.
· It was great, even though a lot of it went over my head. I'm not a techy.
· This was a very useful and informative webinar. Safety of client information is a top concern and this gave me some good info for follow-up
· This webinar seemed to be for IT folks who serve our industry or for advisors that really enjoy diving into the tech stuff. It was for the average advisor as I hoped it would be.
· Volume of the first presenter was very low. Everyone else was fine.
· I did not know that there were so many options for encryption
· Keep it simple -without the long speeches.
· It was not interesting - very boring.
· Excellent information, very eye-opening. Nice touch with the giveaways.
· Great info, rapidly communicated. Good speakers. Nice to have several speakers to fill the time!
These webinars are constantly improving. Many thanks.
· It was very good, but honestly over my head. I am going to share the information with our IT Manager.
by Andrew Gluck
12/3/2009 3:18:00 PM
Using the Advisor Products BackOffice, financial advisors can now add a new type of page to their sites that’s preconfigured for exchanging links with allied professionals.
Alliance Builder is a great way for a financial advisor to build referral relationships with other professionals and also increases an advisory firm website’s “link popularity,” an important factor in boosting search engine rankings.
“Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you,” according to Google’s guidelines for webmasters. “The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.”
Alliance Builder makes it easy to add an “Alliances” or “Partners” page to your site in minutes.
A lot of firms would probably want to exchange links with your firm, including:
| · Estate planners |
· CPAs |
| · Business valuation experts |
· Bankers |
| · Mortgage lenders |
· Geriatric care specialists |
| · Life insurance agents |
· Health benefit consultants |
| · Business consultants |
· Divorce lawyers |
| · Labor attorneys |
· Psychologists |
| · Elder care attorneys |
· Architects |
| · Contractors |
· Auto insurance brokers |
Alliance Builder not only lists the names of companies and colleagues who refer business to you, but it also enables them to submit the information that they want posted on your site.
You simply email or call your referral sources with the URL for the “Alliances” page on your website.
Your alliance partners come to the “Alliances” page and can input their company’s name, a brief description of their firm, and their website URL.
You are notified by email whenever an alliance partner submits a request to create a link on your site’s Alliances page. You can edit the text they wrote, approve it as is, or reject it.
This makes it really easy for referral sources to be listed on your site.
While Advisor Products wants to make it easy for you to gain link popularity, some important caveats must be mentioned.
Just because you post a link to your colleague’s firm on your website’s Alliances page, doesn’t mean he or she will reciprocate. For you to gain link popularity, your alliance partner must follow through and link to your website.
Moreover, you don’t want to abuse a link exchange program by allowing just anyone to post a link on your site.
Like most search engine optimization techniques, link popularity is not as simple as exchanging links with just anyone on the Internet. In fact, Google, the dominant search engine on the Web, penalizes you if you engage in “link schemes” and you could actually hurt your search engine visibility by engaging in gimmickry.
“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites,” ,” according to Google’s guidelines for webmasters. “This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results.”
We’ve seen some advisors create link exchanges with other advisory firms and we do not want to encourage this.
While linking to other financial advisory firms—even if they’re a few hundred miles away and don’t compete with you—you may sound like a clever way to gain link popularity, excessive use of such a gimmick is bound to catch up with you. Such search engine optimization tricks have been around for years and eventually the search engines get wise to it.
Also, don’t think you can link to the local barber shop, dress designer, or auto mechanic and benefit from it. Google is smarter than that.
Instead of gimmickry, keep it real. Exchange links with referral sources and other professionals with which you do business or want to do business. Look for firms that have content on their sites that is related to what you do, even if it may not be directly related to your financial advisory practice.
For instance, a local builder may not seem to be directly related to a wealth manager like you. But builders know that people doing construction need loans and financial advice and they may be interested to add a page to their site about the personal financial aspects of constructing a new home or office building even if they do not link to any advisory firms now.
Please also keep in mind that search engine optimization is a complicated field. Search engine algorithms are complicated and take many factors into consideration in ranking your site and link popularity is just one them.
Advisor Products hosts websites for about 1,200 independent advisory firms and Alliance Builder is just our latest innovative feature. For more information about our services, go to www.advisorproducts.com or call us at (888) 274-5755.
by Andrew Gluck
12/2/2009 5:56:00 PM
Increasing productivity at independent financial advisory firms, Advisor Products Inc. today released AdvisorVault 2.5.
AdvisorVault is an online platform for secure communications between advisors and their clients. It can be added on to any advisory firm website. 
The free upgrade streamlines routine tasks to promote client service and increase efficiency. New features include:
Track Client Activities. An advisory firm can track files downloaded by clients from the vault system. When a client reads a PDF portfolio report, for example, an entry is created in the log.
Collaboration. An advisor can add an accountant, attorney, or other outside professional to the vault and enable access to all of his clients’ vaults, a single client’s vault, a specific folder in a client’s vault, or a single file in a client’s vault.
Document Search. An advisor can search for a file or folder by full or partial name of the file. For instance, if you name all clients’ third-quarter portfolio reports “3Q09_AccountNumber,” you can search all of your firm’s client vaults for “3Q09” to retrieve a list of all the third-quarter 2009 portfolio reports.
Help Videos. Clients can access video help for using the vault. A series of one- and two-minute videos show clients how to drag and drop documents from their desktop to the vault, enable access for other professionals or family members, and view portfolio reports. (A separate series of videos is also available to advisors showing how to administer AdvisorVault.)
Incremental Portfolio Uploads. An advisory firm using Advent Axys® or Schwab PortfolioCenter® can upload only the most recent portfolio data without affecting previously uploaded reports. For example, you can upload holdings and transactions daily, but performance data only quarterly. This reduces the size of the upload and speeds up the process of batch uploading reports.
Email Templates. A firm can now create and store customized template emails that notify clients when portfolio reports and other documents become available in their vault. Template emails for routine tasks, such as posting a performance report, provisioning a vault for a new client, and changing vault passwords can be sent in bulk or one client at a time. Text for many routine tasks are already written for advisors to use and can be edited. Each template merges the client’s name into the salutation and includes your firm’s branding.
Disclosures. Advisors can upload a disclosure that will appear on the bottom of every page of every client’s vault.
Client-Vault Audits. An advisory firm can export a list of client accounts associated with vaults. This makes it easy for firms to audit whether they have properly mapped each client’s portfolio reports to the correct vault.
AdvisorVault 2.5 can be added to any website, whether or not it’s hosted by Advisor Products, for $1,000 a year or purchased with an Advisor Products Platinum website for $2,100 a year.
For additional information, please call our sales department at 888-274-5755.
by Andrew Gluck
11/23/2009 1:51:00 PM
The Financial Advisor Webinar Series has been a lot of fun for me and now I am going to start sharing the comments advisors make every week about each session.
The comments are not always flattering. In fact, they're often humbling for me. But I appreciate that you care enough about what we're doing to give us feedback.
Below you'll find the comments advisors gave us after last Friday's presentation, "Privacy Law, Data Security & Advisors," featuring Brendon Tavelli, a privacy law expert at Proshauer Rose LLP.
Before reading the comments advisors gave us, here's some background.
The Financial Advisor Webinar Series started in early October 2006 when advisors—along with just about everyone else—feared the world financial system might collapse.
Advisors were gracious in their thanks and we've kept doing it every Friday at 4 ET.
We've now produced about 55 sessions. Almost all of them are available for replay, and CFPs are eligible to receive CE credit for replays of many sessions.
The success of the series was a key factor in my decision to start Advisors4Advisors (A4A).
At the end of every webinar, I ask attendees to fill in a survey to give us feedback.
We plan to automatically feed the ratings and comments into the A4A Event Center but have not yet attacked that project. Until we do, I'll publish the comments from the exit surveys here in my blog every week.
You can view the replay of the session on privacy law and advisors and receive get CFP® CE credit for viewing this session if you’re a member of advisors4advisors.
If you don't care about the CE credit, you can see it for free at Advisor Products.
Please also join us for the next session on Secure Hardware For Advisors on Friday, Dec. 4 at 4 ET. Our presenters will be product managers from IronKey, LoJack For Laptops, and Seagate. Registering for that webinar lets you receive a free six-month membership in A4A.
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Interesting topic with lots of information that was new to me.
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Brendon was very knowledgeable and well prepared. Great presentation. I like the way Andrew approaches the seminars; he is easy going and professional. No sales here!
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Excellent as always!
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Very useful information.
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Excellent presentation.
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I found it very informative and the takeaway slides are completed in a manner that will allow me to remember what was said during the webinar as I reference them now and in the future.
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This was a clear, articulate guy. Good delivery, good information, and willingness to disclose when not certain.
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EXCELLENT - EXTREMELY WELL PRESENTED. VERY HELPFUL.
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Excellent and timely information.
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It was very informational. The changes in technology happen faster than any one person can keep track of them so the enforcement follows right behind.
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I enjoyed this one. It didn't end "right on time" when there were questions & other items to discuss.
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All good. Maybe include a few practical examples (in some detail) of actions firms are taking to comply with the new rules.
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Very good. We have a good privacy program in place although the info on Nevada regs was new to me.
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Audio sometimes fades out.
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I found it had timely, relevant information and was able to take away some good bits to share with my office. It would be great to have those slides if they are available.
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Very good.
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Great webinar - thanks!
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Recommendations for software solutions.
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Need more live examples of how to implement these new laws. Being an attorney, Brandon went for the max. In the real world, there has to be a reasonable method.
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Thank you - I had no idea about these requirements in Massachussetts and Nevada. Keep up the good work.
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Great! Things we'd not thought of before.
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Very good.
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Good, but left with more questions than I had before the webinar. To some extent it sounds like it is still fluid in terms of the ongoing evolution of regulations.
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More specific references on how implement security measures.
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More specific actionable items for advisors, less overview, particularly first half of the call.
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Very generic. I was hoping for more specific information and best practices advice.
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More Q+A.
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Too technical. Boring presentation.
by Andrew Gluck
11/21/2009 4:50:00 PM
Call me nerdy, but I was excited to get an attorney from a national law firm who specializes in privacy law to present an overview on this topic geared to advisors. So I’m a little troubled that more advisors did not attend yesterday’s privacy law webinar.
Since starting the Financial Advisor Webinar Series in October 2008, in the throes of a world economic calamity, attendance to the live sessions has held steady. We attract 150 to 225 attendees to each webinar (and another 250 or 300 view replays every week). But yesterday’s live session attracted only about 140 attendees.
Massachusetts and Nevada recently enacted new privacy laws and advisors face growing responsibilities to protect personal data about their clients. Meanwhile, security breaches now occur daily. (The New York Times featured a front-page story about a data breach today.)
Data security, or lack thereof, is a dirty little secret right now among independent advisors. My guess is the problem is already quietly stinging advisors. Hackers are rampant and employees can pretty easily steal client data to set up their own practices. But admitting you had a data breach is kind of like confessing you had an STD. You just don’t hear about it.
I’m not saying the sky is falling and don’t mean to sound alarmist. I’m just saying it’s an important issue that advisors need to learn about.
Advisors commonly carry laptops with client data and use unencrypted VPNs to connect to their offices from their homes. And these are just a couple of the obvious ways advisors are exposed.
I’ve been trying to include reports of security breaches in the Advisors4Advisors Daily Digest to keep members informed and will redouble my effort in the months ahead.
My disappointment that more attendees did not show up at yesterday’s webinar should not diminish the value of the information imparted by the presenter, Brendon Tavelli of Proskauer Rose LLP.
Please view the replay of this session. You can get CFP® CE credit for viewing this session if you’re a member of advisors4advisors. If not, you can see it for free at Advisor Products.
And sign up to attend the next session, which deals with a related issue--Secure Hardware Systems For Advisors, on Friday, Dec. 4 at 4 ET. Our presenters will be product managers from IronKey, LoJack For Laptops, and Seagate.
by Andrew Gluck
11/19/2009 1:01:00 PM
David Lucs, a project manager here at Advisor Products, has worked with scores of advisors over the past two years to help build their websites.
David cares deeply about our clients and wants Advisor Products to be great. He’s great.
In talking with him recently about the challenges of his job, he told me that one of the most difficult areas advisors struggle with is organizing the marketing content on their sites.
So David and I wrote this post together about how advisors can organize their website marketing copy. We’ll collaborate again soon on some other areas that can help you in building your site.
Home Page Text. Two or three short paragraphs on your home page should present your services, ideal clients, and why people should trust you to manage their money. Add a link in the text where people can get more in-depth information about your services.
Detailing Your Services. Use the “Services” page to define your services in detail. Start with a one-paragraph summary about your firm’s overall client experience and all its services. Follow that information with a paragraph about each of your specific services.
· Use bold text lead-in text to make it easy for a reader to skim and find the service in which he or she is most interested.
· Add links so a prospect can drill down to more specific information about each service.
· Workflow diagrams that accompany descriptions about your services are vital. Use a tool like SlickPlan to create a graphic depicting your process for personalizing portfolios, for example.
· Composites of target clients. If you target college professors, doctors, or senior management in a particular company or sector, for instance, write brief cases study about the problems faced by each target client and how you solved them.
Your Team. Visitors want to know about you and your staff. A “Team” page with photos satisfies our natural curiosity and engages visitors. Moreover, sharing your team’s professional qualifications and talents establishes your credibility. Avoid jargon and don’t expect visitors to be familiar with the alphabet soup of financial services professional designations. Say that you’re a CFP® licensee or have a Series 24 and explain in a sentence what you did to earn those credentials. Provide an email address at the end of your bio, along with any social networking credentials as a way for people to follow you on twitter or a link to your blog.
Resources. Link to forms, questionnaires, and other materials clients often need. If you write a blog, you obviously want to link to it. At Advisor Products, we provide a constant stream of FINRA-reviewed educational articles and videos about wealth management. These resources inspire ideas about new ways you can serve clients and draw them into conversations. Having this content on your sites shows prospects the issues you can help them with.
Compliance. Of course, all of what we’re saying here should be vetted by your compliance officer. Some compliance officers discourage the use of case studies or composites, and any marketing copy on your site is subject to rules governing advertising material.
People are not going to entrust you with their money based solely on your website. But people are likely to use your website to determine whether to meet with you and engage you. Unless your site is well organized and contains thoughtful content, you may never get that opportunity.
by Andrew Gluck
9/22/2009 10:43:00 PM
Advisor Products today released Email Templates For AdvisorVault, enabling automatic email notifications to clients when portfolio reports and other documents are posted.
You can customize and save these template emails in AdvisorVault, and they'll be branded with your firm logo and each client's name merged into the salutation. This enterprise-wide console for communicating to clients en masse streamlines required recordkeeping for financial advisors.
With advisory firms battered by the global financial crisis, increasing efficiency is a central focus and Email Templates For AdvisorVault saves time and money.
With Email Templates for AdvisorVault, an advisory firm sets up a mass email to its clients one time and then uses it over and over again. This streamlines notifications when posting a batch of documents or reports. For example, if an advisory firm uploads all of its clients’ reports from Schwab PortfolioCenter or Advent Axys to AdvisorVault, a template email can be sent in seconds to all clients at once. The same branded email also can be sent when a single client’s report is posted.
AdvisorVault is integrated with Advent Axys and Schwab PortfolioCenter, the two most popular portfolio management software applications used by independent advisory firms. When an advisory firm using Advent Axys or Schwab PortfolioCenter batch prints all of its clients’ reports to Adobe PDFs, the resulting file can be uploaded using AdvisorVault’s 256-bit high encryption. Based on an identification code unique to each client, each report automatically posts to each client’s vault. In addition to PortfolioCenter and Axys, many other applications used by advisors can leverage AdvisorVault’s batch-document capability.
Advisory firms can also batch upload a custom report in Axys or PortfolioCenter and AdvisorVault converts that data into HTML reports that contain links and are more dynamic than PDF reports. Email templates can also be set up to notify clients en masse whenever these reports are uploaded.
In addition saving the template text and firm logo, an advisory firm can set up a disclosure that will automatically be inserted into the bottom of every template email as well as an introduction. An advisory firm can define the “reply to” and “from” addresses that are displayed in each template email. In addition, all template emails can be previewed before they are sent and all mass template emails must be confirmed and approved before they are sent.
Email Templates For AdvisorVault includes text for common client communications associated with AdvisorVault, such as resetting a client’s password, enabling a vault for a new client, and provisioning an outside professional, such as an accountant or attorney, to access specified folders of a client’s vault. The dashboard for Email Templates For AdvisorVault allows an advisory firm to associate specific workflows or tasks with a specified email template. Features in Email Templates For AdvisorVault are explained in a 2½-minute help video.
AdvisorVault can be added to any advisory firm’s website for $1,000 a year. It is also bundled with a marketing website that includes a database of wealth management news articles, 10 email accounts, eight hours of support, and a website content management system for $2,100 a year. Online Portfolio Reporting for Axys or PortfolioCenter is an additional $1,500 annually.
Advent Axys is a registered trademark of Advent Software Corp.
Schwab PortfolioCenter is a product of Schwab Performace Technologies, a subsidiary of The Charles Schwab Corporation.
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