T3 Advisor Conference is the leading practice management and technology conference for independent and hybrid financial advisors. Produced by Joel Bruckenstein and friends on an annual basis, advisors emerge with timely information and insights on how to build a more efficient and profitable business.
Financial Advisor Software Survey
In the largest survey of its type in the industry, Bob Veres (www.bobveres.com) and Joel Bruckenstein (www.joelbruckenstein.com) shed new light on the market share of most software applications used by financial advisors as well as their satisfaction with these products. Veres and Bruckenstein released the 2020 report on February 18, 2020 in conjunction with the T3 Technology Conference for Advisors held at the Marriott Marquis in San Diego.
In all, more than 500 different programs, services and solutions are covered in the survey report. The data is provided through nearly 100 detailed charts and graphs, each tightly organized to deliver what Veres and Bruckenstein believe to be helpful information in every relevant software category.
More details are here.
Popular Themes: Saving time and tech integration
Technology integration was once again a popular theme at T3. Fidelity expanded its Integration Xchange with new functionality to help developers at wealth management firms and tech vendors test various integrations and see how they fit with their existing platforms.
Portfolio accounting provider Orion Advisor Services announced an enhanced integration with Salesforce to improve data synchronization with the popular CRM tool, as well as new integration with cash management tool MaxMyInterest.
LPL’s goal is for its technology to give advisers back at least one hour of each workday. In December, the firm introduced a new digital account opening tool it believes will save advisers five minutes.
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On February 18, Andrew Altfest, President of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, launched FP Alpha, an AI-powered technology solution for financial advisors. The software enables advisors to transform financial planning into comprehensive wealth management by streamlining financial planning processes and offering more services to clients. FP Alpha easily integrates with financial planning software. It allows advisors to scale efficiently and decrease the burden of time-consuming spreadsheets, checklists and labor-intensive tasks – enabling them to save time in the process and add more value to client relationships.
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Folio Financial gave a presentation entitled “Personalization Matters: Digital Wealth Technology to Reshape the Client Experience”. It covered clients’ increasing expectation for customized wealth management, and how Folio’s advanced FinTech – namely its latest innovation, the Digital Wealth Platform (DWP), and its fractional share-powered direct indexing technology, which Folio has offered since 2000 – can help. Folio’s Digital Wealth Platform offers the essential building blocks for financial advisors and institutions to deliver intelligent and personalized digital investment experiences – including the ability to do direct indexing – to a wide range of clients, such as RIAs, financial services enterprises and even consumer brands.
More details are here.
In a dramatic return to the main stage, serial technology entrepreneur Reed Colley was first up to tell the crowd about the launch of his new technology platform, Summit Wealth Systems. Colley first appeared at T3 over 12 years ago with the launch of his—at the time, groundbreaking—cloud-based performance reporting platform, Black Diamond.
According to Colley, Summit Wealth Systems is a modern wealth management platform that includes portfolio accounting and reporting at its core, with wealth modeling, rebalancing and client communication capabilities all built together into a unified system. Based on Colley’s history of innovation and leadership skills, and the ability to bring elegant solutions to the market, the future looks bright for Summit Wealth Systems.
More details are here.
Cloud-native platform INVENT returned to T3 after launching one year ago at the conference and presented some staggering growth numbers: Over 10,000 users and $260 billion on the platform. CEO Oleg Tishkevich and Principal Program Manager Jim Zimmerman of Microsoft Azure detailed the many benefits that Cloud-native technology will have on modernizing legacy systems. “INVENT will be the connective tissue that brings all of the disparate systems advisors, tech vendors, and custodians use together, ensuring data security, speed to market, synchronization, responsiveness and dramatic cost savings,” noted Tishkevich.
More details are here.
Envestnet MoneyGuide added to its Blocks feature, which lets clients create small pieces of a financial plan at a time, and revealed new tax planning optimization and API access for third-party developers.
More details are here.
Orion Advisor Tech, a premier provider of financial advisor technology, announced the new Orion Connect experience, a reimagined, next-generation user interface. The new experience blends Orion’s core app-centric model for grouping essential capabilities with a flexible dashboard-based layout that enables users to take quick action and easily move throughout the platform. Drawing from meticulous analysis of user behavior and feedback from a focused group of superusers across a range of roles and business models, Orion created the new home experience to highlight, centralize, and operationalize information crucial to an advisor’s day-to-day responsibilities, like client portfolio data, RMD reports, new account workflows, and more.
More details are here.
Black Diamond rolled out enhancements to its Client View dashboard, enabling advisors, through multiple technology integrations, to have an at-a-glance view into all of the clients’ information, planning results, performance, money moves, balances and positions, and more. “If you are able to quickly respond to clients in an expert fashion with all of the information at your fingertips, then you will build and enhance trust,” said Fleming.
More details are here.
Advice Systems Inc. (ASI), an early-stage personal financial technology company, unveiled its flagship product, Intelligent Decision Tools™ (IDT). According to CEO and ASI founder, Ronald E. Newton, CFP® “IDT is a new and unique category of software that automates personal financial advice. Our AI-driven solution simulates the process of how human financial advisors work with clients, answering both routine and complex financial planning questions through a concise Q&A process that typically takes a few minutes or less.”
More details are here.
Rich Cancro, CEO at AdvisorEngine, led off T3 Advisor Conf main session with perspectives on how RIAs can balance fees against services. Recently, advisors have been feeling confident in their ability to charge fees, even considering raising them. But that confidence is misplaced, he said, for two reasons: first is fee compression, which is eroding margins, and second is the wealth transfer currently underway. His solution employs technology automation that allows firms to leave referral-based growth behind and turning to marketing-based growth, instead. Essentially, working faster without adding to costs.
More details are here.
Twenty Over Ten, an industry-leading SaaS company, formally launched Lead Pilot, one of the industry’s first-ever AI-powered all-in-one solution for content creation and distribution. Twenty Over Ten made the announcement at the T3 Advisor Conference, taking place at the Marriott Marquis in San Diego, California. Lead Pilot enables advisors to launch robust, multi-touchpoint content campaigns from a streamlined, easy-to-use dashboard.
More details are here.