Nerd\'s Eye View Archives On Financial Advisor Conferences

SecondEdit…Highlights From The 2020 Tegra118 Elements Virtual Conference

March 4, 2022 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

In September 2020, InvestCloud hosted its Elements Virtual Conference, which brought together industry leaders and influencers to examine what they referred to as the four pillars of wealth management technology: 1) a hunger for greater productivity; 2) the drive for faster growth; 3) a call for social consciousness, and 4) a compulsion to race forward into the future. This conference paid special heed to how the onset of the coronavirus delivered a monumental shock to the wealth and asset management industries and hyper-accelerated industry shifts towards remote work, artificial intelligence, and automated company processes. Companies of all sizes were forced to pivot quickly and reinvent themselves to deal with these evolving industry trends. As these changes are expected to be long-term, if not permanent, shifts, it is essential for advisors to proactively adapt to them rather than passively wait for a return to normal.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured five key industry experts sharing their analyses of these four central pillars. Craig commences his recap with highlights from Margaret Regan, President and CEO of The FutureWork Institute, and Douglas Contant, President and CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, on reducing the barriers created in remote work while maximizing its advantages. Paul Romer, NYU economist and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, discussed how technology has transformed our economy from the natural limits of physical resources to the eternal growth of ideas and technology.

From there, panel discussion highlights included:

Data Utilization – In the digital age, a proactive advisor is an advisor that uses data well to recruit clients, anticipate life events, and streamline processes, a feat which is made infinitely easier by combining data and AI technology, and frees up the advisor to maintain a deeper focus on their clients and growing their firm;
Impression Management – Hard skills can help a firm grow far, but interpersonal skills, even one as simple as being authentic, are critical to connecting with clients over video or in-person;
Wealth Management – As while the typical wealth management advisor is currently swamped with choices, often juggling five to 15 financial services at once, there is a great need to simplify and streamline their services under larger, more variable platforms, paying special attention to transparency, hyper-personalization, and high responsiveness to allow for the best experience for them and their clients;
Retirement Personalization – Using AI in smart retirement planning has been getting a lot of hype because of its potential for education and personalization, but it often takes a technologically savvy advisor to make wise decisions – and to optimize their efficiency – while using AI tools.

True to the themes of the conference, the Elements Virtual Conference leveraged technology to its advantage in light of the pandemic. It spread over multiple days and featured a wide range of topics and speakers from outside the industry.

Ultimately, the Elements Virtual Conference embodies the future of the wealth management industry: leveraging technology, flexibility, and a plethora of expertise to deliver unique, applicable information that financial advisors can use to make wise decisions about helping their clients and growing their businesses.

The 11 ‘Best’ Financial Advisor Conferences To Choose From In 2022

November 15, 2021 07:03 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a number of dramatic changes for the typical financial advisor, who suddenly found themselves meeting with all their clients virtually, managing their entire team virtually… and trying – usually unsuccessfully – to network with other financial advisors at virtual conferences. As in the end, while the transition to Zoom-based conferences was ‘reasonably’ successful at delivering content for advisors, it’s done very little to alleviate the sense of isolation that has come with 18+ months of a work-from-home environment and the near-total shutdown of financial advisor conferences.

And so as vaccination rates continue to rise across the country – now accelerating as age 5–11 vaccines begin to roll out – advisors are steadily returning to the office, conferences are preparing to re-open their doors for in-person events in 2022… and a lot of advisors are expressing a newfound desire to get out from their 4 walls, take a trip (or an extended vacation!), and reconnect with other financial advisors and get some fresh ideas and inspiration about ‘what’s next’ for their own advisory businesses. Which just raises one key question: if you’re going to go back out for a conference in 2022, for the first time in nearly 3 years… what’s the best conference to attend?

As someone that has been speaking at 50-70 conferences a year for almost 15 years myself, I’ve seen the good and bad of our wide range of industry events, which are spread across membership associations, broker-dealers, insurance companies, RIA custodians, product manufacturers, media companies, private events, and more. And as a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry’s ‘best’ conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of 'best-in-class' top conferences for financial advisors, allocated across a range of different categories (as what’s best for solo advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for larger advisor enterprises, what’s best for fee-for-service advisors isn’t the same as what’s best for AUM firms, more technically oriented advisors will prefer different conferences than those seeking practice management or marketing ideas, etc.).

Having updated our annual conference list in every year since, I’m excited now to present my newest list of “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for the upcoming 2022 year, including both some technical conferences, a wide range of practice management conferences, and highlighting a few never-before-seen events that are emerging for the first time in the coming year.

In addition, we've also launched a new "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2022, for both advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend, and for vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

Of course, because of the disruption of the pandemic, it’s not entirely clear whether some events will show up in 2022 differently than they did the last time they were in person (which for most, was all the way back in 2019!). Nonetheless, as long as you find the conference that is the right type for you, the odds are good that your experience will be good when the content is more relevant, and the other attendees are similar to you (because they, too, were looking for the same thing!).

So I hope you find this year’s 2022 conferences list (and our new Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd’s Eye View readers!
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#FA Success Ep 230: Showing Financial Planning Value As An AUM Advisor By Focusing The Conversation, With Dan Moisand

May 25, 2021 07:05 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 230^th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today’s podcast is Dan Moisand. Dan is a Principal of Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo, a fee-only RIA headquartered in Melbourne, Florida that manages over $800m in assets for 650 households.

What’s unique about Dan, though, is his ability to communicate the value and power of financial planning to clients in a straightforward and compelling manner, illustrating in the process that if an advisor really focuses their communication on the planning issues, at every meeting, then their clients will view them as a planner… regardless of how their advisory fees are structured.

In this episode, we talk in depth about why Dan feels that there’s nothing wrong with offering the “average” advisory firm services for the average advisory fee and why their firm doesn’t discount, why Dan sees the concerns about fee compression as overblown and that the AUM fee model remains a perfectly viable method of charging clients, and why the trajectory of financial planning itself shouldn’t be gauged on the outlook of technology forces trying to simplify the advisor’s value proposition, but rather on the direction of complexity of the typical consumer’s financial life… which isn’t getting any simpler these days, and is just driving even more of them to seek financial advice.

We also talk about Dan’s views on why it’s the relationships the advisors forge with their clients that ultimately matter the most (and why technology may be an invaluable tool but it’s not a competitor for advisors because it just doesn’t care about the client the way another human being does), why it’s more important to simply be of service to clients than to try to always be the smartest person in the room (especially when Dan’s clientele literally include rocket scientists from the central Florida space programs), and the way Dan structures his initial conversations with clients around assessing their confidence levels in all the different aspects of their financial lives because, as Dan puts it, the real value of financial planning at its core is helping people to become or remain confident in all those areas for the rest of their lives.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Dan discusses his firm’s recent addition of a team member who’s exclusively in charge of building out workflows, automations, and software integrations so that their financial planners can spend more time serving their clients, how, despite all the changes in the industry and the ways in which advisors spend their time, the one thing that hasn’t changed in 30 years is that financial planning is about relationships and helping people, and why, being a good financial planner is less about the compensation or business model that we choose, and more about being skilled enough at communication to be able to explain to someone why they’d be better off going through the financial planning process.

So whether you are interested in learning how Dan communicates the value of financial planning to his clients, how he assesses a client's confidence level in the various aspects of their financial lives, or why he continues to view financial planning as a terrific career path, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Dan Moisand.

The Best Conferences To Attend (Or Not) In 2021 And The Future Of Financial Advisor Conferences

October 26, 2020 07:04 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

Reinvesting in one’s education is a staple of being a professional and is embodied in both the philosophy and the actual requirement of continuing education (CE). Of course, ideally, financial advisors will want to advance their knowledge not merely to fulfill a CE obligation but for the sake of the additional knowledge and expertise itself, which can pay dividends from better strategies for clients to practice management guidance that (even if not actually CE-eligible) helps them better execute their businesses and service their clients.

However, the world of financial advisor conferences – which so many advisors attend for those continuing education and advanced learning opportunities – were substantively disrupted in 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered virtually all in-person advisor events after the March outbreak through the end of the year, forcing some events to be canceled, others to be delayed into 2021, and most to be pivoted to an online/virtual format with… varying degrees of success.

Starting back in 2012, we began to publish an annual list of recommended conferences for financial advisors to attend – a byproduct of the fact that I’ve been speaking at 50 – 70 conferences per year for more than a decade myself, and as a result, have seen and attended virtually every major advisor event, and could provide a first-hand perspective on which events really delivered on their promise of advisor education, from membership associations to broker-dealers, insurance companies to RIA custodians, trade publications, private events, and more.

But as we come up on 2021, the reality is that no one knows exactly what the options for advisor conferences will even be in the coming year, given both the uncertainty about the timing of the coronavirus vaccine, a major shift in the economics of advisor conferences as vendors have pivoted heavily to running their own webinar events and appear to be scaling back on the future of conferences, and limited experience for any events about how well they really deliver, or not, in a virtual environment.

As a result, this year’s newest list of the “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for 2021 takes an alternative approach, focusing instead on the ‘knowns’ we can control in the decision of what events to pursue, including Community Events for the advisor’s platform (e.g., the advisor’s broker-dealer, RIA custodian, or advisor network), Deep Learning events for advisors looking to better specialize, immersive Practice Management events for those looking to get more efficient in (or better execute on) their businesses, and the ever-widening range of both free and paid Continuing Education on various topics.

In addition, we’ll continue to maintain our new “Master Conference List” of all financial advisor conferences in 2021, with ongoing updates for which will be virtual versus in-person, as a guide for advisors to plan their own conference budgets and schedule in the coming year.

So I hope you’ll find this upcoming year’s 2021 financial advisor conferences list (and our new 2021 Master Conference List) to be helpful, in an environment that admittedly poses far more uncertainty in the landscape of advisor events than we’ve ever seen… while still recognizing that in the end, reinvesting into our own education as financial advisors is still a professional imperative.

Financial Planning Research Highlights From The 2020 CFP Board Academic Research Colloquium

April 15, 2020 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

From February 20th through February 22nd, the CFP Board’s Center for Financial Planning hosted its third annual Academic Research Colloquium (ARC) for Financial Planning and Related Disciplines in Arlington, VA, to share and discuss research relevant to the financial planning profession.

This year’s event saw a sharp decline in attendance, down about 35% from 2019 (150 attendees in 2020, of which about 20 were practitioners), likely attributable to the fact that this year’s ARC was held separately from the CFP Board’s Registered Programs Conference (RPC), which is required to be attended by program directors of CFP-registered financial planning education programs. While this decline was unfortunate and definitely impacted the overall atmosphere (fewer practitioners, students, and academics who emphasize teaching were in attendance), the quality of the research remained high, and there were a number of papers presented that had strong implications for financial planners.

In this guest post, Dr. Derek Tharp – lead researcher at Kitces.com and an assistant professor of finance at the University of Southern Maine – provides a recap of the 2020 CFP Academic Research Colloquium, and highlights a few particular research studies with relevant takeaways for financial planning practitioners.

The 2020 CFP Academic Research Colloquium again had a strong showing from CFP Board Registered Ph.D. programs, with scholars from Missouri, Texas Tech, Georgia, and Kansas State producing nearly 37% of all research (when weighted by type of presentation and authorship rank). Additionally, Ohio State, Alabama, and Morningstar contributed another combined 15% of total research. Despite the concentration among top institutions, the ARC event remains academically diverse, drawing in scholars to present research from a total of 44 different institutions, including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU.

This year’s colloquium featured a wide breadth of topics. Some particularly relevant topics for practitioners included:

Re-examination of the conventional wisdom that small defined-contribution-plan investment menus are better than large menus (instead, research has suggested that bigger menus actually can be better for participants);
An analysis of U.S. consumers’ willingness to pay for hourly financial planning services (which found that most consumers aren’t willing to pay anywhere near the rates that advisors charge);
An investigation of whether fintech-mobile-application nudges can help individuals reduce their spending (yes, they can, but not by very much, and those nudges may drive consumers away from the apps in the future);
A study examining whether the use of a financial advisor among high-investable-asset households is associated with a reduction in financial anxiety or an increase in investment confidence (no to reducing anxiety; yes to increasing confidence); and
A study exploring whether different types of advisors (broker-dealers vs. RIAs, CFP professionals vs. non-CFP professionals, etc.) perceive the new “Best Interest” standard differently than a fiduciary standard (yes, they do; advisors at RIAs are more likely to be mistaken or confused about whether Reg BI applies to them, although brokers are more likely to mistakenly equivocate the “Best Interest” and fiduciary standard).

Overall, the fourth Academic Research Colloquium delivered on bringing together scholars to share high-quality financial planning research. However, this year’s low attendance felt like a step backward for the Center for Financial Planning’s goal to make the ARC the 'academic home' of financial planning. Nonetheless, the ARC continues to be a conference worthy of attending for both academics and practitioners who wish to engage in academic research.

Highlights From The 2020 T3 Advisor Conference

March 5, 2020 07:11 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

The 2020 Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor Conference, held last month in San Diego, California, featured a large gathering of financial advisors and representatives across the fintech industry attending the two-and-a-half-day conference, which showcased this year’s theme of “Acceleration and the Pace of Change.” Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting, the conference covered everything from how custodians are keeping ahead of the technology curve to the latest in portfolio management and reporting solutions, and from the latest in financial planning software innovations, to marketing tools, billing applications, and the importance of a solid cybersecurity plan.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – summarizes this year’s conference highlights with his signature Twitter-driven recap, kicking off with presentation highlights from custodial innovators such as Altruist CEO/Founder Jason Wenk, TD Ameritrade’s Director of Innovation Dani Fava, and TradePMR CEO Robb Baldwin, and from industry thought leaders from Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, BNY Mellon/Pershing, and Schwab, who gathered for a panel discussion to delve into the importance of understanding the needs of a diverse client base and maintaining gender equity in the workplace.

The annual T3 Tech survey, which assesses the software programs used by financial advisors, was also released at this year’s T3 Advisor Conference, and revealed that only 64% of advisors surveyed actually use financial planning software tools and even fewer (41%) use risk tolerance instruments, but that 81% use portfolio management tools, suggesting that many advisors are still not actually providing financial planning and remain focused mainly on asset management, instead. Other interesting results show Redtail capturing 62% of overall market share of all CRMs reported, with Wealthbox scoring at second place with less than 7% overall market share! Interestingly, though, more people indicated they were considering using Salesforce Financial Services Cloud than Redtail. And it’s not entirely clear how representative the survey really is of the broader advisor industry (as the survey link was simply open to any company that could encourage its users to participate and ‘turn out the vote’).

Other major highlights from the T3 Advisor Technology Conference included:

Betterment For Advisors made its first T3 conference appearance, with Head of Business Development Tom Moore discussing the firm’s automated investing and custodial services, along with its rapid growth (suspected to be bolstered by the recent inclusion of DFA funds to their investment lineup).
Broker-Dealer presentations included Cambridge CTO Nick Graham, who talked about digital transformation and emphasized the importance of creating a strategy before investing in new technology, and Burt White, LPL Financial Chief Investment Officer, who gave a keynote talk on the difference between running a business and growing a business.
Several new and emerging Portfolio Management vendors attended and offered demonstrations of their full-featured application solutions, including AdvisorPeak, Advyzon, D1g1t, Envestnet Tamarac, and several others.
Automated marketing tools are on the rise for financial advisors, as they often need help understanding it and improving their marketing processes. Vendors that attended and presented demonstrations include Snappy Kraken, AdvisorStream, FMG Suite, and TwentyOverTen.
Vendors showcasing financial planning solutions included Advicent (provider of Naviplan and Profiles financial planning tools), Apprise Labs (creator of Lifestyle Studio by former eMoney Advisor founder Edmond Walters), BlackRock (creator of iRetire, providing retirement income analyses), Covisum, Envestnet MoneyGuide, FinMason, FP Alpha, PlantechHub, Income Conductor, and LifeYield.
The conference also hosted a student competition, featuring university CFP programs from across the country. A mix of students studying financial planning and information technology teamed up with mentoring technology firms and were tasked to create RIA technology solutions addressing real, current financial planning problems. BYU Idaho (which was paired with AdvicePay) won the competition with a public-facing version of AdvicePay’s retainer-fee calculator for clients to use directly on an advisor’s website to calculate their own fees.
Brian Hamburger of Hamburger Law Firm and Founder/CEO of MarketCounsel, talked about cybersecurity, and stressed the importance of adequate training and adherence to compliance as good business practices, and also as basic requirements to simply maintain goodwill with clients.
Fidelity’s ESG Product Manager Hannah Lippe explained the similarities and differences between Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Investing, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) and Impact Investing, and how advisors can use these practices to strengthen client relationships.

Ultimately, the 2020 T3 Advisor Conference brought together vendors, industry thought leaders, financial advisors, and students with the shared goal of gaining insight into the fast-paced growth and change of the financial planning industry, along with learning about new technology tools available to help financial planning businesses flourish efficiently and profitably. In line with this year’s theme, there was an expansive array of new and upcoming technology solutions for current and emerging issues faced by today’s financial advisors, no matter the size of the firm.

Highlights From The 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference

November 14, 2019 07:10 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

In the last week of October, executive leadership from numerous independent broker-dealers and large RIAs gathered in South Florida for the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference (as differentiated from the T3 Advisor Conference that is predominantly attended by individual/independent advisors). Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting Services, the two-day conference mixed networking, panel sessions, and vendor presentations, focused more on enterprise-level solutions.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured new enterprise-level AdvisorTech offerings, interviews with industry leaders around emerging financial planning trends, and discussions on the challenges (and opportunities) that firms face in a rapidly-changing landscape.

Craig kicks off his recap highlighting Shirl Penney’s observation that fear and inertia are preventing advisors from going independent, but notes that they're also limiting countless advisory firms who won’t let go of their legacy technology (thus keeping legacy vendors in business). Also casting a long shadow over the proceedings was the Black Friday Crash of (Trading) Commissions, which Penney predicts will lead custodians to start charging for their technology (although Craig points out that there are far more intriguing possibilities for new revenue streams… particularly for smaller RIAs).

Another major theme permeating discussions at this year’s T3 Enterprise conference was the ongoing difficulties with vendor integrations. David Ballard from Ladenburg Thalmann pointed out that firms looking to integrate technology stacks and databases experience too many headaches, and that vendors should take the lead on building those integrations amongst themselves before pushing them out to the end-user.

Other highlights included presentations from:

InterGen Data, which combines government census data with other demographic data sets to deliver unique insights into future life events that could have a significant impact on clients and their families;
Whealthcare Planning, whose platform gives advisors tools to help with challenges their aging clients are facing, including helping retirees letting go of their independence around decision-making, driving, and domicile;
BidMoni, whose FiduciaryShield aims to create a marketplace to connect advisors with service providers when supporting company retirement plans (e.g., record keepers, custodians and TPAs);
Morningstar, which introduced Goal Bridge, a financial planning add-on for Advisor Workstation aimed not at selling financial products, but at selling data and analytics instead; and;
Mike Ragunas, CIO of Cetera Financial, who presented details around their implementation of AdvicePay for their new subscription-based direct billing platform.

Ultimately, the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference brought together a wide range of vendors and firm leaders with the goal of exploring ways to bring real value to their clients through improving the onboarding process and overall experience, while finding opportunities to increase integrations in order to improve firm efficiency and client retention. And, with the trend towards consolidation and aggregation of data and accounts, it behooves fintech providers to focus on integrations and making sure that the user experience is fast, painless, and seamless… or they can be sure that someone else will.

The 20 Best Conferences For Financial Advisors To Choose From In 2020

October 14, 2019 07:46 am 10 Comments CATEGORY: Conferences

It was Benjamin Franklin who once famously quipped “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”. The caveat, however, is that like any investment, it’s still important to do your due diligence in researching whether any particular allocation of dollars will be a good investment. And with the proliferation of financial advisor conferences in recent years, it has become more and more difficult to figure out which events are most likely to actually provide a good “Return On Investment” (ROI) in fruitful knowledge that advances your success as an advisor. Even if it often takes just one good takeaway from a conference that can be implemented to make the whole trip worthwhile.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that advisory firms themselves are evolving in an ever-wider range of directions, with small, mid-sized, and large firms, independents versus employee advisors, RIAs versus broker-dealers, and an ever-growing range of niche specializations… which means an objectively ‘good’ conference may be the absolute ‘best’ conference for one advisory firm (or one advisor within a firm)… yet be totally irrelevant for another.

As someone that has been speaking at nearly 70 conferences a year for almost a decade myself, I’ve seen the good and bad of our various industry events, which are spread across membership associations, broker-dealers, insurance companies, RIA custodians, product manufacturers, trade publications, private events, and more. And as a result, I am often asked for my own suggestions of what, really, are the industry’s ‘best’ conferences to attend.

Accordingly, back in 2012, I started to craft my own annual list of ’best-in-class’ top conferences for financial advisors in various categories (to allow advisors to match the available conference specialties to their own needs), and have updated it every year since, in what has become one of our most popular annual articles.

And so now, I’m excited to present my newest list of “Top Financial Advisor Conferences” for the upcoming 2020 year, broken into 5 broad categories: Go Home (to your broker-dealer, RIA custodian, or network conference); Go Local (to network at your membership association's local chapter meetings); Go Scale (whether it’s making your big advisory firm bigger, or your lifestyle practice more efficient); Go Specialize (in the various industry niche conferences for those cultivating deep subject matter expertise); or Go Broad (to one of the major regional or national association conferences).

In addition, we've also launched a new "Master Conference List" of all financial advisor conferences in 2020, for both advisors looking for a wider range of events to attend, and vendors looking for more conferences to exhibit at!

So I hope you find this year’s 2020 conferences list (and our new Master Conference List) to be helpful as a guide in planning your own conference budget and schedule for next year, and be certain to take advantage of the special discount codes that several conferences have offered to all of you as Nerd’s Eye View readers!

Highlights Of The 2019 FinTech Competition Finalists At XYPN LIVE

October 3, 2019 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Conferences

Last month, XY Planning Network held its fourth Annual FinTech Competition in the Union Station Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Each year, the FinTech Competition showcases software providers serving financial planners that are startup companies with either $1 million or less in revenue, or that have been in business for less than one year.

In this guest post, Bill Winterberg – financial technology consultant and founder of the tech blog FPPad.com – provides a recap of each finalist’s fintech presentation demo, which included a range of tools and services for financial planners, from tax planning and college financial aid planning software, to commission-free custody services and client survey software.

Bill kicks off with highlights from Holistiplan’s presentation on their innovative tax planning software, and how it can take a client’s entire tax return, digitize the data, and produce a client-friendly detailed report in less than a minute. The company aims to fill an important gap with its fintech offering by serving the large majority of financial advisors (estimated at over 90%!) who may collect tax documents from clients but have no tax planning software used in their businesses to support the analysis of all that tax information.

From there, additional XYPN FinTech Competition highlights, in the order of presentation, include:

Altruist (commission-free RIA custody services), which bills itself as a “commission-free digital custodian” providing a low-cost option for financial advisors to manage and report on their clients’ accounts held across traditional custodians, including account aggregation tools for outside investment accounts. Advisors can create custom reports with an option to set up a client-facing dashboard for clients to access and view their reports. Portfolio rebalancing tools also help the advisor manage and submit trades, and include automatic rebalancing features, trading of fractional shares, as well as commission-free trading.
Knudge (client engagement software) offers financial advisors a tool to help their clients stay on track with shared to-do lists. The software integrates with CRM systems, and lets advisors send custom reminders to their clients to keep them on track with given tasks they need to accomplish to achieve their financial planning goals. Clients can access their ‘nudges’ either through email or phone app.
College Aid Pro (college financial aid planning) offers software tools that help advisors guide their clients through the process of evaluating and selecting undergraduate colleges as well as the financial aid options available to attend each school. The software also creates custom reports that show details such as anticipated college expenses, grant and scholarship availability, and projections of anticipated earnings after graduation.
Anvil Foundry (form-filling document automation) aims to streamline the (digital) completion of routine paperwork in a financial planner’s daily workflow, including tasks such as opening new accounts and onboarding new clients (and simultaneously populating that data into other technology systems the advisory firm uses).
NEXA Insights (client survey software) provides a client survey tool that helps advisors create customized surveys helping them identify and track client trends, as well as assess client feedback in relation to other firms also using NEXA. The ultimate goal of the software is to provide information that will help advisors increase engagement and enhance the value-add offered to their clients.

After all finalists presented, a panel of judges – including Michael Kitces, guest-post author Bill Winterberg, and Robert Sofia (co-founder of Snappy Kraken and winner of the 2016 XY Planning Annual FinTech Competition) – named Holistiplan the 2019 winner of the competition for its easy-to-use analysis tools, and for providing a much-needed tax analysis option for use by financial planners. The judges also awarded an Honorable Mention to College Aid Pro for tackling the challenge faced by millions of students annually of evaluating undergraduate institutions and financial aid for families.

The Fifth Annual FinTech Competition will take place on October 12, 2020, at next year’s XYPN Live conference in Denver, Colorado.

Highlights From The 2019 In|Vest #FinTech Conference For Financial Advisors

July 25, 2019 07:08 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Conferences

Last week, SourceMedia, publisher of “Financial Planning” magazine (and several other financial services industry publications), hosted its annual In|Vest advisor FinTech Conference in the heart of Manhattan, with over 1,000 industry executives gathered to discuss technology opportunities and challenges facing the wealth management industry as a whole.

In the guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured presentations and discussions on digital advice trends, RIA M&A, pricing models, custodians, and of course new FinTech itself.

Craig kicks the recap off with highlights from Shirl Penney’s presentation on running an RIA aggregator, suggesting that RIAs should use a 5-year economic model in order to time a sale (rather than being forced to sell during a downturn), and that (with the recent Goldman Sachs / United Capital deal) more custodians will be looking in the middle-market for acquisition targets. Meanwhile, panel highlights included a discussion on the pros and cons of the subscription pricing model, which is a hot topic given Schwab’s strong launch of its subscription service (as well a more recent news that Bank of America might introduce a subscription model for Merrill Edge).

From there, other conference highlights included sessions on:

Drivers of Consumer Choice, with market research firm Parameter Insights pointing out that the biggest reason that consumers aren’t using digital advice is that they think they don’t have enough money to invest in the first place;
Activating Digital Hybrid Advice, where a panel of industry executives suggested that, while digital advice is essentially useless without personal interactions, digital adoption remains a one-way street (i.e., once a digital solution to a problem is adopted, users rarely - if ever - go back to the old way of doing things);
The World Wealth Report, where Abhishek Singh from Capgemini showed how only 40% of high-net-worth individuals were satisfied with the personalization from their wealth managers, that service quality is still the most important factor when choosing a wealth management firm, and that AI has the potential to make the biggest impact on helping advisors meet their clients’ service demands; and
Modernizing Advice, with Michael Spellacy from Accenture emphasizing that, while digital advice may have disrupted the industry, personalization and customer experience remain at the heart of good financial advice.

Attention then turned towards custodians and their vision for the future. Bernie Clark from Schwab pointed out that more than a third of the $1 billion of inflows to its new subscription model came from new clients, and that integrating new tools with existing infrastructure is a major area of focus for them right now. Industry consolidation is also an ongoing trend, as the first half of 2019 saw 67 RIA deals totaling $69.5 billion, or more than a 55% increase over the same period in 2018.

Ultimately, the 2019 In|Vest Conference brought together an otherwise seemingly disparate group of presenters, each with their own perspectives on the trends shaping the ongoing evolution of the industry, yet many shared a common thread around the importance of client relationships and excellent service, the opportunities for technology to help deepen those relationships and improve overall client experience, that industry consolidation will be an ongoing driving force, and that there’s a blue ocean of potential, yet non-traditional, wealth management clients out there that need (and want) advice, and that it behooves the industry to figure out a way to reach them (e.g., through the use of new advisor business models, coupled with new advisor FinTech to serve them efficiently).