David Grau, Sr., J.D., nationally recognized authority on succession planning for financial advisors, shares his insights in a new blog for Advisors4Advisors (A4A), a practice management website for independent financial advisors. He's helping financial advisors overcome one of their greatest deficiencies: planning for their own retirement.
By Advisors4Advisors.com
08/10/2010
Next time you need a quarterly market update to send with your portfolio reports to clients, take a free trial of Quarterly Market Summary from Advisor Products.
By Andrew Gluck
07/17/2010
A fix is on the way for a bug in AdvisorVault that will enable advisors to share a single file with an allied professional.
AdvisorVault was developed principally to enable financial advisors to securely store files they want to share with clients, but it also enables advisors to collaborates with professionals outside your firm--CPAs, attorneys, geriatric care managers, personal coaches, business consultants and other professionals with which clients work.
By Andrew Gluck
06/29/2010
Kristen Jankowski, a specialist in creating financial plans and founder of Financial Planning Outsource Services, is the latest industry expert contributing to Advisors4Advisors, a practice management website for financial advisors.
By Advisors4Advisors.com
06/27/2010
In a recent blog post, Advisor Products CEO Andrew Gluck recounts an client interaction that highlights the company's focus on excellent customer service.
By Andrew Gluck
06/18/2010
To improve security, Advisor Products changed password requirements for advisors who use the company systems. The new password requires a combination upper and lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters. While they're harder to remember, they’re also harder to hack.
By Andrew Gluck
06/16/2010
For independent financial advisors searching for ways to cut expenses and improve productivity, Trumpet Inc. and Advisors Products Inc. announced the integration of two systems to automate the assembly and delivery of performance report packages to clients.
By Trumpet Inc. and Advisor Products Inc.
05/12/2010
Some advisory firms feel they must work face-to-face with a local designer to build their website instead of working over the phone with an Advisor Products project manager. I don't agree. But we price our services so you can use a local graphic designer but still use Advisor Products for hosting.
By Andrew Gluck
05/11/2010
Advisors4Advisors.com today announced that Sheryl Rowling, chief executive officer of Total Rebalance Expert, will join the site to contribute insight on portfolio management and rebalancing, tax-efficient investing, and financial planning. Rowling is the latest of more than a dozen industry experts to join the blogging team of the rapidly growing practice management website and online community for independent advisors.
By Advisors4Advisors.com
05/06/2010
Advisors4Advisors (A4A), a practice management website for independent financial advisors, today announced that George Tamer, who manages a national team of operations consultants at TD AMERITRADE Institutional, will write a blog about sales, marketing, and operational tactics that independent advisors can implement to help increase efficiencies and build their businesses.
By Advisors4Advisors.com
03/08/2010
As he added new clients to his one-man firm, Bill Neubauer was getting bogged down with menial tasks. To continue to grow his clientele without adding support staff, he needed to become more efficient. Personal Client Portals was Neubauer's solution.
By Advisor Products, Inc.
03/05/2010
Advisor Products Online Reporting saves Ferrell Wealth Management about 30-hours of staff time each quarter and $3 in postage and paper per client. In total, FWM is saving about $6,000 annually, far more than the $3,600 a year it pays Advisor Products for the service.
By Advisor Products, Inc.
02/01/2010
At the Financial Advisor Webinar Series on December 11, Ben Norquist of Convergent Retirement Plan Solutions delivered a presentation that was highly rated by attendees about how advisors can seize the 2010 Roth IRA conversion opportunity. Norquist showed a simple web-based application he developed that makes it easy for advisors to calculate complex conversion scenarios to show the net benefit of conversion.
By Andrew Gluck
01/10/2010
Advisor Products’ Quarterly Market Summary becomes available Monday for the fourth quarter of 2009.Written by a veteran financial reporter and edited by one of the nation’s leading financial editors, QMS is delivered to subscribers as an eight-page Microsoft Word document 10 days after the end of every quarter. You can cut, paste, and edit QMS to fit your needs.
By Andrew Gluck
01/08/2010
Advisor Products this week upgraded AdvisorSites Compliance Engine (ACE) to streamline advertising compliance for independent advisors and broker/dealers. The upgrade eases the workflow and organizes information between the advisory firm and its compliance officer when changes are needed to the advisory firm's website.
By Andrew Gluck
01/06/2010
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.
By Andrew Gluck
12/23/2009
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.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.
By Andrew Gluck
12/06/2009
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.
By Andrew Gluck
12/03/2009
Increasing productivity at independent financial advisory firms, Advisor Products Inc. today released AdvisorVault 2.5. The free upgrade streamlines routine tasks to promote client service and increase efficiency.
By Andrew Gluck
12/02/2009
Empowering independent advisors to share ideas, Advisors4Advisors (A4A) today started allowing advisors to post links to articles, videos, and other online content. The three news sections on the A4A home page—-Market & Economy News, Industry News, and Technology News—-now accept advisor submissions.
By Andrew Gluck
11/24/2009
In talking with recently with David Lucs, a project manager here at Advisor Produts, 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.
By Andrew Gluck
11/19/2009
These are comments from real advisors talking about software applications for advisors. They’re not made up. They’re not filtered. And they’re as close you come to truth about an advisor’s practice management applications as you can get.
By Andrew Gluck
11/18/2009
It's been just over a year since we started the Financial Advisor Webinar Series in the throes of the global financial crisis, and I have to say it's been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my career. The Series started out as a way to support advisors at a time when it looked like the global economic system was about to collapse. Over the past year, as we backed away from the edge of the abyss, we've continued the webinars every Friday at 4 p.m.
By Andrew Gluck
11/03/2009
If we host your firm’s website and use our BackOffice content management system, you may have noticed a boost in speed. That’s because we replaced the main server that powers Advisor Products’ websites and BackOffice last week. Your website is loading faster for prospects and clients now.
By Andrew Gluck
11/02/2009
The 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar was posted for free distribution to members of Advisors4Advisors.com, a practice management portal site for independent financial advisors. The RIA Compliance Calendar was created by Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist, a compliance consulting firm serving RIAs and B-Ds. It lists 27 key compliance activities for RIAs month-by-month, helping organize RIA compliance responsibilities on a timely basis.
By Andrew Gluck
11/01/2009
AdvisorsForAdvisors.com hosts the first session of its Advisors Going Independent Webinar Series, which will provide brokers guidance on challenges they must face when becoming independent financial advisors.
By AdvisorsForAdvisors.com
10/14/2009
Since we receive a lot of questions from advisors who would like to provide aggregated account information to their clients, I am going to answer some questions here.
By Andrew Gluck
10/09/2009
Advisor Products today released Email Templates For AdvisorVault, enabling automatic email notifications to clients when portfolio reports and other documents are posted.
By Andrew Gluck
09/22/2009
Schwab PortfollioCenter, a leading portfolio accounting and reporting application used by about 3,500 independent advisory firms, has posted its specifications to the Advisor Software Database at advisorsforadvisors, a new practice management portal for independent advisors.
By Andrew Gluck
09/10/2009
SunGard WealthStation, a leading financial planning application with 125,000 users, has posted its specifications on advisorsforadvisors, a practice management website for independent advisors.
By Andrew Gluck
09/01/2009
On advisorsforadvisors, the new practice management website, advisor blogs are being aggregated, which makes it easy for advisors to see what other advisors are blogging about. This can give you ideas for your own posts or inspire you to start writing your own blog. More importantly, being listed on the blogroll can help boost your blog's search engine rankings.
By Andrew Gluck
08/28/2009
We’re now programming a new feature in our content management system, BackOffice, to enable your firm to add a “Link Exchange” page to its website. This will allow you to quickly add links to other firms that will be displayed on your marketing website. The page on your site will be pre-formatted to look attractive and easy to read.
By Andrew Gluck
08/27/2009
We’ve made it very easy for you to remind clients why they need you. All the tasks you’ve completed for a client over the past 12 months are now conspicuosuly displayed on each client’s home page. This important new feature in the Advisor Products Client Portal is integrated with Redtail Technology’s CRM. So when you input an Activity in Redtail, it shows up automatically in a client’s portal.
By Andrew Gluck
06/30/2009
When the U.S. economy seemed like it might collapse last October, Advisor Products hosted a webinar for advisors in an effort to help to help them cope. Attendees were so grateful, we did it the following week. Pretty soon, it became clear that advisors wanted us to bring them this information regularly. Thus was born the Financial Crisis Webinar Series, which brings advisors leading thinkers from the financial advisory profession every Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern Time. Last week, we upgraded our registration platform. As a result, you are now be able to receive continuing education credit when viewing webinar replays.
By Andrew Gluck
06/16/2009
Advisor Products and Redtail Technology, developer of a widely-used CRM system for advisors, announced a client-facing CRM integration that will expand the reach of Advisor Products' Personal Client Portals.
By Advisor Products Inc.
06/09/2009
In the presentation, I incorrectly said that if you keep your tweets private and approve all of your followers on Twitter, other Twitter users could not see your followers. That's incorrect. While approving your followers allows only approved followers to see your updates, any other Twitter user can still see your followers.
By Andrew Gluck
05/16/2009
Advisor Products just launched a streamlined interface for firms using AdvisorVault™ to upload portfolio reports from the two most widely-used portfolio reporting systems, Schwab’s PortfolioCenter® and Advent’s Axys®. The way an advisory firm maps a report containing a client’s portfolio data to the client’s online vault is simple now. Mapping is a one-time procedure for setting up the Advisor Products Online Reporting Solution. It’s also used whenever a firms adds a new client to the system.
By Andrew Gluck
04/22/2009
While CRM systems have long been used by advisory firms to manage their contacts and track tasks assigned to staff, the Advisor Products interface with XLR8 allows an advisory firm to manage and track client “to-dos.”
By Advisor Products Inc.
04/22/2009
The interface of the Advisor Products Client Portal system with this XLR8 represents a breakthrough in client communications because it transforms a CRM system in to a client communication tool.
By Andrew Gluck
04/16/2009
In a survey conducted by Advisor Products, results indicated that the majority of financial advisors are not using Web 2.0 technology, but are interested in it and believe it could increase efficiency. Andrew Gluck presented valuable Web 2.0 tools in a webinar hosted by ByAllAccounts.
By Andrew Gluck
03/26/2009
There's an elephant in the room. It’s the global financial crisis. If your firm's website looks exactly the same as it did before the crisis, then you're acting like there is no elephant.
By Andrew Gluck
03/19/2009
The Financial Crisis Webinar Series, a free weekly service providing financial advisors continuing education for navigating the global financial crisis, announced its schedule of upcoming speakers.
By Advisor Products Inc.
02/19/2009
With the global financial crisis causing many investors to fire their brokers, independent financial advisors are using Web 2.0 technology to attract clients, according to Advisor Products Inc., a leading marketing technology firm to independent advisors.
By Advisor Products Inc.
01/20/2009
Advisor Products' Webinars Are Helping Financial Advisors Communicate With Clients During The Financial Crisis
By Andrew Gluck
01/05/2009
Advisor Products announced that it is beta testing Online Reporting for PortfolioCenter, a new product that will allow the 3,400 financial advisory firms using Schwab PortfolioCenter to share performance reports with clients.
By Advisor Products Inc.
09/30/2008
The recent integration of Albridge Solutions’ portfolio performance reporting application and Advisor Products Inc.’s Personal Client Portals™ system makes any advisory firm more scalable, efficient, and client-centric. But what’s more exciting is that it will promote financial planning to millions of American households by making it easier for them to understand, measure, and manage their progress toward achieving long-term financial goals.
By Andrew Gluck
06/10/2008
The first application dedicated solely to managing communications between financial advisors and their clients was launched today by Advisor Products Inc., a leading marketing firm serving 1,800 independent financial advisors.
By Advisor Products
05/21/2008
Advisor Products added an interface for Black Diamond Reporting to its Personal Client Portal platform this past week, allowing financial advisors to securely stream holdings, asset allocation, and performance data to individual clients automatically daily. Using the latest technology for integration, an XML Web Service, the interface between Black Diamond and Advisor Products feeds each client of an advisor continuously updated performance reports with no work required by the advisor.
By Andrew Gluck
04/28/2008
Blogs are an excellent way to market to clients. You cement relationships by reinforcing views that you are both accessible and informed. You can also use blogs as a way to add valuable content to your website, benefiting both current and prospective clients. Whether or not you have the time and ability to write your own blogs, this opportunity to reach your contacts should not be missed. That's why Advisor Products is now offering a blog writing service to help you take advantage of this key marketing tool.
By Andrew Gluck
04/28/2008
Your website is advertising and you must keep a record of all versions for regulators. With our website archiving system, simply make one click to save a copy of your site or turn on automatic archiving to create a copy of your site whenever you make a change.
By Advisor Products Inc.
04/15/2008
Advisor Products Inc. announced today that it has launched a new email account dashboard that makes it easier for financial advisory firms to manage their email accounts. The new email administration tool allows advisory firms to set up new email accounts, change passwords, delete email accounts no longer in use, forward emails to different addresses, and set up automatic replies when you go on vacation.
By Advisor Products Inc.
04/01/2008
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