Andrew Gluck: This is Andrew Gluck and
welcome to the MarketingSmart Webinar Series, http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx,
our monthly session about www.advisorproducts.com
and its partner firms. Today is Wednesday, August 12, 2009, and with us is
Mike Kelly, the CEO of BOSS, Back Office Support Service (www.thebackoffice.biz) and Mike will be
here to discuss how to streamline PortfolioCenter Reporting and then we’ll also
have an update on www.advisorproducts.com.
So those are the two items for today.
In this business, you partner with a lot of companies
because you want to have an integrated platform, so that is what www.advisorproducts.com is doing, but
few partners are as easy and as much a pleasure to work with and as
knowledgeable as Mike Kelly at www.thebackoffice.biz.
I learn a lot every time I talk with Mike. Mike founded www.thebackoffice.biz
in 1996 and works with PortfolioCenter, which is owned by Schwab Performance
Technologies. That, in turn, is a subsidiary of Charles Schwab Corporation.
But he’s built a really nice business serving about one hundred thirty (130)
firms with handling their portfolio reporting. He gives them daily support,
processes all transactions for them daily, and this is another way of
outsourcing, streamlining your process, and focusing on what you’re strongest
at, is by outsourcing to a firm like www.thebackoffice.biz.
Before founding www.thebackoffice.biz in 1996, Mike was actually
an independent financial advisor and his firm ultimately became the largest
financial planning firm in San Diego County and Mike was the operations
person. He was the leader in selecting a PMS system, designing the workflows,
and implementing all of that.
And at www.thebackoffice.biz,
I can tell you that Mike has really honed those skills because he’s doing it in
mass for a lot of firms now. He’s no longer at the financial planning firm, by
the way. That’s all in the past. When he started www.thebackoffice.biz, he
moved on and this is his sole business now, but at one point he was a top
producer at LPL and he’s got a great background as a financial advisor.
Mike has also got a degree in engineering management and
systems management and he’s a certified financial planner. So with that, I
want to introduce Mike Kelly, who’s going to talk about the BOSS Briefcase
System that www.thebackoffice.biz has designed and talk about it integrated
with Advisor Products’ AdvisorVault
and Client Portal System. So Mike, take it away.
Mike Kelly: Thank you very much
for those kind words, Andy, and thanks everyone else for taking time out of
your busy schedule today to spend a few minutes with us. With that, I’ll go
ahead and dive right in on the BOSS Briefcase.
What is it? The BOSS Briefcase is a remote application
that runs from a hosted site that we provide. It is designed for use with
PortfolioCenter. It will access some of the data and the data tables directly
and runs a one-off computer to access some of the other things.
The principle point with being a PortfolioCenter tool is
it allows people to get more mileage out of PortfolioCenter and run some other
things in the background, as I’ll describe later.
It does not require that you run PortfolioCenter at the
same time, so even if you have PortfolioCenter closed, you can, in fact,
operate and get the benefits out of the BOSS Briefcase. It is designed to
cover several principle areas. One is exports to third parties, batch
processes, monitor various activities that go on, and a variety of other
features that I’ll describe with you in just a moment.
The front screen looks a bit like this and you can see
tabs across the top that are, in fact, very similar to the topical areas that
I’ve just described, with Batch Print and Batch Interval being
batch processes, Exports across the top and we’ll discuss Backup
and other things that happen on this status screen a little bit later.
Let’s go into the Exports area first. In Exports,
currently we can export data through the BOSS Briefcase to AdvisorVault,
to Redtail, Junxurei, Tamarac, MoneyGuidePro, and the Schwab rebalancing
utility as well. Some of these can be – not just have the files put together,
but also transmit the data to the recipient all in one process, and our goal
ultimately is that every one of the exports that we have and partners that
we’re working with will allow this process to be essentially a one-button
process from start to beginning.
It can be as simple as the few items you see here on the
MoneyGuidePro export where there’s only a couple of questions that need to be answered
and the MoneyGuidePro export doesn’t have a lot of variables in it so that
allows for a very, very simple screen to be able to move that data from our
system over to their system.
On the other hand, you could have something like www.advisorproducts.com. In the case
of the www.advisorproducts.com, we
can move position information, you can move performance information,
transaction information, realize gains and losses, income, any combination of
the above, or data ranges that you choose, a number of other options in each of
those areas. So this is actually one of the more complex exports that we do
because there are so many different options that can be accommodated by the www.advisorproducts.com system over
on the other side.
Besides exports, we also have a number of batch processes
we try to facilitate. Printing and Intervals: two of the most time-consuming
things in terms of CPU usage within the system. Let’s take a look at batch
prints first.
What we’ve designed here is the ability to able to run
simultaneous batch jobs. So if you’ve got three sets or four sets of information
that you want to run batches on, you can actually queue them up by using this
by choosing the first data set, put in the data range, Batch Number one,
whatever you’ve defined within PortfolioCenter, it will pull the list straight
out of there and fire it off to be run. Queue up the next one, the third one,
the fourth one. There’s no limit to the number of batch processes you can put
in line to run and we have, on our side, not one, but multiple batch machines
so the Briefcase can take the jobs and funnel them out to different machines
that can actually run in parallel processing multiple jobs at the same time.
In addition to that, it runs this in the background as far
as the PortfolioCenter user is concerned. You may recall I said that this system
is designed to run even if PortfolioCenter is not, and that means that if
PortfolioCenter is running, that independence is still maintained. So you can
fire off a batch print job or for that matter, a batch interval job and in each
of those cases, your use of PortfolioCenter is immediately retained while this
process is taken care of in the background.
The activity monitors are designed to be able to keep
track of what’s happening in these different batch processes, to monitor
exports, and to do what we call take care of a cycle monitor. I’ll show you
what I mean here.
In the center of this screen, the very top center section
says Batch Print & Interval Jobs and every batch job that you have
submitted through the briefcase gets listed here; who submitted and where it is
sitting in the queue; is it the next one, is it one of several jobs that are
running, so exactly where your job sits for operation is displayed on this
screen. If you have exports running – and they can be running at the time as
batch prints are running – their status is displayed as well. And on the
right-hand side, we have a series of checkboxes that display information as it
progresses, usually at quarter-end. It could be month-end, but for most
advisors, it’s quarter-end so that our clients can see where in the quarter-end
process their database is sitting at that time.
Back to the center screen and toward the bottom under Backup
Projects, we have also got a tab that allows you to request backups of your
data and the status of the generation of the backup file is what’s shown in the
bottom center. All you need to do is identify the data set and click the
button to request a new backup of your data, and an email will be send to the
email address that you have here.
The same is true, incidentally, of any other batch jobs or
exports that you run. A separate email notification is sent to you once the
job is completed. So it is quite possible for a person, without opening
PortfolioCenter, to request and fire off one or more jobs and get notified that
these jobs are completed through the Briefcase without ever once having to open
up PortfolioCenter.
There are a number of other features that we have, what we
call the Panic Button, File Transfers, a Library, and Notices
that can be sent out on an advisor-by-advisor basis.
On the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll notice the
cleverly labeled Panic. That serves one purpose and one purpose only.
If for whatever reason we have a server that goes down off hours – so it’s
Saturday afternoon and you’re working when you should be out playing soccer or
whatever, you’re not left in the lurch. This panic button will send a
notification to off-hour staff so that we can address the issue and make sure
the server gets brought back online for you. We haven’t had to use it yet, but
it’s there in case the situation does arise.
The second button down on the left-hand side says Sync
Files. We actually have a file synchronization utility that allows the
hosted system to synchronize data files that have been created with your local
server or workstation. You can specify where you want the synchronization to
occur, and this will transfer up to three files simultaneously. If you have
fifty (50) files that are there that need to be synchronized, it will get all
fifty (50) of them, but it can transfer up to three (3) files simultaneously.
The BOSS Library is simply a place where we keep
additional documents that might be of interest, such as a Disaster Recovery
Plan for our firm, or other things like that that a client might have occasion
to want to get a hold of from time to time.
And then on the bottom right-hand side is the message box
that I referred to before where the assigned Account Manager here can provide
some kind of message unique to your firm – this is not a broadcast to all of
our clients, but to a specific client, having to do with something about their
data sat.
And that, in a nutshell, to keep it short and sweet, is
the BOSS Briefcase. So with that I’ll turn it back over or take care of any
particular questions that you might have.
Andrew Gluck: I want to thank you for
going through all of that and giving us that detail. I want to just ask
everybody to please chat in your questions to me. I have some questions for
you myself.
One thing you said that I just wanted to get clarification
on was, you talked about the www.advisorproducts.com
settings being more elaborate; actually, you used the word “complex.” It is
more complex, but it’s more flexible too, isn’t it? Do you want to explain the
tradeoff there?
Mike Kelly: Yeah, I think
complexity is probably not the right word. There are simply more choices
because there’s so many more things that you can do with the export that goes
to www.advisorproducts.com. So,
you can set individual date ranges for three (3), four (4), five (5) different
time periods. You can indicate that you want only positioned income and not
performance income, or only realized gain and loss and positioned, but not
performance. And because you’ve got so many different choices and options on
what can be sent to www.advisorproducts.com
to update the AdvisorVault,
we’ve got a host of choices that still need to get made.
Now, if somebody’s familiar with the AWC export from
PortfolioCenter, you’ll note that there’s actually probably another fifteen
(15) or twenty (20) choices that could be there. A lot of that stuff is
handled behind the scenes because once it’s set, it’s set. If you’re running
performance and you use three indexes, that can all be accommodated, but once
we set that up for you, we don’t need to put it back on the screen again
because you’re going to use the same three indexes each time you run
performance. If that’s not the case, we’ve got a different way to accommodate
it, but we try to take those kinds of things that once they’re set, they don’t
change, and remove them from the screen to keep the screen as clean as we can
and still provide all of the options that AdvisorVault
accommodates.
Andrew Gluck: We have one advisor
asking: Explain how this improves an advisor’s day-to-day working with
updating PortfolioCenter reports, the time that he spends. Explain the – well,
I guess what www.thebackoffice.biz is
bringing to the table and the workflow that occurs.
Mike Kelly: Okay, I want to make
sure that I understand the question here. In fact, I’m going to ask you, Andy,
if you want me to talk very briefly about what www.thebackoffice.biz does, the short
version is that we take care of the data on a daily basis, download, post,
process, reconcile, and get that morning stuff out of that way, either from our
East Coast office, or the West Coast Office, so that the advisor can focus on
making decision about his data and communications with their clients. So
that’s the primary benefit that I think www.thebackoffice.biz
brings to the table.
Specifically with regard to the BOSS Briefcase, what we’ve
tried to do is provide a mechanism that allows you to get the same thing done
with either fewer questions or fewer keystrokes, or allows you to run processes
in the background that PortfolioCenter essentially takes over your screen and
prevents you from doing, so that you can continue to operate it even if you’ve
got a call from a client or something like that at a time that a batch process
is running. So we’ve tried to provide flexibility, some time savings with
regard to what we’ve got here, particularly with regard to simultaneous batch
processes.
Andrew Gluck: Explain the reports,
Mike. Are they the normal PortfolioCenter reports, or can they be customized?
Are they different?
Mike Kelly: They are currently
normal PortfolioCenter reports and would encompass anything that fits within
the full range of Portfolio’s internal native customization as far as the
report generation is concerned. Some of the third parties, www.advisorproducts.com being one of
them, when the data gets to the third party, they may present it in a better
format than what it started with inside PortfolioCenter, but as far as the
batch reports that are created using the batch report tools, it is currently
still just the reports native to PortfolioCenter.
Andrew Gluck: Is the BOSS Briefcase in
tandem with BOSS Handling Data, or is it a standalone product?
Mike Kelly: It is in tandem with
BOSS operating the database. It is not a standalone product.
Andrew Gluck: Another question is: One
of the key concerns about automatically importing from PortfolioCenter to AdvisorVault
is data integrity. At our firm, we still have a lengthy process to review the
reports and make sure the numbers are correct. Does BOSS address this issue,
or provide such services?
Mike Kelly: The answer to that is
yes, but not at that particular stage. When we work with our data on a daily
basis, we reconcile on a daily basis as well. When we are working with
performance data, we review all of the intervals for usually the last several
months, not just the current month. We run intervals every month and then
review typically the last two to three months of data. When we do that, we
look to see whether there’s anything that just doesn’t have the right feel.
Did the person really make forty-seven percent (47%) this month?—possible, but
not the way to bet. So we do that type of routine data scrubbing and review.
It has nothing to do with the Briefcase, but as part of our regular services.
So we believe the data’s got to be taken care of prior to the export phase, not
reviewed as part of the export phase.
Andrew Gluck: If you would, could you
back up and explain how BOSS does the reporting? Just the process, what
interfaces the advisors use? Just give us a brief explanation of that.
Mike Kelly: You’re talking about
the exports that we take care of currently?
Andrew Gluck: Correct.
Mike Kelly: Right now, we had a
screen up about, I guess it was seven (7) slides back. The ones that are
currently supported are AdvisorVault,
Redtail, Juncturei, Tamarac, MoneyGuidePro, and the Schwab Rebalancing,
we handle through the Briefcase as well, but it’s not really a – I don’t
consider that an export to a third party – well, I guess it would be. So,
Schwab Rebalancing Report is another one for the trade generation.
We expect that we will probably double the number of
exports over the course of the next year and those that we get the most
requests for, of course, will go to the top of the line.
Andrew Gluck: And the advisors, when
they work with you, do they use Centerpiece? That’s what I was really getting
at. Are they using PortfolioCenter, that is, or are they using Terminal
Services? Explain that whole process for BOSS.
Mike Kelly: With PortfolioCenter,
they are running an actual copy of PortfolioCenter. They will use Terminal
Services as the technical vehicle to connect to our site, but the hosted site
that we have does, in fact, run PortfolioCenter natively so people have direct
access to their data. They can edit information. They can add details if they
want to. If you wind up with a weekend scenario where the client calls you
Saturday morning after a tennis match to tell you about three more pieces of
information that he wants to discuss with you that afternoon, the advisors on
our system can easily log into our hosted site, enter the data, rerun reports
and be ready for the meeting later on Saturday.
Andrew Gluck: So really, what’s the
difference between using BOSS and using one of the – to the advisory firm and
workflow – what’s the effective difference between using BOSS with
PortfolioCenter versus using a web-based Portfolio Reporting System?
Mike Kelly: There are a couple of
key differences, the primary one being what I just described, and that is that
the advisor has complete control and access at all times to their data. They
can enter data, rerun reports; they can create a brand new report on the fly if
they’re familiar with PortfolioCenter and how the PortfolioCenter report design
tools are used, which are fairly straight forward, they could go in at any time
and change that if they want. If they want to change the models on asset
allocation at ten o’clock at night and rerun them and be ready to execute
trades the following morning, they can change all their models any time they
want. So they’ve got complete access to all aspects of their data and they can
edit without having to worry about the availability of somebody else to be able
to take care of that for them. That probably is the biggest single difference
between what we have and another system.
They’re both hosted on the web, so as far as being able to
access it from some place other than your office, that is the case in either
instance.
Andrew Gluck: How difficult is it to
incorporate alternatives? I guess that means alternative investments.
Mike Kelly: Very easy. You can
add a new security at any point. You have the ability to add the asset class
in PortfolioCenter. That’s a dropdown. On our system, if you’ve got some
asset and you want to add a new asset class, you can do that at the same time.
So you could add a new asset class, add a new security, put it into the
client’s data – in other words, put in a buy transaction, or a transfer into
the security, or whoever you want to affect that – but you can do all of that
live in real time.
Andrew Gluck: Does BOSS provide
additional reports from what PortfolioCenter currently offers, or would reports
still be run through PortfolioCenter?
Mike Kelly: Currently, the only
reports that we have available are reports that are run through PortfolioCenter
or you may get a slightly different format or display of the information by
going to somebody like AdvisorVault
and using the screens that they have for displaying the information, but for a
batch print type of process or a report process, you’re going to be looking
–unfortunately, it’s still going to be what is in PortfolioCenter natively.
Andrew Gluck: Could you just explain
that again about the reports with AdvisorVault, with www.advisorproducts.com?
Mike Kelly: Sure. One of the
biggest complaints that we get and PortfolioCenter has heard it time and time
again, is that the reports look like they were designed, oh, maybe twenty (20)
years ago, which is probably when they were designed. And as much as I would
love to have different formats to be able to present them straight out of
PortfolioCenter, that capability is not currently one that we have.
One of the ways around that is to go to a third party –
and we’ll use AdvisorVault
as the sample here – where AdvisorVault
can take the underlying data, the rate of return information, the position
information, the gain/loss information – those data points – and present it
onscreen in a fashion that is much more palatable to both the advisor and more
importantly, to their clients. So it’s possible to get it displayed in other
formats, but it’s done by using a third party that has taken the time to learn
how to work with that data and display it in a much more attractive fashion.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, and I’m actually
going to show some of those reports in just a little bit, but we have some more
questions for you, Mike.
Please cut to the chase – what does it cost?
Mike Kelly: This is where I get
to say, “Less than it should,” and we don’t have a one-size fits all pricing.
Having said that, I’m going to give you some parameters which would allow
almost everybody to narrow this down to a ballpark number pretty quickly.
We have a base fee which is approximately $400 a month.
We have a cost per account which generally will run between $2 and $4 a month.
It can be higher. It can be lower, but the vast majority of our clients fall
within that $2 to $4 range and there is a fee that we pay through to
PortfolioCenter for use of the software. You no longer need a PortfolioCenter
license if you come onboard, and if you don’t have PortfolioCenter, you don’t
have to spend the $10,000 up front to buy it. That license fee ranges from $66
for the first fifty (50) portfolios up to it could be several hundred, but if
you figure $66 for the first fifty (50) portfolios, and as a ballpark number
around 60 cents for each portfolio beyond that, it does scale down to 19 cents.
So there’s two variables there: the number of accounts
that you’ve got for the portfolio licenses and where in the $2 to $4, or under
or over – you know whether you’ve got complex businesses. If you buy and hold
mutual funds, you’re going to be closer to the $2 range. If you want to
execute options on the Russian Exchange, then you’re going to be over the $4
limit. But that will give you some ballpark numbers that will tell you about
what our monthly costs are.
Andrew Gluck: And I’m sure the Russians
appreciate the plug.
Mike Kelly: They do.
Andrew Gluck: Yes, and the cost on the www.advisorproducts.com side of the
equation, you could get this as a standalone product, actually, but this comes
with a marketing website for $3,600 a year and the marketing website that you
get with that includes AdvisorVault,
8 hours of support from www.advisorproducts.com,
and it includes the portfolio reporting and bulk uploading features that Mike
is going to use. So it includes all of that.
An example of what a quarter-end billing and performance
report looks like, is that something that you can put up on your screen? I’m
going to show you reports anyway, so that will take care of that, actually,
Mike.
Mike Kelly: Okay.
Andrew Gluck: Let’s see. Another
question: We manage and report portfolios on a household basis, not on an
account-by-account basis. Is this a problem for you?
Mike Kelly: Absolutely not. In
fact, you can even mix if you want. If you want to have some that are reported
at the client or household level and other cases where it’s single accounts,
you can do those within the same batch. If you want to do them in separate
batches, that’s okay. You can key up multiple batches to run at the same time,
but running at the household level, at the client level, is absolutely not a
problem.
Andrew Gluck: In downloading and
reconciling, does BOSS handle downloads from account aggregation software like www.ByAllAccounts.com?
Mike Kelly: We do.
Andrew Gluck: Can large batches be run
on multiple computers simultaneously in an office?
Mike Kelly: Yes.
Andrew Gluck: Gosh, these questions
just keep coming in. Would BOSS data services replace an advisor’s need for www.ByAllAccounts.com?
Mike Kelly: The answer is yes,
because we will run the www.ByAllAccounts.com
data – an advisor that’s using www.ByAllAccounts.com,
is probably using it for a reason, and that particular reason does not go
away. Our contract with www.ByAllAccounts.com
is going to be less expensive than the contract an individual firm has, so the
data that flows through the www.ByAllAccounts.com
data aggregator would be obtained less expensively through www.backoffice.biz, so you wouldn’t have
to do it twice. You’d get it through www.backoffice.biz.
You would not need to continue with it directly with www.ByAllAccounts.com.
Andrew Gluck: I have somebody asking, what
kind of training?
Mike Kelly: I’ll just go ahead
and take it on the fly here. The amount of training that you need, I’m going
to call it minimal. The reason for that is that every one of our clients has
an assigned individual account manager. We don’t use a pool of people like a
help desk. The same person that is responsible here for doing the download,
posting, and reconciliation of your data, is the person that you have available
to you for customer support or any how-to question on “I don’t know how to run
a cross-reference report for such-and-such. How do I do that?” The customer
support person here that is assigned to you will take care of those kinds of
questions and will talk you through how to be able to do it. If you wind up in
an absolute emergency and you don’t want to take the time to learn it, you just
need to get it for that meeting that’s coming up in three minutes, we can run
the report here and send you the PDF.
We prefer to enable our clients and teach them how to be
able to do these things and having an assigned Account Manager takes care of
that.
Andrew Gluck: If you are a current BOSS
user, is there additional functionality for using this new Briefcase software?
Mike Kelly: There are a few other
pieces that I didn’t go into, but the key components of the Briefcase were
mentioned here. In addition to this, of course, you’ve got direct access to
PortfolioCenter itself and all of the functionality that exists within that
program, and there will be additional enhancements that we’ll be rolling out as
part of the Briefcase in addition to the fact that we’ll be expanding the
number of exports, we have additional features planned for the program as well.
Andrew Gluck: You said that the cost
was $2 to $4 per month. Was that per user, per client, per account? Please
explain.
Mike Kelly: Yeah, if I didn’t
give you a unit there, it is $2 to $4 per account, not per client or household,
but per account – per portfolio.
Andrew Gluck: So it’s per portfolio?
Mike Kelly: Yes.
Andrew Gluck: Okay. And does the cost
increase with each data source we bring into PortfolioCenter?
Mike Kelly: It does not.
Andrew Gluck: Can this be used with a
Fidelity download?
Mike Kelly: Absolutely.
Andrew Gluck: You might want to mention
here, Mike, what other download feeds you could do.
Mike Kelly: The primary feeds
that we get, it will be no great surprise that we’ve got a lot of advisors that
use Schwab. Second in line would be TD Ameritrade. Next would be Fidelity,
then DST and Pershing; www.ByAllAccounts.com
is probably up in that range at this point as well. I think we’ve got about
600 or 700 accounts now through www.ByAllAccounts.com.
Those are the primary ones. We’ve got about another half a dozen, maybe ten
(10) additional downloads that we do. Any one of the roughly forty (40) or so
that PortfolioCenter supports, we can take care of. That’s stated rather
globally.
I can tell you that there are some of them that we don’t
care for very much because they don’t work very well. That’s more a reflection
on the custodian than it is on PortfolioCenter’s programming prowess, but there
are some where we simply know the data is not very good data and it takes us a
lot of time to scrub it, but we can have those discussions with people up front
so they don’t sign up for our services and then find out that they’re stepping
into a problem they didn’t know they would have.
Andrew Gluck: I’m not sure I understand
this question entirely myself. Can you customize an export for XLR8?
Mike Kelly: I’m going to have to
say I’m not familiar with that question either. Many of the – there’s a lot of
data in PortfolioCenter that can be exported to Excel. I’m not familiar with a
program called XLR8.
Andrew Gluck: Let me give this a try.
We actually have an interface with XLR8, but we don’t currently feed portfolio
account data. However, we are creating a web services interface that CRM
Systems will be able to use to pull that data from us.
Describe your ideal firm, as a client, Mike.
Mike Kelly: I think what I’m
going to do is go with the average. On average, our investment advisors have 2
to 3 licensed users in their office, have approximately 300 accounts that they
are taking care of. The smallest client we’ve ever brought on board had zero
accounts and I don’t think we’ll ever get one smaller than that. The largest
client, 5,000, grew to 8,000 accounts, but firms of that size, quite frankly,
are unusual for us. So somewhere in the 200 accounts to probably 600 account
is where a good portion of our business is. We don’t care what size the firm
is.
Andrew Gluck: Does a report exist for
quarterly billing of assets under managed that a client could view online?
Mike Kelly: There is a way to do
that. The billing statement can be generated and third parties such as www.advisorproducts.com can take PDFs
as part of their data feed so an invoice can provided using that mechanism.
That’s being done currently with www.advisorproducts.com.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, and actually we’re
building some stuff that I’m going to be talking about briefly that I believe
will automate that for the advisor – the notification on that.
Can you take a download for FOLIOfn?
Mike Kelly: FOLIOfn is one of the
exports that’s listed as available at PortfolioCenter. We do not currently
have any advisors using it, so that’s one that I know is available, but not one
that I can provide experience with. So the answer is yes, we can, but I don’t
know what the experience would be like since we don’t have another advisor
that’s currently using it.
Andrew Gluck: Right, and the candor of
your answer is what makes you such a pleasure to work with.
Can large batches be run on multiple computers
simultaneously in an office?
Mike Kelly: The batches are
actually run on our servers here through the Briefcase, so the answer to the
question on “can multiple large batches run?” the answer to that is, yes, and
then the file synchronization with the Briefcase can transmit multiple files.
So let’s say that there are two or three large files that are being run and
they’re being run as one large PDF each, our file synchronization would then take
those two or three files and simultaneously transfer those three zip files down
to the local server. I hope I answered that question.
Andrew Gluck: On the back processing,
though, why is it important to be able to queue up batch processes?
Mike Kelly: The primary reason is
that batch processes in PortfolioCenter are CPU hogs. They take lots of memory
to be able to run effectively. If in our environment where we’re hosting a
number of advisors, we allowed advisors to run batch jobs at any time, that would
be just fine most of the time because we’ve got very, very powerful servers
that are running. However, having said that, if three clients or five clients
or ten (10) clients, at quarter-end, all decided they want to run their
intervals from inception and run batch printing for 3,000 accounts, you try to
run several of those simultaneously, PortfolioCenter won’t handle it. So we
make sure that stays organized so that the universe of clients that we have
will not have their performance eon our hosted server impacted.
Andrew Gluck: Mike, if I can ask you to
stick with us for a few minutes, I’m just going to go through some things that
I want to update everybody on on www.advisorproducts.com,
but we certainly appreciate your questions, everybody, because they were
clearly engaged with things that you’re saying here, Mike, so great going.
Thanks.
Mike Kelly: You’re welcome.
Thanks to all of them for their questions.
Andrew Gluck: I want to just give
everybody an update on the goings on at www.advisorproducts.com
real quick. The client portal platform is being rolled out by some larger
firms. Happily, I’m looking forward to seeing that continue to grow. We’re finally
getting adoption from some very nice sized, serious technology firms and we
hope to have more on that for you in coming months.
We are also working to get into testing now – it’s in
alpha now – a communication consult for the vault. So the AdvisorVault
communication consol will go live into production sometime in a few weeks. I
also want to spend a few minutes with you talking about password management.
Some of the work that we’re doing to leverage features in AdvisorVault
and other PMS systems and leveraging our online reporting system for other
portfolio report systems and talk about our video publishing dashboard. I’m
going to do this really fast because we are running short on time.
I just want to make sure that everybody understand that
the client portal is really a new way for advisors to practice. This is a
whole new class of software that provides straight through processing of tasks
– straight through for clients, so whenever you’re doing something for a
client, you’re going to be able to process those tasks straight through using a
CRM system or financial planning system, key information then will show up in
the client portal platform from those other systems and it’s going to make
virtually any firm more scalable and efficient and improve your client
experience.
What I’d like to do really fast is just show you some of the
reports in a client portal. I’m going to log in. I love doing this live
because it shows you a real system. Most presentations don’t dare do this
live, but this is the www.advisorproducts.com
system that I’m proud of and I’m going to show it to you live.
So this is the client portal. I’ll just do a quick fly
over here. When I say straight-through processing, what I mean is this is an
integration www.redtailtechnology.com.
We’re displaying all of the completed to-dos in www.redtailtechnology.com right up
front here so that every time your client logs in in the context of everything
else that you show him, he can see the things that you’ve done for him and
completed over the past year. In your CRM system, such as Redtail, you just
click Share with Advisor Products Client Portal and that automatically
pushes the data into the client portal system. The client can assign you
to-dos and those are fed straight through to your CRM system and it also works
the other way. You can assign clients to-dos from your CRM system. The beauty
of this is that they’re all showing up in this new type of software that we
call a client portal. Yes, there are other systems that call themselves client
portals.
Financial planning systems have what they call client
portals and portfolio management software systems have client portals, but this
is the only dedicated client portal. Www.advisorproducts.com,
is, of course, a client communications company and we have made our system the
main system that you’re going to use to communicate with clients because that’s
our specialty. That is what we’ve been doing since we started making websites
in early 1997.
So you can see here integrations with –that was a
financial planning system. This is a really beautiful integration with a
system called Finance Logix (www.financelogix.com) . This is www.ByAllAccounts.com integration. www.advisorexchange.com, www.albridge.com, and all of these system
are very fully features and robust.
So you can see that we have many, many interfaces and we
are unique in that we are creating personalized information for each client and
if we go into the vault, you can see portfolio reports just by clicking here.
These are HTML reports. You can also send up PDF reports in bulk from
PotrolioCenter, which is what Mike is doing, and he’s doing all the downloads
for you as well. So just looking at the HTML reports, we have firms, some with
hundreds of clients, doing this every day. You can export any report – or
pretty much any report – to Excel. It looks like that.
You can also – this is really neat – you can see how fast
the system is. Let’s say I’m going to order this report by the value of the
holdings. I can just click on Value and it reordered. I’ll do it again
for you, and it reorders the data by the value of each position.
There’s a realized gain/loss report here, for instance.
You can again do an export to Excel and very detailed information of course,
that the client can download into Excel very easy and there are many other
reports in here. The are all HTML reports.
You can, of course, also do monthly or quarterly reports
in PDF in bulk as well. So this is all bulk process whether you do HTML or
PDF. And then you also have a full featured client vault that goes along with
the system where you can post all of your other documents for a client in this
system. In fact, clients can also upload documents to the vault.
Unlike other systems, this is a drag and drop system. This
is capable of drag and drop and so what’s really important about that is I can
tell you that when you want to fire a vault vendor, you want to be able to drag
and drop the data because it’s going to be difficult getting your data out
otherwise. We’ve encountered that ourselves in moving advisors over from other
systems.
So I’m not here to give you a complete tour of the client
portal system. I just want to show you those features. Now the portfolio
reporting features and vault features are available outside of the client
portal system, just with marketing websites so it comes both ways and they also
come as standalone systems where you can buy just our reporting, just our
vault, and add that to your current website, if you’d like.
The communication consol that we’re working on is going to
enable automated email templates for specific tasks. So for instance, you’re
going to be able to send an automated email whenever you post a new performance
report, for instance. So you can create a template email. It will be branded
and there’s a system for managing that so you don’t have to keep rewriting the
same email, or you can send that in bulk so that if you’re sending an
individual report to a client, you can leverage the template system, and if
you’re sending an email notifying of a bulk upload, you can also do that using
this email consol. It’s all branded and customizable and at the time you send
the email, you can edit the email. It’s editable.
I also just want to mention that the password management
system, which is really important, is also part of the email notification
system. You can also upload individual documents and that will be covered by
the template email system, making your workflow more streamlined. So will
management of the client passwords.
What I mean by that is it’s really important to have
automated vault password management. To be able to automatically send a
temporary password – that’s what we do – so that when each vault is created, a
client automatically can get a temporary password and you can leverage a
template email that is editable by you for each client when you send it, or you
can do it in batch.
You also have the option of whenever you want to send a
new client a password. If you do them, you could have the new email password –
when you provision the vault, you can have the new email password sent to you
instead of to the client so that then you could call the client, give him a
temporary or the permanent password. At that point, you could assign a
permanent password. We like temporary passwords because then the client can
name his own password.
The other thing is that also part of this system is that
clients can rest forgotten passwords themselves without any human intervention,
which really makes your life easy. You want that with any client vault that
you’re using.
Another feature that we’re working on these days is we are
leveraging the work that I showed you – the online reporting tool for
PortfolioCenter for Advent Access we’re adding those features to those systems.
So we’re doing www.albridge.com, we’ll be
doing www.orionadvisor.com and www.blackdiamondreporting.com
as well and all of the things that I showed you where you can sort by column,
you could export to Excel, all of these things – automatic notification of bulk
reporting – all of these things are going to be leveraged for these other
portfolio management systems.
Please let me know if you’re interested in a very advanced
Google pay per click service that we are interested in testing. This is your
opportunity to get this at a very low price right now because we’re looking for
just a couple of firms to test this. We’re going to be adding – we currently
offer Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Management programs with our
websites. These are, quite honestly, the first level of service – AdvisorFind,
and then a second level, AdvisorFindPro.
We are building onto that one more. Quite frankly, a
higher end service that you could use. We’re partnering with a nationally
known firm, nationally known SEM experts, to bring this service to you. If
you’re interested in creating a budget that’s more serious for online marketing
and search engine marketing, please let me know and we will hook you up with a
consulting firm that we are working with.
I also want to mention, because we got questions about
this, www.advisorproducts.com is
now a frame free platform and if you are an existing client and want to do
Search Engine Optimization, we can flatten your site. Right now we’re running
a special low price discounted offer. We are flattening sites to make them
Search Engine Optimize ready. For a template site, it’s $250. For one of our
custom-designed sites, it’s $600 in order to get your site flattened so that it
will perform well with search engines.
So we’re going to update your site for either $250 or
$600. New sites are all frame free that we build – and have been for many
months now.
We’re also building a video publishing dashboard that I
would urge you to check out in coming weeks. We’ve been building a library of
videos. One such video is Planning for a Child with Special Needs. These
videos are really a great way to get fresh content on your site. So what we’re
doing now is, we’re taking our content and we are turning them into videos that
will be branded to your firm. You will be able to place a FINRA-reviewed video
anywhere on your site with this video publishing dashboard that we are planning
to provide sometime in the next month or two. It should be done with testing
and out and ready.
Finally, I want to urge you to take a look at www.advisorsforadvisors.com. This
is a new practice management website, www.advisorsforadvisors.com, that
will save you time every day. It aggregates information on the web that you’re
going to need to know to be more successful and it facilitates idea sharing
among financial advisors.
I’m just going to log in and show you www.advisorsforadvisors.com
really fast. This is a program called RoboForm that I am addicted to and that
really helps me manage my passwords. I only have to remember one password, so
right now it’s going to log us into www.advisorsforadvisors.com
and this is the profile page where you set up your own profile, but we have a
video tour, if you’re interested in this, and over here, Mary Rowland, former New
York Times Personal Finance Columnist, wrote the Personal Finance Column in
the New York Times for a decade or so ago. So Mary is aggregating the
news information that you want to read every day.
Her husband, Bob Casey, also a veteran journalist, former
editor of Bloomberg Wealth Manager, Bob is going in every day and
finding the industry news that you have to read. So the market economy news
and industry news is all presented for you, as is technology news. Tech
Vendors can come here and upload information themselves, and you also have this
wonderful content-rich review section where if you want to come in and find out
about a program, advisors can write a review of programs, and they can also
compare different applications side by side.
Right now let’s say I want to compare NAVI client Extended
to Total Planning Suite and MorningStar Office, I could come in here and
compare them , all these systems, in great detail. You could see, for
instance, the estate planning capabilities of each program side by side. You
could also see the pricing. You could see how it handles insurance. All of
this information is available at www.advisorsforadvisors.com.
We also have bloggers.
We have a huge research section that aggregates, like I
said, all of the blogs and other information that you’re going to need to
conduct your business.
So please check out www.advisorsforadvisors.com.
Also, finally, this Friday, I want to recommend that you
attend Serving Middle Class Investors. That is Friday, at 4 p.m. EST at the
Financial Webinar Series, (www.advisorproducts.com/webinars).
We continue to do them every Friday at 4 p.m.
EST. You can see the list of upcoming speakers. It really has been a great
series. We get great feedback from advisors on this series.
With that, I think I should
probably just wind it down here for you. Let me just see if we have any
questions or comments. You can send them to me now if you do have a question
or a comment.
Okay, we don’t have questions,
so I’m going to call it quits here while I’m ahead. I want to thank you all
for attending this webinar series, the MarketingSmart Webinar Series (http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx). Please, if you want to contact www.thebackoffice.biz, you have the
contact information on screen over here for www.advisorproducts.com as well, Tony
Russo or Barry Weinstein. Once again, Mike Kelly, I want to thank you for that
great presentation.
To all of you, thanks for
coming. We appreciate it. We’ll see you next month.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]