Davis Janowski at Investment News talks about Lab49, a new company that is developing financial services software for the iPhone. The company seems to be in direct competition with Pyxis Mobile, who is also delivering financial data to mobile devices.

Lab49 isn’t targeting the individual investor, opting to target hedge funds initially.

From the article:

“[We think] fund managers, trade operations, groups and institutions that are a little less hamstrung by deployments of enterprise wide applications and issues … will gravitate to the application and the iPhone’s abilities,” Mr. Jacobs said.

“I also see demand from clearing and custodian companies which do a lot of processing and need better ways to manage work flow remotely, and are looking to monitor the status and performance of their systems,” he said.

It’s fun watching a new financial software market being created. I’m not too sure I can picture my hedge fund manager making trades from his cell phone, but it will be interesting seeing whether either of these companies get any serious penetration.

I ran across Russ Thornton’s Wealth Simplified blog several months ago and asked him if he would participate in our advisor blogger profile. The blog was brand new and he wanted to put some more miles on it first. But it has since turned into one of the best looking blogs out there.

One of the things I really like about Russ’s blog is that he puts it on the main page of his web site. Every time his clients go to his site, they’re reminded that he has a blog with constantly updating content. Which should, in turn, bring them back to his web site more often.

1. How would you describe your business and typical client?

My business delivers a comprehensive wealth management service to families.  This includes planning, investment management and coordination with a client’s other professional advisors.  My typical client has $1 million or more in investment assets and has important goals that they wish to accomplish.  Here’s my ideal client profile:  http://www.thorntonwealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/twm-ideal-client-profile.pdf

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Broadridge Financial Solutions acquired Investigo two weeks ago–I’m not sure how this one slipped under my radar. This is turning into an exciting month for portfolio management acquisitions. It really highlights the risk advisors take when they select a smaller startup vendor for technology/operations outsourcing.

A few years back, Investigo was the #1 stop for outsourcing portfolio management and reporting for advisors. I think they stumbled a bit with a botched rollout of their new version, but I haven’t heard anything new about them in the press for years. From the advisor side, I’ve heard slightly displeased rumblings but no specifics.

I know some of the Investigo crew and they’re good folks. I wish them well.

Morningstar bought dbCAMS+ maker Financial Computer Support (FCSI) yesterday, with the intention of integrating it into their Principia product line. This is an unexpected move that has me scratching my head a bit. dbCAMS is a low-end legacy product that usually isn’t even included in reviews of portfolio management systems. To be blunt, nobody took them seriously. I’ve always thought that was unfair and I’m glad to see somebody else agreed.

From Morningstar’s letter to their clients:

We have seen strong demand for integrated portfolio management solutions like this in our Web- based investment planning platform, Advisor Workstation Office Edition, and felt that offering a similar capability in our Principia suite would be a valuable enhancement.

We plan to incorporate dbCAMS+ into the Principia product line and rebrand it within the next year. By bringing these two software applications together in a single product suite, advisors will have powerful options for integrating investment data and analytics with client performance reports.

…The addition of dbCAMS+ will allow us to offer portfolio management systems, integrated with traditional Morningstar research and analytic capabilities, in both a web-based and CD-ROM software-based solution.

They’re coming out with an integrated desktop suite that they can sell in parallel to their Advisor Workstation product. I’ll bet Morningstar thinks they can clean up the dbCAMS front-end, and turn it into a viable contender in the desktop portfolio management space–a third option that people will eventually consider alongside Advent Axys/APX and Schwab Portfolio Center. I wonder if Morningstar is planning any more acquisitions to round out their desktop suite. Legacy technology aside, they may be able to buy up a low-end desktop suite on the cheap.

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I got an e-mail from Chris Willis at Pyxis Mobile today, announcing the launch of their company blog. I’d never heard of their company and checked it out. Pyxis makes a mobile portfolio/contact management application tailored toward the financial services industry.

Pyxis takes your financial data and delivers it to you on your mobile phone. I’m not sure how much demand there is for this; I can’t remember anybody asking for it five years ago at Techfi. I know that IAS is playing with mobile PMS on the iPhone, but it feels more like a developer boondoggle than a serious product effort.

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Andy Gluck has an interesting post on his blog about integrating web services. In it, he promotes the concept of Web Services being the new silver bullet for financial advisor applications.

From the post:

Web Services provide significant improvement in efficiency and savings. They free advisory firms from re-keying client data into multiple applications, which saves labor and reduces errors. Service to clients is also improved because you no longer have to input all of the holdings every time you do analytics on a portfolio. If your analytics program, say Morningstar Principia, can take a Web Service from your portfolio accounting application or get it directly from your custodian, you are likely to run your analytics program more often.

I’m seeing the "Web Services is the solution" theme more and more in technology articles about our industry. I’m going to disagree with the prevailing sentiment. Not only are Web Services not the solution, they actually make the fundamental problem *worse* from a vendor perspective.

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After our sixth straight week of down markets, our worst run since 2001, we’ve had the craziest weekend I can remember. It’s getting hard to keep track of the disasters.

Regional bank IndyMac fails and the FDIC takes over. This is the second-largest bank failure in our generation and larger than the combined assets all the small banks the FDIC has taken over in the past 15 years. IndyMac may be the first of many. The Feds have a list of 93 banks they’re watching and the really scary thing? IndyMac wasn’t even on the list. In fact, analysts say that up to 125 banks could fail over the next 12 to 18 months.

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I stumbled on another excellent advisor blog to highlight in our running series of advisor blogger profiles. David Laidlaw is an investment advisor with National Advisors Trust, and he hosts a client-facing blog on his site. This is our second advisor blog profile with a National Advisors Trust advisor (Bob Klosterman’s Wealth-O-Nomics being the other).

David is a CFA and practicing attorney, and co-authors the blog with fellow CFA, Ben Connard. They use something called SquareSpace to host the web site and blog, which seems to be similar to the modular DotNetNuke software we’re using to host FinFolio. I also need to thank David for turning me on to the hilarious JeffMatthewsIsNotMakingThisUp site.

1. How would you describe your business and typical client?

Our firm serves as an investment manager to individuals and families and institutional investors such as pension plans, endowments and foundations.  We determine their investment goals and risk tolerance and then build a portfolio using individual equities, fixed-income Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and International ETFs to match their objectives.  We rely on fundamental equity analysis and create portfolios using common stocks that sell for discounts to their intrinsic values .  Laidlaw Group also manages a Long/Short Hedge Fund. 

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The FinFolio logo contest at 99 Designs wound up last week and I’m very happy with the results. The contest ran for seven days, and we ended up with at least twelve logos that would have made us happy. Our final selection:

Logo design packages start at around $1,500 from reputable companies. We signed up for one with my last company, Techfi, and were not happy with the results. But the 99 Designs competition only cost us $350, and I was impressed with the quality of submissions. IMHO, we had several world-class designers working on it and there were several logos that were relevant to our company, clever, and professional.

I assume that anybody looking at our logo/web site already has an idea what FinFolio does, so a financial logo doesn’t send a helpful message. We went with the open lock logo to emphasize our open development philosophy, which is how we differ from the other portfolio management companies. I’d love to show you the ones we rejected, because they’re as good as our final selection–however, I didn’t pay those designers for the right to use their logos. But they’re still available on our contest site if you’d like to view them.

I would highly recommend 99 Designs for anybody needing a corporate identity. Even if you already have one, I’d consider starting a contest with a modest prize amount, just to see the possibilities.

There’s a new player on the advisor blogging scene, one that may deliver on some predictions I made in my Kickstarting Advisor Blogs post. Andy Gluck just launched Advisor Blog Central, a site that gives a consolidated blogging platform to selected financial advisors, consultants, and other industry pundits.

From his inaugural post:

I’m writing this blog to tell you myself about the marketing products [Advisor Products] offers financial advisors and explain the ideas driving them. … In addition to marketing, I’m also going to use this blog to write about ideas that don’t get into my column.

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