Elizabeth O’Brien reports in Financial Planning Magazine that Pershing has launched their Net Exchange Investor site. This is a client-facing site that allows financial advisors to give their clients online access to their accounts. Advisors control the parts of the site their client can see and there is no trading capability—that is still left to the advisor. If you use Pershing as your broker/dealer I recommend that you take the tour and see if you like it.

The site seems like a good value-added service from Pershing and will probably have a decent adoption rate. My problem with these broker/dealer client-facing sites is that they tend to get the client involved with the broker/dealer directly. This creates a large obstacle if the financial advisor wants some portability.