The Advisor Dashboard
Every once in a while I will hear this term. Whoever says it is generally talking about the panacea of integration. There has been a lot of progress in this area over the years and the growth is generally coming from Broker/Dealers.
The idea is simple; let individual companies do what they do best. Forget buying the all in one product, instead, buy a solution that allows you to use the best of breed in each segment and use them together.
In technology lingo this is called middleware. Broker/Dealers and Custodians used to get a lot of pressure from their clients to get good pricing on software. Now, they are getting a lot of pressure to make all this software work well for the Advisor.
Some Broker dealers get this, look at LPL and Raymond James as pretty good examples. They are trying to deliver integrated platforms that enable the advisor to use a single front end to access all the different products seamlessly.
The advantage to the broker dealer is that they can do compliance from a central location. The advantage to the Advisor is not worrying about moving between five or more applications. To quote that old sales adage, it’s win win.
What’s missing? There is no middleware for the small shops and by small I mean smaller than the top 10 custodians, let alone individual offices. I have seen many offices that use their own hybrid middleware, excel sheets talking to multiple data sources and little programs that copy data from application a to application b.
In technology circles, middleware has been much more formalized. We have had it for some time, there are companies that make a very good living on middleware that does nothing but enable communication between applications let alone provide a dashboard.
Maybe it’s time. A good middleware solution that enables your PMS to talk to financial planning system would be awesome. Think about an application that hides your PMS and financial planning solution from you using an integrated user interface. Add in your document management solution and you’ve struck gold. Would you pay a couple of thousand dollars for that?
Obviously the product does not exist yet; our industry is generally behind the rest of the world in technology and it will take some time to catch up. Whoever does this first (and well) is going to make some good money doing it.
Bill Ramsay said,
June 29, 2007 at 9:57 pm
IAS is an integrated PMS/FPProjection/CRM system, but it has some usability issues. One of which concerns projections. One of the biggest bugaboos is how to have a projection tool that easily allows one to account for actual numbers to see the progression along the plan- in other words being able to override say the amount of dividends paid in a given year, but have it revert back to the projection assumptions after that year. Its fairly complex to do that, but by no means impossible- but I’ve not seen any of the vendors even able to see their way through it.
Junxure is probably the best advisor specific “CRM/business management” tool, and I’ve spoken to Ken Golding the developer a couple times. IMO The hang up on making it truly integrated, is them wanting to cast the customer net as wide as possible, which makes him not want to have to deal with data connections to the varied structures for competing complimentary software pieces like PMS. Though with the latest Schwab reconnection, he may be inclined to truly link it to PortfolioCenter. Too bad PortfolioCenter didn’t correct some of their most problematic data structures when they moved the backend to SQL. I did see that Ken apparently has embraced a more robust development environment, rather than just using Access, so they may go somewhere cool with it.
Truly integrated doc management would be a real time saver, I’ve been hoping to have time to work on that for a while now, but other initiatives keep taking priority(and I guess I keep wishing someone else will do it). Imagine being able to scan and retrieve from the most appropriate position in the app- be it account, holding, client, person, task etc. That means keys for the doc tables related to many different parents rather than crap like 1-1 on client. Easy scan ability is key, so that anyone in the office can easily scan in and have the system assign at least one of the keys automatically to reduce or virtually eliminate misfiling errors.
A couple years ago I spoke with Morningstar about allowing us to integrate the data from Principia with Portfolio (we don’t use single asset classes on funds, we run our clients through Principia to get a summarized holdings based analysis), so we wouldn’t have to export/import (and we could fix some of their bad data)- they wanted 50Gs a year, which is absurd given that our 2 user licenses cost