Next in our running series of advisor blogger profiles is Kim Miller, a CFP, ChFC and CLU based in Redmond, Washington. He is a financial advisor at Sweetwater Investments and writes a blog called the Egalitarian Adviser. He gets a +1 from me for being a fellow reddit user as well has for having the most creative job title yet, “Financial Cartographer”.

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

We are Financial Cartographers – we help people map out their finances so they can relax and enjoy life.  Clients range from a 26 y.o. just getting started to 78 y.o. retirees.  The business is fee-only, so we work with anyone who needs financial advice.  We offer comprehensive financial planning as well as modular planning where we will focus only on the area of greatest concern.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I started in October 2007 as a way of increasing my web presence.  It also helps me clarify my philosophy.

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The RAND Report is the result of a two-year study on the broker-dealer and advisor industry done by the Securities and Exchange Commission. A few years back somebody got worried that the line between brokers and advisors was getting blurred and asked the SEC to investigate. The SEC’s response was a monster report–219 pages long in its current pre-publication form. I e-mailed it to my Kindle which made it much easier to wade through.

The broker/RIA line wasn’t only getting blurred with clients–at one point, the CFP was seriously considering relinquishing their fiduciary duty, which would have been a big step backwards in the arena of client advocacy and professional responsibility. The RAND report is about RIAs not CFPs but their conclusions probably apply to both designations.

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Why do portfolio management systems offer so little in the way of flexibility when it comes to their reports. Instead of using Crystal Reports (or something similar), they build their own proprietary solutions, making it much harder for firms to do anything more than stick their logo on the reports.

Wall Street & Technology magazine did an informal survey among their readers and found something astonishing:

…nearly half the firms reported that they use an enterprise solution that is a combination of a proprietary solution and a vendor-supplied solution for client reporting. Most said they use Business Objects’ (San Jose, Calif/Paris) Crystal in combination with proprietary solutions… Significantly, however, about 80 percent of the firms that participated in the survey said their platforms do not meet all of their periodic and ad hoc reporting needs.

I assume that by “platforms” they’re talking about portfolio management software, which uniformly lack good reporting solutions. How hard would it be to rewrite your client reports using Crystal, and let your clients edit them? (Ok, probably pretty hard.)

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Bedside delivery of the Wall Street Journal–sounds like something you get in five star hotels, right? It’s also something you can get now from Amazon.com in the form of an electronic book reader named Kindle. I got mine three weeks ago and so far I’m having a great experience with it. It cost $400.

Amazon claims the Kindle is an entirely new class of device—”a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers.” They’re using the new electronic paper that was designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. The “paper” shows up as a dull gray and the “print” is a crisp black that is easy to see and read. The screen isn’t backlit so you can’t see it in a dark room, but you don’t get the same eye fatigue as with LCD computer screens.

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Its been five long years, but my no-compete finally expired. This is the official announcement that I’m creating a new portfolio management platform for investment advisors and money managers. Development started a few weeks ago and I just recently set up the FinFolio web site:

The initial reaction I’ve gotten is mainly from old Techfi clients and it has been resoundingly positive. It’s nice being able to talk directly to people again and even nicer to know there’s still a need for good software. Techfi was built on what is now ten year old technology–the new company will have some similarities but our vision goes beyond what anybody else in the industry is presently working on.

Mike and I will keep WealthFly going as a separate venture. It’s nice having a neutral platform to talk about the industry and we’re having fun with it. In the process of seeking out good material for WealthFly posts, I’ve become more aware of industry trends and events than ever before. It helped me decide to create this new company, and will largely determine the initial direction of our development.

In line with WealthFly being a separate venture, don’t expect to see much about FinFolio here on the blog. We’ve set up a FinFolio corporate blog where we’ll be talking about future company direction and details of our portfolio management development. I think it should be interesting reading for anybody wanting to watch a piece of software being built.

Thanks everybody!

Joel Bruckenstein throws out several predictions for 2008 in a series of articles on Morningstar Advisor called Technology for 2008: Part One, and Part Two. Joel tracks the wealth management industry and reports mainly on technology.

Article highlights include:

• Document Management (yawn)
• Document Authentication (yawn)
• Online Statements (interesting)
• Integration (interesting)
• Rebalancing Software (interesting)
• Retirement Income Planning Software (yawn)
• Vista Takes Off (inevitable)
• Office 2007 Will Become The Industry Standard (inevitable)
• Smaller Advisors Will Embrace Apple (interesting)
• Technology Vendors Will Emphasize ROI (zzz…)

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Last week was our week for updates. We moved the blog to a new server, updated to the latest version of WordPress and were down for at least a day. In fact, this post serves as our final test that everything’s up and running again.

You can watch the action today:

Here’s the second in my series of profiles on advisor bloggers. This time, it’s from a former Techfi client, Bob Klosterman. Bob was one of the first clients to use Techfi’s web technology, the web add-on to Portfolio 2000 that later became Techfi Web Office. His blog is called Wealth-O-Nomics.

1. How would you describe your business?

We are a fee-only wealth management firm.

2. When and why did you start blogging? Who set the blog up for you?

I started about two months ago. We felt it was important to be part of the conversation in the blogosphere. More and more people are using the Internet to gather information and we want them to have an opportunity to be aware of our existence. We also have four private blogs for the exclusive use of our clients. We post investment updates and data there and information clients would find useful. I set the blog up myself.

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With my new gaming computer purchase, I got one of those amazing 30″ Samsung 2560 x 1600 LCD monitors. If you haven’t seen one yet, you should go to an Apple store and check out their version–it will bring a tear to your eye. With my other computer setup I have two 22″ Samsung 1600 x 1050 LCD monitors. So now that I’ve got both setups, I’m in a position to evaluate each one and tell you what you should spend your money on.

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Wondering if anybody was paying attention to Fidelity’s WealthCentral announcement? Schwab was and they’re not sitting back to see if Fidelity can pull it off. Schwab’s acquisition of Etelligent Consulting must have been an open secret because I heard about it weeks ago; Etelligent does back office work for RIAs using Schwab PortfolioCenter.

This was a smart acquisition for Schwab for many reasons:

1. If I were Schwab, I’d be a bit uncomfortable having a third party vendor managing such a crucial piece of the client relationship. What if Etelligent took a glean to another portfolio management vendor? All of a sudden, Schwab could find 100 of their customers moving to Advent Axys, which would make it easier for them to switch between custodial providers. Now Schwab fully owns the technology relationship with Etelligent’s clients.
2. Schwab gets an in-house outsourcing capability that it can leverage by offering it to their captive audience of 3,000+ PortfolioCenter users.
3. Schwab adds a big component of the “total advisor desktop” to their platform, better positioning them in respect to Fidelity with their new WealthCentral initiative.

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