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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Andy Gluck at Financial Advisor Magazine has an interesting roundup of the customer relationship management (CRM) options for investment advisors. He touches on the two traditional industry options: Junxure and ProTracker. Next, I was expecting him to talk about some of the new web-based options that Joel Bruckenstein wrote about back in January. (I haven’t heard anything recently about Redtail, Upswing, Advisor Tools or Nation Builder.) But Andy didn’t mention them at all.

Instead, the article mostly talks about an interesting new option for wealth managers, XLR8. Its a custom template written on top of Salesforce.com, the best Internet CRM out there. I *love* Salesforce.com. They have one of the best web UIs around and have been leading the way creating an extensible web-based platform; this is how XLR8 built their product.

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The article is titled Deb McWhinney Abruptly Retires from Schwab. I don’t know anybody on the editorial staff of Financial Planning Magazine but I’ll bet they’re lots of fun at parties. Most publications would relegate firings to small innocuous blurbs on the back page. Not these guys—they revel in them.

Other magazines reported this as:

Schwab’s McWhinney retires – Investment News
Schwab Institutional’s McWhinney Resigns – Investment Advisor
Advisors Losing An Ally With McWhinney’s Departure – Financial Advisor

At least you can’t accuse Financial Planning of burying the lead.

McWhinney had been head of Schwab Institutional—the division that serves financial advisors—since joining the company in 2001 and, until recently, was widely considered a potential successor to the once-retired company founder and current CEO Charles Schwab.

But in February, the company appointed Walter Bettinger II as the firm’s new president and chief operating officer, making him, and not McWhinney, the clear front-runner to eventually take the firm’s reins. McWhinney’s abrupt decision to leave Schwab comes less than two months after Bettinger’s promotion.

Her position has been filled by Charles Goldman, who has been acting chief operating officer of Schwab Institutional for the past two years.

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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.

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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.