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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Davis Janowski jumps on the all-in-one-software-is-dead bandwagon with a recent article in Investment News. The article largely documents the conversation flow of a vendor roundtable at the Chicago FPA conference. It’s peppered with depressing quotes from both advisors and vendors talking about how hard it is to make their software applications talk to each other.

Janowski says:

Problems come and problems go, but linking adviser tools so that data entered once can populate several software programs — that’s a problem that seems eternal.

I think that all the industry pundits have now thrown in the towel on integrated software except, possibly, for Joel Bruckenstein, who said nice things recently about both the Your Silver Bullet initiative and Interactive Advisory Software’s integrated solution.

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Joel Bruckenstein previewed a beta version of Junxure 7.0 and wrote it up in Morningstar Advisor Edition. Junxure is one of two established advisor CRM software solutions (ProTracker is the other). It was sold by Schwab for a while as Relationship Manager, but recently Schwab stopped selling it and, instead, directs people to Junxure’s site.

Joel thinks highly of the new release:

Some have argued that Junxure 7.0 extends the concept of client relationship management to a whole new level termed total office management. Based upon what I’ve seen so far, I would have to agree. Junxure 7.0 allows you do document and report on everything that takes place in a financial service practice. It also takes the flexibility and usability of the program to new heights. I’m sure that there will be at least a few complaints and criticisms, but overall, Junxure 7.0 is a quantum leap forward. If you liked version 6, you are going to love version 7. If you are dissatisfied with your current client relationship management application, I’d suggest you test drive Junxure 7.0.

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There’s a new article in Financial Advisor Magazine that talks about FinFolio. The article is a good technical discussion of some of the things we’re working on. We’ll be releasing parts of FinFolio software as open source, using Microsoft’s new Silverlight for the UI, and fanatically wrapping everything in unit tests to ensure a bug-free first release. But mainly, the article closes out the Techfi story by talking about the Advent sale.

From Unfinished Business:

Meanwhile, Rob Major, a co-founding minority partner, became embroiled in disagreements with Abar about the direction of the company. Abar now admits that he was having trouble finding qualified executives with knowledge of advisor technology and good operations management skills to help lead the company. Abar says he explored raising $2 million in the spring of 2002 to address operational, technology and personnel issues and elevate Techfi to the next level, but with the tech bubble burst it would have meant giving up at least a 40% stake in the company. That was when Advent made an offer to buy Techfi.

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I’ll make this short since I’ve done several Fidelity posts recently. Joel Bruckenstein has a more positive take on Fidelity’s new Wealth Central platform. Apparently they already have much of it up and running and he’s seen it in action.

To refresh your memory, Wealth Central is Fidelity’s new integrated office suite for advisors. It ties together portfolio management, planning and CRM by integrating three best-of-breed applications: Advent APX, NaviPlan and Siebel.

Joel is pretty enthusiastic about it:

…based on what I’ve seen, WealthCentral will likely represent a revolutionary advance in advisor technology and efficiency. Since the platform will be totally Web-based, WealthCentral just might be the catalyst that breaks the Microsoft Windows stranglehold on the financial service sector.

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Andy Gluck wrote an article about the odd Fidelity Wealth Central announcement. He wonders why they announced the product more than a year before they think they can ship it. Pre-announcing products like this is classic Microsoft strategy that they used often in the pre-anti-trust days. They preannounce a product, which makes prospects wait before buying a competitor’s product. If the product ships late, without a full feature set, or never ships at all, then the prospects lose out.

Usually companies don’t pre-announce years in advance. Those that do, often reget it. Adobe’s president Shantanu Narayen says:

Narayen emphasized that early announcement can be a double-edged sword. “When we preannounce products, sometimes people tend to stall their purchases because they’re aware there’s a new product [coming out]. So there has to be a balance. In retrospect, maybe announcing something nine months ahead of schedule–[like] when we said Creative Suite is going to ship in the second quarter–might have been a little premature.”

With Fidelity making such a bold announcement years before the product release, they’re setting themselves up for some major embarrassment if the product doesn’t ship. I’m sure it was fun having those billboards up during the Schwab conference but I wonder if they should have saved the stunt for next year.

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Fidelity announced their new WealthCentral platform by placing billboard ads throughout Las Vegas this week, during the Schwab IMPACT conference. Ballsy move — I love it.

WealthCentral combines portfolio management, customer relationship management, financial planning and other applications on a single platform. It doesn’t actually exist yet, but Fidelity plans to spend $50 million developing it. The software will replace Advisor Channel.

This an interesting move by Fidelity. They’re obviously under pressure to compete with Schwab’s Portfolio Center offering which is getting more and more popular. But instead of building all the components in-house (like Schwab), they’re tying together several best-of-breed products. That’s a tricky proposition — one vendor’s integrated best-of-breed platform is another’s Frankenstein monster.

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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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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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