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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Investment News has a great article on Morningstar’s performance since their IPO in 2005. Amazing is the only word for it. Check out their performance against the Nasdaq and S&P over the last few years. Keep in mind that’s a logarithmic scale.

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Investment Advisor Magazine has a review of four investment monitoring packages, Morningstar Advisor Workstation, Steele Systems Mutual Fund Expert, fi360, and Klein Fund Selection Tool. They don’t draw conclusions and, in fact, it seems like the products are only superficially competing for the same market. But it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

fi360 seems designed to create an investment policy statement (IPS) for an advisor’s clients, then monitor the client positions against a target model of funds, re-evaluating the IPS every year. They focus on tracking the fiduciary responsibility an advisor has towards the client.

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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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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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The CFP officially adopted new ethical standards May 31, 2007. I think it’s a move in the right direction but it’s still not enough. The new ethics require more disclosure, clarify that saying “fee only” must mean fee only and that a CFP must let the CFP board know of any criminal allegation against them.

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