TD Waterhouse Offers New Services For Advisors

TD Waterhouse Institutional Services is offering new services for the 2,600 fee-based independent financial advisor clients in its network.

TD Waterhouse‚s advisor clients can now access:

• Proprietary research from Goldman Sachs PrimeAccesssm. The service provides advisors with access to real-time news, proprietary research, initial public offerings and alternative investments.

• Mortgages through Nexstar Financial Corp. The program enables advisors to provide their clients with access to residential home financing.

•Administrative family-office capabilities through Total Personal Services Administrative Group LLC. Advisors can provide their wealthy clients with executive secretarial, bookkeeping and personal concierge services, and daily monitoring and review of bills and other time-sensitive information. The group also prepares and reviews reports and account activity with advisors and their clients.

•Web-site development. TD Waterhouse has partnered with AdvisorSites to offer customized Web-site development at discounted rates. AdvisorSites also helps advisors update their clients on financial news.

Financial advisors already in TD Waterhouse‚s network who want to learn more about these services may call (800) 431-3500. Other advisors may call (800) 934-6124.

VUL Data Now Available

DST Systems Inc. of Kansas City, Mo., is providing Variable Universal Life (VUL) data through its proprietary service, FAN (Financial Advisor Network) Mail.

FAN Mail sends financial intermediaries automated downloads of client data, such as shareholder positions, account profiles, financial transactions, dividends and daily prices from various mutual fund, variable annuity and REIT providers. Western Reserve Life Assurance Company of Ohio is the first provider of VUL data through FAN Mail.

FAN Mail works with portfolio-management software to eliminate manual data entry and to streamline back-office operations.

For more information on Fan Mail, call (816) 435-1000 or visit www.dstsystems.com.

Help With Clients

Contacting clients is critical to retaining them, and Phoenix Investment Partners, based in Hartford, Conn., is offering a tool that may help.

It‚s a practice-management kit, "Financial Advice is a Contact Sport," including a brochure, "Putting the Market Into Perspective," and presentation CD, "Investing Perspectives." Advisors can use these tools when contacting clients to reinforce essential investing fundamentals and keep clients focused and on track toward long-term financial success.

Advisors interested in the kit may visit Phoenix‚s Advisor Center at www.phoenixinvestments.com or call Phoenix Investment Partners‚ Advisor Consulting Group at (800) 243-4361.

529 Plan Introduced

Waddell & Reed Inc. of Overland Park, Kan., has introduced a 529 college-savings plan. The Waddell & Reed InvestEd Plan offers three portfolios–growth, balanced and conservative–and is available nationally through Waddell & Reed financial advisors.

The plan was established under the Arizona Family College Savings Program, which was created by Arizona as a qualified state tuition program in accordance with Section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code. 529 plans are post-secondary education savings plans that enable anyone to open an account and invest significant amounts for higher education expenses.

For more information regarding the InvestEd Plan or any of the mutual funds offered by Waddell & Reed, please request a prospectus by calling (888) Waddell or visit www.waddell.com.

Measure Your Practice

Tiburon Strategic Advisors has partnered with SunAmerica Financial Network to launch an interactive benchmarking Web site, www.IndependentRepBestPractices.com, where independent reps can profile their businesses and measure their practices against a database of hundreds of colleagues for free.

Tiburon, based in Tiburon, Calif., also has released a research report based on the data collected in its preliminary survey of 250 independent reps and will be available to conduct market seminars and conference speeches for industry vendors trying to better understand the independent rep market and build value-added programs.

To use the benchmarking tool, independent reps must visit the site and answer some or all of the 40 questions. In return, they can access 213 graphs that identify the industry‚s best practices.