Advisor Emporium Advent Launches Solution For Family Offices

Advent Software Inc. in San Francisco has launched a software package for family offices.

Advent for Family Offices is designed to meet the specialized investment management and reporting requirements of multi-disciplinary firms offering integrated financial advice to either single or multiple high-net worth families. The company bills it as the industry‚s first front-to-back solution for family offices.

Advent for Family Offices is comprised of four modules from which family offices can choose. They include:

• Portfolio Management and Reporting, powered by Advent‚s Axys application, for performance measurement and reporting, integration with third-party general ledger packages, tax-sensitive investment management tools and interfaces to third-party portfolio analytic tools.

• Trading and Order Management, from Advent‚s Moxy product, providing portfolio modeling and rebalancing, FIX-based electronic order routing, intra-day order management and integrated pre-trade and post-trade rules-based compliance checking.

• Integrated Custodial Data, enabling banks and trust companies to download client account data from the more than 300 custodians participating in Advent‚s custodian network, to consolidate client assets from multiple financial institutions, reconcile cross-institutional data and deliver it online.

• Total Wealth Management, through Advent‚s outsourced data management service, allowing firms to consolidate securitized and nonsecuritized assets (real estate, jewelry, art, etc.), normalize data and deliver reconciled data online in a consistent format for easy wealth reporting.

For more information about Advent, visit www.advent.com.

Companies Provide Data Integration

StatementOne in Lawrenceville, N.J., and CashEdge Inc. in New York and Milpitas, Calif., have partnered with Cambridge Investment Research Inc. to provide Cambridge's advisors and registered representatives with combined data aggregation and consolidation services.

StatementOne provides enterprise financial data consolidation and performance reporting. CashEdge offers secure online money movement and advanced account aggregation platforms.

Visit www.statementone.com or www.cashedge.com for more information.

S&P Expands Analysis

Standard & Poor's will start providing independent pricing for U.S. taxable fixed-income securities–including high-grade, high-yield, mortgage-backed and asset-backed offerings–at the end of this month.

Standard & Poor's has a long-established track record of providing independent pricing for U.S. tax-exempt securities. The new taxable asset classes will give financial professionals an additional source of independent and objective pricing to help them meet increased regulatory and auditing scrutiny.

For more information, visit www.standardandpoors.com.

Fidelity Introduces Value Fund

Fidelity Investments of Boston has introduced the Fidelity Advisor Value Fund, which invests in undervalued small- and mid-cap companies.

The fund is managed by Richard B. Fentin, a 25-year veteran of Fidelity, and is only available for purchase through investment professionals. For more information about Fidelity, visit www.fidelity.com.

Manulife Tools

The Manufacturers Life Insurance Co. (U.S.A.) is offering a new qualified plan distribution sales tool kit and MLI Solutions module. The kit and software describe how distributions from qualified plans and IRAs can be used to fund life insurance policies, thereby potentially avoiding the "double tax" bite of federal estate and income tax that can result when these required distributions are allowed to accumulate inside an estate. For more information on Manulife Financial, visit www.manulife.com.

LTC Marketplace

The LTC Exchange Ltd. has been launched to offer agents long-term-care insurance products plus a free sales-training program.

Founded by Wilma G. Anderson, the exchange offers contracts with LTC insurers as well as in-person, Web and audiovisual programs.

For more information, visit www.LTCX.info or contact Kevin Hussey at (800) 550-2666, ext. 110, or Wilma Anderson at [email protected].