Marketing and business development

Human capital

Business and strategic planning (benchmarking study)

Transition and succession planning

Compliance

Schwab provides its solution through face-to-face interactions with relationship managers, third-party vendors, Web solutions, webinars, white papers, benchmarking studies and regional events. Slater feels the gap that Schwab needs to fill in its business consulting solution is providing more extensive customized solutions. Schwab wants to provide deeper actionable solutions around important areas like succession planning.

Bob Barry has headed up Barry Capital Management of Hackettstown, N.J., since 1983. "We're primarily a financial planning firm that provides asset management," says Barry. He says the firm serves middle-income to high-net-worth families with just two people, although he's looking at adding two more in 2011. "We probably won't get much bigger than four to five people," he adds.

What practice management services does Barry receive from Schwab? "Schwab makes very good practice management research available to advisors, like its compliance newsletter. The issue for us has been how to integrate that data into day-to-day practice management practices; that's where Schwab falls short."

What Barry really wants, though, is demographic data. "It would be nice if we could pull demographic info from Schwab ... a breakout that says here's total clients, average age, females, males, average account size, dollar value of qualified and non-qualified accounts ... we've done that using Salesforce but it takes a lot of time and it's not particularly convenient."

So many companies make applications available through Salesforce, says Barry, that he would love to see Schwab build a practice management app for Salesforce. "We have no issue with paying for it," he says.

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