Continuing its quest to catch up on the technology front, LPL Financial on Monday announced plans to upgrade its advisor workstation.
The new system, called ClientWorks, will eventually replace the current BranchNet workstation, LPL said at its annual advisor conference in San Diego. The upgrade will begin with an improved advisor Resource Center this fall, with a full rollout in early 2015.
Resource Center is the hub through which LPL advisors access a variety of information. “It’s a treasure trove … and advisors just want to be able to find [information] and have it available on more devices,” said Victor Fetter, chief information officer at LPL.
The revamped version has an improved search engine with mobile accessibility, LPL said. Fetter, the former chief information officer of Dell online, is a star hire for LPL, which brought him on board in December 2012 to give the firm’s technology a needed boost.
Several LPL advisors told Financial Advisor that the legacy system is clunky. The most recent revamp “was long overdue,” said Jamie Cox, of Harris Financial Group, who has been beta-testing the new system.
“Victor [Fetter] is delivering on what he was hired to do,” Cox said. LPL also announced a new relationship with Redtail Technology, a CRM provider, and is promising enhancements to its portfolio-management system and an improved trade blotter for OSJs.
LPL will also be bringing e-mail surveillance in-house. Reps currently have to find their own e-mail hosting solution.
Fetter said LPL reps have been “eager for us to take [e-mail hosting and storage] off their hands.” The hosting service will be included in the fees advisors currently pay, he said.
Like many of the technology enhancements the company announced, improved compliance was a driving force behind the move to internal e-mail hosting, Fetter added.