The pace of technological innovation has never been greater. Independent broker-dealer firms continue to invest to keep up with the competition, offering advisors and end clients a better experience. In this article, we look at some recent technology developments at a number of leading independent broker-dealer firms.

LPL
At the company’s national conference in August 2013, Victor Fetter, the new chief information officer of LPL Financial, promised the audience that the company was beginning a major overhaul of its technology. One year later, at the 2014 conference, Fetter told advisors the platform remodeling was well under way, and that does appear to be the case.

LPL advisors, said Fetter, had been asking the company to update its Resource Center—the information hub within LPL’s advisor technology BranchNet platform—which includes business processing and client management tools; presentations and client communication resources; and research (on the markets, the economy, investment strategies, etc.).

The new center, redesigned from the ground up, provides a much improved user experience. It’s easier to navigate, said Fetter, and offers better search capabilities. It also contains new, improved content and can be accessed through mobile devices.

“It’s smarter, simpler and more personal,” he said.

New online cashiering and money movement capabilities will be added in the winter of 2014-2015.

LPL also announced that it would host its own e-mail (with archiving) as part of its core technology package at no additional cost to advisors. The offering was presented to advisors as a compliance upgrade (the company was fined by Finra in 2013 for violations related to e-mail compliance), but it would also appear to be a great deal for LPL advisors, since many pay third parties to host their e-mail, archive it and send copies to LPL for oversight and compliance purposes.

The free service will cut out the middleman, improving efficiency and saving advisors money. In addition, many advisors will have access to a more modern, more feature-rich e-mail system with plenty of storage (users get 25 gigabytes of space) that they can access through mobile devices. Furthermore, although LPL did not mention it, we strongly suspect that an integrated e-mail system would lay the foundation for future deep third-party integrations with applications such as client relationship management software.

ClientWorks, the successor to BranchNet, made its debut at the LPL Focus 2014 conference. The new platform, currently in beta testing by a select group of advisors, will launch in the fourth quarter with a subset of BranchNet features. Additional features will most likely become available by the first quarter of 2015.

One of the many complaints about the current BranchNet system is that it is only compatible with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. This limitation is due to the way LPL currently authenticates users. ClientWorks will support all major browsers. In the initial release, not all of the functionality of BranchNet will be available in ClientWorks, so the two systems will run in parallel until ClientWorks has all of the required functions, after which BranchNet will be retired. Initially, the developers of ClientWorks are concentrating on providing the following functionality: client information, client management, cash management and digital account openings with e-forms and e-signatures.

The new ClientWorks should solve a number of other problems for LPL. Much of BranchNet’s functionality goes unused because advisors don’t know it’s there, or they can’t find it. That should be remedied with an improved interface and better navigation. The display and filtering have also changed so that advisors will be able to view the information they want, the way they want to see it in ClientWorks. The filters can also be saved so that advisors don’t have to recreate the sort/search the next time they want to access information.

More important, ClientWorks has allowed LPL to build a robust new foundation. It did not make sense for LPL to keep building new capabilities onto a platform that was old (technologically). ClientWorks allows new enhancements, including third-party integrations, which we expect to see in 2015.

Raymond James
Raymond James has been working on adding functions to its advisor-facing technology, says Vin Campagnoli, chief information officer at the company.

“One area where advisors distinguish themselves is client reporting,” says Campagnoli. “Many of our advisors create their own unique reporting package for clients, but creating the report packages for clients can take hours.” Raymond James is working on combining everything necessary for the report into one tool, so that the custom report can be sent back to the client through multiple channels (on paper, into an online vault, etc.). This system would allow advisors to create report package templates and save them for future use. Advisors can assign templates to clients and then schedule future reporting intervals. The system would then prepare an updated package at the designated time and alert the advisor that it is ready for review or adjustments.

Behind the scenes, the company has been working to improve its data management and security. The company’s goal is to have one source of data that populates all applications. Raymond James recently signed a data aggregation deal with Fiserv that will allow it to store Fiserv data on held-away assets.
This will be a significant improvement for advisors currently using MoneyGuidePro or third-party aggregators and importing report data that cannot easily be shared with other systems. Raymond James hopes to store all data in a central location, so that the company can populate multiple applications with it.

The firm recently launched phase 2 of its new Client Center, the portion of its workstation dedicated to client data such as account information, CRM, etc. This will allow Raymond James to retire some legacy systems. Phase 1 of the next version of Practice Center, the other main portion of the workstation, which is dedicated to practice management, will be released toward the end of 2014, with enhancements coming in 2015.

Commonwealth Financial
For the past few years, Commonwealth Financial Network’s technology strategy has focused on strengthening the core of its existing applications, according to Darren Tedesco, managing principal of innovation and strategy at the company. The company’s work perfecting existing applications and tighter integration has won it a No. 1 ranking in advisor satisfaction by J.D. Power and Associates for four consecutive years. The company also ranked No. 1 in technology satisfaction in 2014.

In May, the company rolled out its “Client Household 360 Dashboard,” a page that illustrates the benefits of Commonwealth’s tighter integrations. The company first made a practice level dashboard available to advisors back in 2010, but the household dashboard is brand new. It’s made up of multiple widgets that can be organized within the page as the user desires. The widgets can take information from CRM applications and recent document uploads and they also allow you to move money, open accounts and rebalance portfolios. With the new dashboard, advisors can configure a page to view everything they need to know about a given household in preparation for a meeting. According to Tedesco, more than 3,800 advisors and their assistants are currently using the new dashboard. So far, the widgets have been deployed in more than 1,000 configurations, which not only shows the flexibility of the dashboard, but also proves how unique each advisor’s needs are.

This month, Commonwealth is scheduled to roll out an upgrade to Practice360, its advisor business dashboard, so it can include household modeling. This is significant because it will enable advisors to assign models to groups of accounts or to households instead of just to single accounts. The system will then optimize asset location for tax advantages using Commonwealth defaults. If advisors prefer, they can override the defaults with their own preferences and then rebalance based on those preferences.

In December, the company is scheduled to roll out the fifth major version of Commonwealth CRM. Since 2005, this technology has been built on Microsoft Dynamics so it could work with Outlook, a program important to many Commonwealth advisors since it allows them to synchronize their e-mail on multiple devices. The new system no longer relies on Microsoft Dynamics; all that will be necessary for e-mail synchronization is a Commonwealth e-mail account, which every advisor already has. For the 73% of affiliated advisors currently using Commonwealth CRM, Tedesco says the new system “will be easier to use, offer even tighter integration with other systems, and it will be lightning fast.”

In September, the company released the third iteration of its smartphone app. This allows advisors to make mobile check deposits by taking pictures of checks to put in their brokerage accounts with Fidelity, and saves both time and postage. The new app also offers more tiles to present key information at a glance, as well as touch screen navigation.

AIG
Over the past year, the AIG Advisor Group has worked to make better use of the data it already has. The company has invested heavily in data analytics to uncover opportunities and deliver useful, actionable information to its advisors. “Our goal with technology is to keep advisors focused on helping their clients,” says James Clabby, chief information officer of the AIG Advisor Group. The less time advisors spend dealing with administration and technology, the more time they can spend helping their clients.

Clabby says better data analytics can help advisors in multiple ways. For example, it can help advisors segment their client base effectively. That way, they can more effectively match their services to client needs and increase profitability.

As the industry moves to a fiduciary standard, Clabby says that data analytics can help advisors better serve their clients by helping broaden out asset allocations where advisable to reduce risk.

At a management level, data analytics can help identify advisors who are poised to take their practice to the next level, so that managers can provide the necessary resources to support that growth.

For 2014 and 2015, Clabby says that the company is designing software from a “mobile first” perspective. Everything it releases going forward will be ready to work on tablets and phones. He believes we are moving to a mobile workforce that demands anytime/anywhere access to data.

Before year’s end, the firm will be rolling out the mobile version of Salesforce to advisors and adding Salesforce work flows for advisors. In 2015, the firm will be rolling out straight-through digital processing, including e-signature capabilities.

In Summary
All four of these broker-dealers continue to devote significant resources to their technology. As a result, advisors and their clients are benefiting in multiple ways—getting better, more actionable data; tighter integrations; a better user experience; improved work flows; and improved client reporting.