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.”