For more information on Fan Mail, call (816) 435-1000 or visit www.dstsystems.com.
Help With Clients
Contacting clients is critical to retaining them, and Phoenix Investment Partners, based in Hartford, Conn., is offering a tool that may help.
It‚s a practice-management kit, "Financial Advice is a Contact Sport," including a brochure, "Putting the Market Into Perspective," and presentation CD, "Investing Perspectives." Advisors can use these tools when contacting clients to reinforce essential investing fundamentals and keep clients focused and on track toward long-term financial success.
Advisors interested in the kit may visit Phoenix‚s Advisor Center at www.phoenixinvestments.com or call Phoenix Investment Partners‚ Advisor Consulting Group at (800) 243-4361.
529 Plan Introduced
Waddell & Reed Inc. of Overland Park, Kan., has introduced a 529 college-savings plan. The Waddell & Reed InvestEd Plan offers three portfolios–growth, balanced and conservative–and is available nationally through Waddell & Reed financial advisors.
The plan was established under the Arizona Family College Savings Program, which was created by Arizona as a qualified state tuition program in accordance with Section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code. 529 plans are post-secondary education savings plans that enable anyone to open an account and invest significant amounts for higher education expenses.
For more information regarding the InvestEd Plan or any of the mutual funds offered by Waddell & Reed, please request a prospectus by calling (888) Waddell or visit www.waddell.com.
Measure Your Practice
Tiburon Strategic Advisors has partnered with SunAmerica Financial Network to launch an interactive benchmarking Web site, www.IndependentRepBestPractices.com, where independent reps can profile their businesses and measure their practices against a database of hundreds of colleagues for free.
Tiburon, based in Tiburon, Calif., also has released a research report based on the data collected in its preliminary survey of 250 independent reps and will be available to conduct market seminars and conference speeches for industry vendors trying to better understand the independent rep market and build value-added programs.
To use the benchmarking tool, independent reps must visit the site and answer some or all of the 40 questions. In return, they can access 213 graphs that identify the industry‚s best practices.