Both Fidelity Investments and SEI this week announced new features for financial advisors using their respective platforms.

In Fidelity's case, the Boston-based company rolled out a multimedia portal--the Insight Center--on its advisor.fidelity.com website which it says provides advisors with access to sales ideas, Fidelity research and market analysis.

Among the program's specific features are more than 50 investment and retirement planning sales ideas covering a range of topics from market volatility to international investing to 529 plans. And advisors can access Fidelity Advisor fund hypotheticals that are approved for use with investors.

Insight Center also provides monthly, quarterly and annual market commentaries, and enables advisors to sign up for upcoming conference calls with Fidelity Advisor fund managers and to download podcasts of past calls.

The advisor.fidelity.com website is part of Fidelity Investments Institutional Services Company, a Fidelity subsidiary that serves financial advisors. It had $300 billion in assets under management as of the end of June.

Regarding SEI, the Oaks, Pa.-based investment company unveiled a new goals-based client reporting system that recasts investment accounts to illustrate "progress to goals" for investors.

SEI says the new statements will make it easier for clients to understand exactly how their investments are doing and if they're on the right track to achieve their goals, while helping advisors better communicate and connect with clients.

As part of the roll-out of the Statement and Reporting platform, SEI sent its new goals-based statements to clients of more than 1,000 of its independent financial advisor clients.

The new statements complement SEI's goals-based investment strategy, an approach built on the tenets of behavioral finance. Founded on the premise that individuals have multiple goals weighted differently in their minds, goals-based investing analyzes performance not by traditional benchmarks, but rather by an individual's progress toward goal attainment. To reflect this approach, the new goals-based reporting system breaks down each investor's aggregated investments into buckets for holdings, transactions, asset allocation and performance related to long-term progress to each individual goal.

The statements features include a general market summary, specific investment performance and ongoing account activity. SEI's new system also consolidates clients' monthly transaction statement and quarterly performance report in a single quarterly mailing. An initial roll-out of the system was conducted in August, and the company plans a full roll-out to all clients by end of year.

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