What were the most popular WM Today posts from 2013? Portfolio rebalancing, financial planning and anything mobile were big draws last year. Here are the top 10 according to stats from WordPress:
10. 5 Ways a Web Portal Can Excite Your Clients
This summary from the fantastic Technology, Tools & Today (T3) conference highlights how software vendors need to continuously expand and evolve their product offerings in order to stay relevant. Junxure CRM has done this by building their ClientViewLive portal, which acts as central integration hub for all other wealth management products. Through it, clients can access their account holdings, performance reporting, online statements even financial planning tools via a single sign on and a well-designed user interface.
9. Which Portfolio Rebalancing Software is Right for You? Smartleaf’s Response
Part of an ongoing series of articles focusing on automated software rebalancers, I thought it would be interesting to interview different vendors and compare their products and their approaches to portfolio management.
8. Current Trends in the Electronic Payments Industry
This post continues to surprise me with its popularity since I wrote it back in 2011. Jeff Yabuki, President and CEO of Fiserv, talked about four drivers to build growth, profit and loyalty in the financial services industry. One of them their peer-to-peer payment solution, Popmoney, which allows consumers to send money to each other from their mobile devices.
7. Which Portfolio Rebalancing Software is Right for You? FolioDynamix Response
Look for additional follow-ups to this series, with three posts in the top 10. It seems that everyone loves reading about software rebalancers, such as the highly-scalable one designed by FolioDynamix that allows multiple accounts to be linked to multiple models, which are held at multiple custodians and traded simultaneously.
6. Financial Planning in 10 Minutes or Less with goalgamiPro
One of three posts in this list related to mobile and one of two about financial planning. This iPad app is targeted at advisors and designed to be used primarily as a prospecting tool. It walks the user through a simplified workflow in order to build a client’s household balance sheet.
5. A Sneak Peak at Envestnet’s Upgraded iPad App
Continuing with the mobile theme, Envestnet’s app makes their entire end-to-end wealth management platform available to an advisor almost anywhere. Through the app, advisors can submit request such as Raise Cash, Rebalance, Run Proposal, or generate all custodial paperwork and even open the required custodial accounts.
4. Financial Advisor Technology: 9 Apps to Improve Your Practice
Another in my series from the T3 Conference, I was fortunate to attend a panel discussion with industry heavy-weights Joel Bruckenstein, Conference Co-Organizer, Bill Winterberg, Founder, FPPad and Davis Janowski, Editor, WealthFront. This was a veritable smorgasbord of mobile treats to improve advisor productivity, reduce costs and improve client satisfaction.
3. Why Haven’t Advisors Embraced Unified Managed Accounts?
Back to basics and one of the core topics of this blog, managed accounts. Rob Klapprodt from Vestmark provided a clear and concise list of three reasons: Lack of Advisor Education, Lack of Marketing and High Investment Minimums.
2. Which Financial Planning Software is Right For You?
This third post in the top 10 from the T3 Conference contains an informative overview of how four vendors of financial planning software approach user interface design. The best quote was from Dr. Alex Murguia, CEO, inStream Solutions, “If someone has to read our manual, then we made [the software] too complicated.”
And finally, the #1 most popular post on WM Today for 2013…
1. Which Portfolio Rebalancing Software is Right for You?
The winner! I’d like to thank all of the people and companies in the wealth management industry that I have written about. And of course, I would like to thank everyone that read WM Today last year and made this blog so popular. I plan to increase the number of articles I post this year, so you can expect to continue to see more interesting content here.
All the Best in 2014,
Craig
