Googling for financial advisers

SAN FRANCISCO — The owners of the world’s largest search engine are taking dead aim at Yahoo! Finance, and many financial advisers are taking notice. A beta version of Google Finance — launched in March 2006 under the direction of Katie Jacobs Stanton, a former top executive at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! Finance — already has grabbed attention by offering features that many advisers call industry leading. One of these is an interactive-charting capability that allows a user to click and drag data from decades past. Users also can click on a date and see news stories that may have precipitated a drop or spike in the price of a stock. “The charting is a lot better [than Yahoo! Finance], and I have expectations, because of the Google brand, that it will just keep getting better and better,” said Christopher Cordaro, chief investment officer of RegentAtlantic Capital LLC. The Chatham, N.J.-based firm manages $1.6 billion. Since the start of the year, the number of page views on Google Finance has increased at a rate of more than 10% a month, according to Ms. Jacobs Stanton, Google Finance product manager. She said the company has no immediate plans to launch Google Finance formally but that the beta version is fully functional. Yahoo! Inc. didn’t return repeated phone calls seeking comment.
As might be expected, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. already has brought its mighty search powers to bear on its finance site. For instance, a user can look up the stock of Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., by punching in the word “iPod.” But Google wants to define its advantage in even simpler terms, according to Ms. Jacobs Stanton. “We want to make sure we’re the fastest on the web [for financial information], and the one covering the most markets possible,” she said. Speed is the killer app, according to one adviser. “Google doesn’t have the smooth look and feel or the bells and whistles [of Yahoo! Finance],” said Joel Cundick, operations manager for Rockville, Md.-based Financial Services Advisory Inc., which manages $450 million. “But if Google could go real time, it would take everybody right away [from Yahoo! Finance].” Ms. Jacobs Stanton flew to Washington last week to speak before the Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure the ability to deliver free real-time quotes. The New York Stock Exchange and The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., also of New York, agreed to provide Google with price quotes at a flat rate rather than pricing them on a per-quote basis. The SEC still needs to give the nod to this arrangement. Meanwhile, Google plans to add data from stock exchanges all over the world to make itself a one-stop shop for quotes. It also intends to continue expanding the information it provides on private companies. Other plans include bringing more color to finance by loading up its home page with video links to CBS, Forbes, Wallstrip — a financial YouTube-like site — and others. Google Finance makes available photos of corporate officers when their names are searched by users. Since various surveys over the years have shown that Yahoo! Finance is the favorite site of many advisers, Google faces a marketing challenge. “Yahoo! Finance is the one. I keep my browser open to it,” said Steve Landis, director of investment management at Sojourn Financial Strategies LLC in Columbus, Ohio, which manages $15 million. But he said he is open to change. “Can you give me what I need in a better format?” Mr. Landis asked. “I may start drifting to Google. I never thought it would happen, but now I have a Gmail account,” Mr. Landis added. There is no clear winner, Mr. Cordaro said. “I keep toggling back and forth between Yahoo! [Finance] and Google [Finance],” he said. The battle of the search titans is “great for the financial adviser,” Mr. Cordaro added, because it saves both time and money by reducing the need for paid data. “Right now, we have one Bloomberg terminal; if Yahoo! Finance didn’t exist, we’d have about four or five Bloomberg terminals,” at $2,000 a month for each one, he said. Bloomberg responded to phone calls and an e-mail with a brief return e-mail stating that the company doesn’t compete in the same market as Google Finance. Sally Cates, a spokeswoman for New York-based Thomson Financial, said that her company’s offering goes to the high end of the market, including investment bankers and hedge fund managers. Dow Jones & Co. Inc. of New York declined to return phone calls seeking comment. But Denise Valentine, New York-based senior research analyst for research firm Celent Communications LLC of Boston, said that Google could compete with Bloomberg and other commercial data services in some instances. “For any adviser with less than $5 billion [of assets under management], [Google Finance] could suit their needs, and it could pull market share” from Bloomberg, she said. “It’s just another reminder to Bloomberg that they need to do something” to make their technology more user-friendly. Google Finance’s user-friendliness to professionals and individuals alike is no coincidence, Ms. Jacobs Stanton said. Google has a program whereby engineers can choose to devote 20% of their time to a self-elected area. Google Finance is a big beneficiary of that program, Ms. Jacobs Stanton said. Hired hands For instance, ex-hedge fund employees at Google are itching to bring their expertise to the enterprise and have thrown their energies at the finance web page. Ms. Jacobs Stanton, who left Yahoo! in 2002, joined Google in 2003 on the search side of the business but found herself drawn back to her comfort zone of finance, and spurred development of Google Finance. As a result of the people involved in the effort and the company’s culture, Alois Pirker, a senior analyst with the research firm Aite Group LLC in Boston, thinks that Google won’t be satisfied by merely replicating Yahoo! Finance. “They must have something up their sleeve,” he said.