Schwab unveils upgrade to adviser site

Schwab Institutional last week unveiled a significant redesign of its website for financial advisers. Advisers using the site, schwab-institutional.com, will likely find it easier to group, sort and view client accounts. The revised site also features myriad ease-of-use improvements such as quicker access to recently used accounts. The changes likely will come as welcome news to advisers who keep all their client assets under custody at Schwab. “Having a client-centric view of things is a feature that we have been waiting for a long time,” said Tiffany Ballard, a financial planner and adviser with Bergland Wealth Management Inc. in Ridgeland, Miss. “We have explained to our Schwab service representative many times that we'd love to have a way to see how much that one client has at Schwab and what accounts that money is spread out amongst.”
Bergland manages $17 million in assets. Schwab is the largest provider of custody services to registered investment advisers, having about twice the market share of Fidelity Investments, its nearest competitor, ac-cording to industry surveys.

MULTIPLE CUSTODIANS

Advisers who spread their clients' assets among different custodians likely will find the changes less valuable. That's because such advisers typically use systems that pull all their client data into an application such as the Junxure customer relationship management system from CRM Software or any number of portfolio management applications or financial-planning programs. “This would be great if Schwab was the only custodian out there,” said LeGrand Redfield, president of Asset Management Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn., firm that manages $130 million in assets. “We use four different custodians, and while Schwab is our biggest, I rely on my own database that gets updated each day instead of having to go to four different sites.” The changes are intended to make an adviser's time on the site more efficient, Michael Gola-szewski, director of schwabinstitutional.com, said during a lengthy demonstration of the new site last month. To that end, advisers logging on to the site will find that accounts are now presented in a “holistic client view” instead of the previous system, which was very “account-centric,” he said. “We talked to advisers a lot about using our site, and they explained that having to go from account to account could be tedious at best,” he said.

NEW FEATURES

The new site features an Associated and Recent Items sidebar. which appears at the login screen and provides links to accounts that have been recently accessed. It also lists links to ancillary accounts. The organizational improvements, Mr. Golaszewski explained, will allow advisers to be more responsive to their clients' inquiries. “Let's say he or she suddenly has the client on the phone and they are saying, "I need $50,000 to buy a vacation property.' With the new site, the adviser will now have at their immediate fingertips a list of the accounts composing the client's whole portfolio, instead of having to look here and there,” Mr. Golaszewski said. Another new feature that is likely to be of interest to many firms can be found under the Profiles tab of the main menu. Within this part of the website, a designated “firm security administrator” will be able to create custom groupings of accounts, and these can be shared across the firm. Mr. Golaszewski admitted that some advisers may find themselves a bit overwhelmed by the flexibility of the site. “Old salts might experience a bit of vertigo when exposed to the new site,” he said. There's one other big change that will be of interest to many advisers. While it is not disappearing anytime soon, SchwabLink will eventually be replaced by Schwab Data Delivery.

NEW DATA DELIVERY

For those in need of a brief refresher, SchwabLink is a desktop-based program that allows advisers to download their client data — current to the previous day's close of business. SDD allows users to do the same thing, but with additional features. For example, the data may now be accessed from a desktop or from within the Schwab Advisor Center website. With SDD, advisers can also, for the first time, schedule downloads ahead of time. Advisers also have the ability to download as much historical client data as they want, as well set specific date ranges for retrieving that data. There are many other minor features and changes to the website that go beyond the scope of this article, but Schwab is hosting a number of webcasts and question-and-answer sessions to help advisers who want to know more. Those interested can visit the schwabinstitutional.com website for more information. Testing of the new site design began last October with a dozen advisers, followed by an additional dozen this March. Forty firms in June were enlisted to put the site through the paces. Live client data has been in use since March, and many of the firms involved will have been on the website on a production basis for five to six months by its official rollout. The developers said they hoped this lengthy testing period will have allowed them to work out many of the bugs that might otherwise mar the rollout. “The new site is based on user-requested and user-centered priorities, and a user-centered design, and we see it as a launching pad for the next 10 years in terms of further developments,” Mr. Golaszewski said. E-mail Davis D. Janowski at djanowski@investmentnews.com.