Technology efforts this year might lure people to the web

Online delivery of software tools and data to advisers will be the major focus of 2008 technology innovations, industry experts say. Service providers, including broker-dealers and custodians, as well as software vendors, plan to improve data aggregation and consolidation and provide advisers with simplified access to more efficiently designed online applications. "There's no silver bullet, just a continual evolution of the data and its delivery," said Advisor Software Inc.'s president and chief operating officer, Neal Ringquist. The company, based in Lafayette, Calif., provides software to thousands of advisers via the platforms of financial institutions like Schwab Institutional of San Francisco and TD Ameritrade Institutional of Jersey City, N.J., among many others. Edmond Walters, chief executive of eMoney Advisor Inc. in Conshohocken, Pa., said that the days of spending a lot of money on product-focused web pages were over. His company surveyed the advisers who used its popular software and found they wanted to see a stronger focus next year on the client-side experience. "It's not all financial and it's much more client-centric. There's even demand for space to store family videos. They [advisers] need a family space, not just a company site for their clients," Mr. Walters said. This meshed quite well with the company's secure online vault offering for storage of a client's important legal documents. Mr. Walters said the industry needed to move in a direction similar to that taken by popular mainstream computing companies. "If you look at the iMac with Apple, and how you can create your own website with your family pictures, it's brilliant. Google and its iGoogle pages and the way you can customize it — not all roads lead to a product sale," he said. "On our site you are going to see an enormous facelift in May, and you're also going to see us go much farther with the client experience. I think you are going to see a lot of people doing it in '08," Mr. Walters said. Justin Parr, a certified financial planner and principal financial adviser at Atlanta-based Lightship Mutual LLC, said he has been seeing first-hand evidence of this with his clients. "Our clients are flocking online to use Google docs and spreadsheets for data sharing, Flickr.com for photo storage, liberating their telephone lines with GrandCentral.com and even replacing desktop personal-finance software packages with easy-to-use online options like Mint.com," he said.

ONLINE BOOSTS

Efforts to bolster online systems are under way in other segments of the adviser-serving industry as well. Take clearing and custody firm Pershing LLC of Jersey City, N.J.: Some of its major areas of focus are portfolio consolidation — principally being able to provide advisers with client data for assets held with other custodians — and a move to provide advisers with document imaging from their desktops. Lucille Mayer, managing director of Pershing's customer technology and solutions delivery group, said that advisers could look forward to the launch of the Enterprise Portfolio Management Solution, a web-based platform that consolidates data from financial firms, in the second quarter of 2008. This represents a continued build-out of Pershing's NetExchange platform, which its iNautix USA subsidiary is developing. Ms. Mayer and Cheryl Mills, a director in the same group, said that much of their work revolved around personalization for advisers using advanced web technologies. Referring to updates of the NetExchange platform, Ms. Mills said: "Sometime in the third quarter, advisers will be able to create personalized dashboards — we are calling it being persona-based — that will allow advisers extended search capabilities both within our portal and outside it." Among online providers are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, far better-known by the acronym AJaX, which are used to make web pages more interactive, giving them a look and feel akin to a desktop application. Due to their responsiveness, online programs that employ AJaX and similar technologies are known as "rich client" applications. In a nutshell, applications using AJaX require them to pull a lot less data from across the web than those that rely on the HTML technology used for many years. "In terms of other Web 2.0 technologies, you are also going to see more use of RSS [really simple syndication] to do things like the ratings capabilities you'd see at sites like [digg.com]," Ms. Mills said, referring to the wildly popular consumer site for publicly sharing and commenting on web stories and news.

THE WEB'S THE WAY

Dan Skiles, vice president of technology at San Francisco-based Schwab Institutional, said that all this focus on leveraging web technology can really help the bottom line, not just for his company but for the industry as a whole. "There can be tremendous cost savings," he said, noting that an adviser can send out reports to clients electronically and thus avoid the costs of printing, production and postage for something an investor may not open or read. "Perhaps more importantly, though, as soon as someone logs on to your website, you can track where they go and what they are looking at," and this can be a road map to what they are interested in, Mr. Skiles said. Davis D. Janowski can be reached at djanowski@crain.com.